A Progress Check, Newfoundland Listings are Finally Complete and Queen Elizabeth Definitives Are All Ready to Go!

After much hard work over the past few days, I am finally done sorting all the Queen Elizabeth definitives and finished listing the Newfoundland material with the 1897-1901 Royal Family Issue, which is shown below:

So the only Queen Victoria material left to list is a bit of revenue material, which I hope to deal with tomorrow evening and possibly Monday and then this major block of material has all been dealt with.

So how have I done to date given that I have been in business for 107 days?

1. I have listed just under 1,000 inventory items in my E-bay store.

2. Of the items listed, I have sold 277 of them, which is approximately 27% of what I have listed. That is about four times the sell-through rate that I had predicted in my business plan projections. My daily sales are growing each week.

3. I have established a presence on Pinterest with 21 active boards to which I pin stamps of particular interest as I list them. My boards now have 28 followers.

4. I have kept three blogs up to date, posting new topics 4-5 times a week. Each blog gets 50-100 page views a day now that I am sharing them with groups that I joined on Facebook. Half of my traffic is for older posts.

5. I opened an AdSense account and to date, I have hit 1,000 ad impressions, which has earned me almost $2 of ad revenue. Not much money, but better than nothing.

6. I now have a mailing list with 92 new customers that I have sold to since July.

Not bad at all for just over three months worth of work. What I am hoping will become apparent to my readers is just how long it takes for consistent effort in each of these areas to generate traction. At the same time, I hope my readers will see that consistent effort does indeed yield results. I don't yet know how much of my current sales is related to people who saw my blog. For all I know, it could be zero, and that's OK. No matter what, there are now at least 50 people out there, assuming that its the same people who come back to my blogs each day, who know about me and what I am doing. I'm not asking anybody to buy my stamps - not yet. All I am doing on these social media platforms is exposing people to information and eye-candy in my specialty areas. I got into this business because I genuinely love stamps and I believe everybody could benefit from collecting. I want to spread the hobby as far as I can. So I am happy to give away information, which is what I am doing for 2-3 hours every day now. I have no doubt that eventually, some of those people are going to visit my store.

Once I have established a solid social media presence and I have most of my stock listed for sale, then I can start spending a bit of money to promote and market my inventory, but establishing a good online reputation is key.

With that I wish all of you a happy weekend!