ArtFire's Official Blogger Blog

We’ve teamed up with our Common Good partner Delphi Glass for the Ring of Fire Contest! To enter, create an art item using one or more product from Delphi’s Ring of Fire product selection (These items are available for 15% off with the code FIRE15) and submit a photo of the artwork with a description through Delphi’s online Submission Form (available here) before June 30, 2010. Winners will be selected based on criteria for specific awards, which are as follows:

AWARDS

Each award winner will be eligible for prizes from the company sponsoring the award. These prizes include $50 Delphi Gift Vouchers, a product feature in Delphi’s art glass catalog, a free Pro for life account on ArtFire, a year’s Pro membership on ArtFire with a graphics package from our designer, and a grand prize of Delphi Ez-Pro Deluxe 15-6 Kiln!

You can read more about the contest here.

Good luck everyone!

To celebrate our newly designed Sell Crafts page we’ve announcing the Share the Love Contest, in which you enter by sharing your favorite Pro feature on ArtFire with the world!

There are four different ways to enter the Share the Love Contest:

On Twitter: Send out a tweet from your Twitter account with your favorite Pro feature, a link to the new Sell Crafts page , and the hashtag #AFSL.

On Facebook: Send out a status update about your favorite Pro Feature and the Sell Crafts page link. Post a link to your status update in our entry thread or send it as a message on Facebook to Kevin ArtFire.

On an offsite blog/personal website: Post about your favorite Pro feature on ArtFire with a link to the Sell Crafts page. Afterward, Just post a link to the entry in the entry thread.

With a Wild Card Entry: Tell your friends, tell your art group, make a flier, get creative! If you have a chance to talk to people about your favorite ArtFire feature in a method not outlined above, this can count as a Wild Card entry. Send your Wild Card entry to Kevin once done!

(Wild Card entries will be deemed invalid if they violate the Law, the Terms of Service of another site, or if the entry is a post in another marketplace's social interaction space.)

This contest will run for Two weeks starting today, with a winner for each week, so you have two chances to win! You may enter one time per week per one of the four methods, so you can enter four different ways each week!

Checkout the Entry Thread for more details on our Share the Love Contest.

Back on Google Base

Most of our Pro items are back on Google Base, and we are working with Google support to get additional feeds for the sellers (Basic and Pro) with items not yet on Google Base. Remember that Google Base is different from organic Google traffic, which we have not had any issues with so far.

We’ve added in a new Pro feature that will help members determine why their items are rejected by Google Base. This feature will allow members to mouse over a rejected Google Base status on ArtFire and receive a message letting them know why it was rejected. Since not all products are back on Google Base, many items will appear “pending” or “rejected” right now, but once everything is back on Google Base members will be able to use this tool to know what changes they need to make to resubmit their item to Google Base.

Artisan Sales Surpass $2 Million

Our completed member sales exceeded $2 million earlier this month! Out of those $2 million items sold, 65% of them were handmade and fine art goods. Over 80% of these products were from Pro member studios.

ArtFire Items Now on TheFind.com

ArtFire items are now available on TheFind.com! TheFind is a search engine for shopping similar to Google Base. Since TheFind receives 5-8 million shoppers a month, this should provide quite a bit of additional exposure and traffic for our artisans.

You can receive daily updates in the Behind the Beta section of ArtDaily.

We’ve lowered the price of most of our Featured Studio Spots, which current show on the right of all trend pages, gift guides, and categories. Users are able to purchase month long ads at a fraction of the original cost. These are highly targeted pages and offer an easy way for you to get more exposure and traffic to your studio. All you need is a 110 x 110 pixel image to get started!

The New Pricing Breakdown:
Top Level Categories (I.e. Handmade, Fine Art, etc): $20/ Month
Main Level Categories (categories within the top level categories, i.e. under Handmade< Accessories, Bath and Beauty, etc): $10/Month Sub Level Categories (categories within the main level categories, i.e. under Jewelry< Necklaces, Bracelets, etc): $5/Month Trend Pages (I.e. Alice in Wonderland, Steampunk, etc): $10/Month Gift Guides (I.e. Easter, Mother’s Day, etc): $10/Month However, since Jewelry has been our most popular featured ad spot on ArtFire, it has been decided that ad prices there will remain as they were before the price reduction. This means a month ad in the Jewelry main category will be $20, while all sub-categories under Jewelry are priced at $10/monthly. Jewelry is the most competitive category for ad spots, lowering the price would be unfair to artisans who have already purchased their featured spot in advance.

You can purchase Featured Studio Spots by clicking here or following an of the "Advertising Info" links on any category, trend page, or gift guide on ArtFire.com.