Promotionalicious Goodness!!!!

The Forque
If you see it here, you know it's forqued!
Vol. 2



With the handmade market blooming like ragweed in the springtime, we here at ETC understand how hard it is to be seen. Each seller is really just one tiny drop in an ocean of shops. That's why we are uber pleased to announce the our new promotional program! Now everyone can find a spot in those coveted gift guides or become a featured seller in The Forque, not just my besties and fave sellers! Our favorite admin, DanielleX-hungryhungryhip-O, came up with a brilliant promotional opportunity we like to call "Pay to Play"!

It's really quite simple. You send us gifts and we make sure you get free advertising from ETC! Here are the gift giving monetary standards:

• $10 and under: A mention of your shop in Twitter.
• $15: Your item in a Treasury.
• $20: An enthusiastic mention in Twitter, using excited adjectives like "super-cute", "XXX goodness", "awesomeness", and "totally loving" plus an actual link to your item AND one of your items in a Treasury.
• $21-$30: All of the above plus an item from your shop in the "related items" part of a Forque article.
• $31-$49: All of the above plus a spot in the coveted gift guides.
• $50-$65: All of the above plus a spot in our spammy email, ETC Finds
• $66-$100: All of the above AND The Forque Featured Seller Spotlight.
• $101 and up: All of the above and... (drum roll please) we'll send you a DVD of some White Supremacist inmates forcing a sobbing and drooling Rob White to toss their salad. Now doesn't THAT sound fun?

We here at ETC are pleased to be able to offer this great opportunity to you sellers and hope that you'll be showing us the appropriate gratitude for making it available to you. We don't want to hear any more pissing and moaning about favoritism anymore (cough cough! Etsybitches). Now it's all fair and even and anyone can be an ETC fave. If you don't have the money to cough up for the Pay to Play gifting program, then that's your fault for being such a broke dick.

Ho ho ho! Happy Holidays! and Happy Hannukah! (see how multicultural we are?)

Your good friends at ETC.

Complete Guide to Business Ethics

On a more serious note: Venting is all very well and fine, but if you have a genuine complaint please report it to the Better Business Bureau. I am here only to have a little fun and provide an outlet for my frustrations over the frequent BS I see, but the only way for real issues to be taken seriously is to report them to the correct agency. Please don't rely on this blog, Etsybitch, Regretsy or any of the other bloggers to "get the message through to Etsy. Maria, Rob, DanielleXO and all the rest don't take any of this seriously. They WILL, however, take reports to the BBB seriously and if they don't, their apathy will be there for all the world to see.

REPORT YOUR ISSUES HERE

Vistaprint.com

Let's all celebrate ETC DAY this Friday!!!

I just had the most delightalicious idea! Let's designate Friday, May 1, 2009 as the first annual ETC DAY! I do hate to spend money on promoting and advertising, so I thought it would be fun to launch a mass campaign of grass-roots guerrilla promoting to get the word out about my tres FABOO blog!!!! And best of all, I would hardly have to do a thing! I know all my loyal fans would love to help me and it's so easy, here are some ideas for what you can do to spread the word about Etc:

1. Make everyone in your family wear a fake mustache all week long with signs around their necks that say "Mass consumer and proud of it!" Then when people ask them about it, they can say they do ALL their shopping at Etc!!!
2. Spray paint "ETC RULZ", in big orange letters, on your garage door!
3. Spam the internet like it's 1999! I'll help you by providing a three-tiered outline for getting the word out: Social Networking - Twitter, facebook, myspace, chat rooms, stumbleupon, craigslist, and forums are good places to start spreading the word. Email - Send a announcements to every single person on the contacts list for your email account. Advertising - Put your money where your mouth is and dig deep. Pay to do some prime time advertising for Etc on Tim Adams Designs, Craftcult, Etsybitches, and adwords!
4. Stand outside of Costco and Sam's Wholesale and stop customers and tell them how much better Etc is than any big box store.
5. Ladies, your cleavage is prime advertising real estate, use it to advertise more than just your sex appeal! Get "Shop Etc" tattooed on each bazoom!
6. Expectant mommies, name your babies Betsy Etc!
   
7. Go to the airport and love bomb people. Hand out orange paper flowers (available here, at Oriental Trading Company for a special Etc Day price), hug people, and try to assimilate them into the Etc collective. But that is a bit cultish, would a legitimate art venue do that? Oh well, let's just do it and worry about that silly little detail later.
   

Get the Etc name out there in the loudest, most obnoxious, spammiest way you can think of!!!! Make sure to record your efforts with video or photos (if you upload photos to Flickr, make sure to tag them "Etc Day 2009" because I'll DEFINITELY be doing this next year and for years to come).

I'll be highlighting the funniest, weirdest, spammiest, most personally degrading efforts on my Blog and on my social networks, and I'll make sure to link back to you. For those of you who are not my favorite sellers or BFFs, here is a great opportunity to work your little patooty off and finally get my attention and receive the shop promotions I know I should have been sending your way all along.

Vistaprint.com