Purple Banner, Sunshine Coast BC Studio and Gallery Guide

Sunshine Coast British Colombia
Art Studios and Galleries
Purple Banner

The Sunshine Coast, BC, has a very large and active art community. Many artists and galleries, including Coast Chimes, take part in the Purple Banner promotion, through the Coast Cultural Alliance. This year's guide is a work of art in itself, simply beautiful! If you visit the Sunshine Coast, pick up a guide which is available on the ferries, in tourist centres, and in Vancouver at the main tourist office.

The Sunshine Coast is a fabulous place to visit, and with this guide, or simply looking for the flying purple flags, you can enjoy visiting awesome studios and galleries all up and down the coast.

Advertising a New Website

My New Website: Coast Chimes

With the launch of each new website, I always run a little advertising campaign to help get it going. The launch of my newest version is no exception.

I don't recall it being very challenging to set up a campaign with my first several websites . But this appears to be an area (along with online selling in general) which has not gotten easier, or cheaper, with time.

With the new Coast Chimes Shopify site, I thought I would go in to Adsense, click a few buttons, fill in a couple of lines, and advertise. Ha, ha, ha.... nope. Not really.

It is true that I could get a very basic add with a bunch of keywords up and running quite quickly, but the number of various options / screens was, to say the lease, overwhelming. I didn't have any idea what many of them even meant.  I decided to give Google Adsense a phone call to consult with an expert, for free, as offered in an email sent from Adsense.

The first phone call lasted about a half hour. A very nice and knowledgeable service representative went over a whole lot, and we decided it would be best to pause my current campaign and arrange an appointment with a higher level technician, so that I could maybe get some images into my ads.

I knew a little about what would be needed, so I started looking at my old Google Merchant account prior to consulting with this next expert. Wow. What a tedious, multi-tasking sort of chore that is! I fooled around, but in the end decided to wait for the expert's phone call.

When I talked with the expert, he got me to share my screen with him, and led me through many, many steps. The job took over an hour. Now there will be a few days until the team approves my set up!

Then it will be back to the expert, to finish the process of integrating my images with my ads.

Then back to the initial contact, to help with the keywords and bidding amounts etc. etc.

All this, just to get a little ad campaign going. I had no idea. Truly, I think it is quite amazing any ads appear on Google!

From what I saw before pausing my initial ads, this is likely to be far too expensive for me to use anyway! Those clicks cost so much money!

'Push, Push, Push'

You're too late! You missed the boat! This one sold yesterday. But don't despair. There are more beautiful works at my website.

A reviewer of my blog just wrote they liked the ‘push, push, push to try to get people to buy.’ That got me thinking (oh, oh).

It’s tough making a living selling art or crafts. You can make all the amazing things you want, but if you can’t sell, the dog’s not going to eat.

As the reviewer noted with approval, I am upfront, and don’t sneak up on people. I believe in my work. It’s a big part of my life. it’s what I do. Along with pushing.

I thank the reviewer for not being annoyed and for an honest, thoughtful assesment of my blog and my new web site (the appearance of which has now been vastly improved from when he or she saw it— I hope).

Now if I could only think of more ways to push...