The Engravable Gift

I have a website at http://www.TheEngravableGift.com. I've had it for a few years but have sold virtually nothing from it. The problem seems to be that no one is able to find it.

I work on it from time to time and it now has over 500 items on it. As the name suggests, all items on the site are engraved or printed with names, dates and special messages, depending on the size. Some shot glasses, for example, have only an initial.

I've had business cards made up and virtually all of my relatives and friends know about it. I pass out cards as often as possible, but so far, I've gotten very little activity. My tax guy says that if I don't start making some money from the site soon, I won't be able to deduct my expenses, so I need to get some activity soon.

I provide the products through a wholesaler who engraves and ships the product. I just sell it and get a cut of the profit. It would be a nice income if I could actually start selling some of the items there.

That's one reason I've decided to blog and join Twitter. I'm hoping that as more people find me, I'll get some sales. I've actually not pushed too hard on Twitter yet, and not at all here on my blog. I wanted to get some experience and some followers first.

Now, I've got to build up my followers a lot further. I've considered some of the outfits that claim that they will get me tens of thousands of followers in 90 days or something like that. Maybe they can, but what will be the quality of those followers. I need real people but what I'm afraid of is that I'll get mostly porn sellers, teenagers and other people selling stuff.

I don't even know if it is possible for a third party to have someone else follow you. Will the people that follow me even know who I am? I know Twitter is very strict about some things, but I also know that there are a lot of third party applications out there and I don't really know what is allowed to happen. I'm really a newbie in a lot of ways.

A couple of years ago, I signed up with an outfit that promised me first page search engine placement for my website for X amount of dollars. The only reason I signed up with them was because they had a monthly charge following the first page placement. I forget what for. I reasoned that they probably weren't scamming me if they wanted to collect the monthly payment, but I reasoned wrong. They came up with a convoluted 3 word keyword that had me on the first page of search engines pretty quickly, since no one else used it. They did what they said they would do so I had no recourse, but I told them to drop me so I didn't need to pay the monthly fee.

Right now, I'm mostly following back people that are following me, and most of them are selling something. It's not a total waste, since somewhere down the pike, I'm probably going to sign up with one of the outfits that can get me more followers. I just hope that whoever it is, they are legitimate.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

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Don't forget to visit http://www.TheEngravableGift.com Use the discount code Twitter for a 15% discount on everything on the site.

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Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all. - Sam Ewing, Writer