"PAI is a beacon. A candlelit labyrinth just over the hill. A song through the trees that calls you home."

-- SJ Tucker (sooj) Frontwoman, Skinny White Chick/Tricky Pixie/Fire and Strings http://www.skinnywhitechick.com

1. all sellers now have direct links to their active auctions in the form http://(username).pagan-arts.org/ (I just added these today, so DNS may not have had time to propagate. If yours doesn't work today, try again tomorrow. If it still doesn't work by Thursday evening, drop me an email, and I'll look at it.)
2. auctions may now be up to four months in length, so you don't have to keep re listing items you sell all the time.
3. auctions may also contain multiple items, so you can list 100 copies of your signed/numbered prints in a single entry.
4. you now have a new option on the Selling tab of YOUR CONTROL PANEL named, "Store profile." You can select this option to add basic information to your active-auctions page. Right now all it supports is a store title, a store subtitle, and a store announcement. Over the next few weeks more features will be added to this area, giving more of the sense of a personalized store to your active-auctions page. (You can see a sample of how one might use this in my test store at http://pai.dvpn.org/marketplace/active_auctions.php?user_id=3

1. tell your friends.
2. post as many free auctions as you can.
3. invite existing customers to visit your auctions here in the Marketplace.
4. if you're in the Philadelphia area, try to come visit us at one of our public events, announced below.

The big news in the Pagan Arts Marketplace this week is very fundamental: two auctions have received bids!! (Presumably, one of these auctions has already ended in a sale.) This is a big moment for validating the Pagan Arts Marketplace concept. We actually have the beginning of a audience for our products!

Aside from that, we're up to nearly 40 members, 17 of which are registered as sellers. There are currently 17 active auctions, one of which has a bid. This is pretty encouraging, considering the Marketplace is all of five weeks old.

Of course, we still need to grow. This week, I've been working on getting our auctions listed with Froogle. If you visit Froogle you can see a sample of how this would work. (The list of auctions is not currently up to date, because the good people at Froogle have asked for a few small, technical changes to the feed before they approve our membership.) When this project is done, all auctions with, "Buy It Now," prices will be automatically listed with Froogle 24-32 hours after their posting,

After the Froogle feed is stable, I'm planning to work on getting auctions listed on Yahoo! Shopping, as well.

In the meantime, all of our auctions are already active at Bidfind. Because Bidfind is specifically designed to list auctions, all auctions can be included in their feed, whether they have, "Buy It Now," prices or not.

Of course, those who have been with the Marketplace more than two weeks already know that I'm not going to talk about the things I'm doing to make us a valued shopping destination, without reminding our members what they can do, to help, too:

1. tell your friends.
2. post as many free auctions as you can.
3. invite existing customers to visit your auctions here in the Marketplace.
4. if you're in the Philadelphia area, try to come visit us at one of our public events, announced below.

I was talking about item number two in an on-line community list this week, and realized I'm just not stressing this concept enough, in general. They key message here is:

"Who cares how many auctions you have to place to make a sale, when the auctions are free?"

Even after May 1, when we start charging annual membership fees, that philosophy will still hold true: the more auctions you place, the cheaper the price per auction will be. While our steering committee is still discussing actual numbers, I can promise a year's membership at the basic rate will be within everybody's reach.

Once you have budgeted and paid for all your auctions for the year, the trick is to just go wild, and auction everything.

Meanwhile we'll be working to make sure your auctions get the attention they deserve.

Now go make some money!

Web server statistics

The good news is this is our best week ever. The web server stats tell a clear story of progressive growth each week since the Marketplace was announced. We also currently have 13 active auctions and 35 registered users. Fourteen of these users are approved as sellers. You can also find us listed at bidfind.org and stumbleupon.com, as well as a few other web sites. (Google "pagan arts marketplace" to see the list.)

The bad news is very simple. We still have no bids on any auctions. In order to address that, I've updated our banner ad and our Google ad to speak more to buyers than sellers:

The best way to attract paying customers is still to fill the site up with good stuff. We've come quite a long way in four weeks, but we have much further to go. When we have over 100 active auctions at any given time, then buyers are likely to stay around and shop. If any of you sellers are still waiting to see what happens before posting auctions, please remember that now is the time you can determine what happens! While the no-risk period extends until May 1, 2007, your best time for attracting buyers is still now. If we use the energy of Yule to attract buyers, we can ride on that energy for months to come. Of course, that brings us back to the big three techniques that I've been propounding since the first State of the Marketplace:

1. tell your friends.
   
2. post as many free auctions as you can.
   
3. invite existing customers to visit your auctions here in the Marketplace.

Now go make some money!

Web Server Statistics

Once again, the Marketplace has grown this week. We now have 9 active auctions and 27 registered members. We still have a long way to go to build an active, thriving community, though. When last I checked, there were still no bids on any auction!! Clearly that has to be addressed long before the beta period ends! (That problem is also part of the reason we're offering free auctions during the beta period: specifically because it will take an active community to make this place a worthy destination.)

Anyway, we've definitely learned a bit about what works and what doesn't work over that past three weeks. Check out the Web Statistics section of this newsletter to get a graphical picture of what I mean; the days where there were spikes this month, are days when I sent out the newsletter! Clearly a worthwhile pursuit.

The statistics show another blip on November 18. That's the first day I put postcards announcing the site in a public place. (The place was a science fiction fandom con called Philcon.) Clearly we need to do more of that, too. I'll be sending postcards out to DVPN's mailing list this week. Hopefully we'll see some results from that, too!

We can also see more connections in general this month than last. Part of that difference is sure to be a direct result of the announcement of the Marketplace section of the site. I'm hoping some of that difference is a result of the banner exchange programs we've joined, as well as Google Ads.

Also, if you're in the Philadelphia area, don't forget to check out the announcements of our Winter Solstice celebrations in December and our Bardic Pot Luck in January, both listed below.

In the meantime, don't forget that, to grow this community we all need to:

1. tell our friends.
2. post as many auctions as we can.
3. invite existing customers to visit our auctions here in the Marketplace.

Of course, we'll be working on more new ideas on our end, as well!

Go make some money!

Webserver Statistics

Our status here at the Pagan Arts Marketplace is, in a word, slow.  Growth is much slower than we had hoped.  After our initial enrollment explosion, very little growth has occurred.  Our Google Ads and our free Banner Exchange ads have, so far, had no measurable impact on our membership.  We're only up to 19 registered users, only a few of which have chosen to become sellers.  We have 4 active auctions, expiring between 7 and 11 days from now.