Justyna Dorsz

Steam Store Page Optimization

This video is full of useful information on how to optimize your game description and tags to get more sales:

The main takeaway about tagging is that you should remove generic tags and only leave tags specific to your game. So, for example, remove the tag “Indie” as it doesn’t say much about your game and there are hundreds of games that are “Indie”.

I went through all our games: Hidden Paws, Hidden Paws Mystery, Summer Paws, and Sandmade, and fixed the tags.

The same applies to tagging designs. TeePublic has a post about optimizing tags. Don’t use vague tags like “Art” or “Design”, look instead for words that describe your specific design.

Brands are made by memories

I don’t know anything about advertising yet but I just stumbled on this article titled “Let’s ask a better question: Why doesn’t advertising work (more often)?” And I thought I’d share it here because it explains concisely why e.g. buying ads on Facebook so rarely works. Some of my friends tried advertising their designs/art/course but they got hardly any sales from those ads.

Humans might be made from stardust, but brands are made by memories.

— by Jenni Romaniuk

I think I’ve always assumed that advertising — if I ever learned about it and invested in ads and knew how to improve and optimize them — would lead to more sales. This is not the case. I need to do more research before I spend money on buying ads that won’t work.

The article also mentions Freakonomics Podcast which I completely forgot about but might be worth getting back to.

Knives Out

Claire Folger/Lionsgate

I took a break from work today and watched the movie “Knives Out”.

I don’t really watch movies that often anymore. When I have time I prefer to play games and also watching a movie is not relaxing for me — I can’t seem to be able to just sit and do nothing for 2 hours. I usually have to pause it about 50 times, do something else, then come back to watch for a minute or two more. And so it takes me days to finish one. But this time I somehow managed to watch “Knives Out” in nearly one sitting.

I liked that there was hardly any action, mostly a detective mystery and people talking. It reminded me of the Sherlock Homles tv series. I will try to find more movies about murder mysteries. If you have any to recommend send them my way.

Edit (April 2nd, 2021): Just learnt that Netflix paid $450 million for two more Knives Out movies!

Tagged With:

My favorite tool is $40 off

Guys, reMarkable 2, which is amazing and I use it ALL THE TIME is now $40 off. Here is a link.

If you are unsure whether you want it, you can order it, test it, and return it for free within 30 days. But be prepared that you will fall in love with your reMarkable 2 and will not want to return it. Ever.

I use it for my to-do lists, random notes, writing blog posts, and for sketching. Here is my reMarkable 2 Review.

My reMarkable, with gray book folio and gray marker

Update your collections

Updating collections in your Threadless Shop is one of the items on my Store Maintenance CHECKLIST.

Create collections and keep them up to date so that customers can easily find relevant items. I have my Ridiculous Cat Collection, Dogs, Space, Best Face Masks, Forest, a collection with Best Gift Ideas, and also my collection with Black and White Cat Designs.

Now, I’ve added a collection called New Arrivals. I will make sure it always shows my 10 to 15 most recent designs.

New Arrivals collection in my Fox Shiver store
New Arrivals collection

$4.71

$4.71 - my earnings

The dark side of freelancing is — unstable income.

I like being an independent artist and programmer. I wouldn’t want to work in someone else’s firm. But there’s one thing that people new to freelancing have a hard time dealing with. It’s the fact that income is so unstable that some months you might not even earn anything.

I’ve already written about the fact that February is a bad month for designers. For example, one of the websites just paid me $4.71 for my designs sold during the past month.

But unstable income also means that there are months when you earn way more than you would earn in your standard employment. Remember, it just takes a while to get to that point. Don’t quit halfway.

TeePublic Resources for Artists

TeePublic is one of the best places where you can sell your designs.

I don’t earn there as much as I earn on Threadless but TeePublic has the best uploader — very fast, easy to use, you can submit your art and start selling on all products in minutes.

Until recently, I didn’t know that TeePublic had an Instagram account dedicated to helping artists:

There’s also TeePublic Blog with a lot of helpful tips about designing, selling promoting, and tagging.

And if you are already a TeePublic artist and are subscribed to their Artist newsletter you get useful emails about how to improve your store and get more sales.

Why haven’t you opened your TeePublic store yet?

Can you get organic sales on Threadless

If you sell your designs on Threadless you can get sales in one of two ways:

  • Organic sales from Threadless, e.g. Threadless promotes your designs in their Marketplace.
  • Sales in your own Artist Shop that you have to promote yourself.

I wrote about it before and Threadless made videos about it too.

But can you even get organic sales or do you have to promote your store and find customers yourself? I downloaded my sales report from Threadless and checked.

Download your sales report from Threadless
Download your sales report from Threadless

Turns out over 99% of my sales are organic! That means people who buy my designs come from Threadless, not from my poor marketing efforts.

This is great news if — like me — you don’t have many followers on Twitter or Instagram, or if you are not good at marketing, or if you don’t like doing all that promoting stuff and prefer to simply create new designs. It’s still a good idea to promote your art on social media and slowly gain followers, but even if you don’t do that, you can still get sales — same as me.