Great to know there are other 60 something’s on Folksy and that many of us are not completely comfortable with social media (but most of us are getting better at it). I think a lot of us older ‘art professionals’ took career breaks to have children and when we came back ‘cut and paste’ was completely different - the art universe had changed. I love creating digital art (as well as using traditional techniques) but as to how you ‘self promote’ and sell online - well that’s a different game entirely. All I can say is hang on in there and experiment with new products and new niche’s. I know social media exposure is the key so keep at it and best of luck. Hope we all get there in the end!
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Jewellery is a tough category - there is a lot of competition from other sellers and a lot of people make jewellery as a hobby - so expect it to be a bit of a slog at the beginning and this is a really tough time to be setting up shop (summers tend to be slow for online sales and we’ve got the added effect of cost of living crunch making people more careful with their spending). Find your niche, find what you can do better than everyone else so they want to buy from you and not all the others. That, I’m afraid, can take time and money (FYI I made a loss in my first year due to all the supplies/ fees/ equipment I had to buy, just to manage the expectations of any newbies. But I wrote that loss off against the following year’s profits on my tax return).
If you want your shop to grow into ‘something worth while’ you need to master social media and SEO (search engine optimisation). Social media and it’s algorithms is all a bit of black magic to me not helped by the fact they keep changing them. But search engines I do understand a bit better, if you want to feature in search results when someone googles ‘polymer clay earrings’ you need to write your descriptions in the way that search engines like. If I look at your descriptions they are all identical apart from the length of the earrings changing - this level of duplication is a big no no for SEO. In the first paragraph of the description you need to actually describe the item as if the photo wasn’t there (search algorithms can’t see the images).
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Yes indeed 
I just love creating, in whatever form that is at the time.
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I have done some pet portraits digitally but they take a while as I add in all the detail, I do envy those artists with original loose styles 
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Oooh thank you for that tip Sasha, I’ll get that sorted
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From a quick look at your shop, I was going to say similar to @SashaGarrett. Your descriptions are all almost identical and more about your jewellery overall rather than the specific item in that listing.
Google for one doesn’t like duplicate listings, so a description with almost no differences may mean only one of your items shows up in Google results. It doesn’t affect Folksy search in that way, but ir will still cause problems in being found, for example these earrings
don’t have the word “flower” or “daisy” (or anything similar) anywhere in the description. Although you have it in your title, your item won’t be seen as very relevant in a search, because without flower also in the description, the search won’t think it’s a very important to the listing so will place it lower down the results in a search for flower.
You need to make sure the important words are in your title, tags and description. As Sasha says, make your first paragraph to be a full description of that particular item in the listing. Mention the shape/pattern/colours as well as the length. I know you’ve got a couple of item specific tags, but it might help to add some more too such as “flower earrings” on those ones. Words that come to my head when looking at others are things like swirl and marbled… your star earrings don’t have star mentioned anywhere in the title, tags or description, so definitely make sure you add that in too!
It can take time to start getting regular sales, and even those who have been doing it for years can have slow periods. I think it’s important to remember that those who seem to mention items launching on Instagram and selling out immediately are not your average seller, but the few that are exceptionally good at selling and social media (and probably took years to build up that sort of demand).
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Super thank you Kim I will be re-doing a new paragraph to start with each listing
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I am trying to get my head round search engines - is there a website to learn about this? Do you have any useful links?
Sorry ive never found a single website that explains it well -they are often just explaining what changes have been made to the algorithms so you then need to deep dive back through older articles to get the full picture.
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@plumporridge I already have a fb art page. I wonder if it could be made into a business page fb: marjansart
Oh I see, I’m sorry but I don’t know. xxx
@Marjansart I just had a quick look and that already is a business page, so you don’t need to do anything to switch it.
Business pages have the option to follow (or like if they’re still old style) and personal pages have the option to “add friend”.
@fatcatclaycreations I can understand the idea behind having a private Facebook group to give people special offers, but I think that relies on already having a following, and that alone isn’t going to help build your audience, because it’s only people who already know and like your work that are going to see/join it. It’s not going to help anyone new come across your work because the only people who will see your posts are those that are already in the group. Someone who doesn’t know your work isn’t likely to join it just to see what it is, and if people in the group like what you’re posting, they won’t be able to share the posts to their friends because that’s not possible with private posts.
It might help to start a business page where you can post things as you list them (so anyone can see/share the posts) and keep your group for more exclusive things such as first chance to see/buy and special offers. Then put a link to the page in your group’s about section (that bit is normally public so people know what they’re joining) and a link to the group on your page as a special place for exclusive news and offers.
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