I belong to a great group – Etsybloggers Street Team, and one of the things we do each month, is write about a particular subject. This week – the subject is What are you goals? Short term, long term? It’s up to you.

Before today, I would have told you that my short term goal is to finish adding new items to my website.

I have an online website Sandi’s T’s and I have a large variety of high quality products that I sell.

Some of the companies I represent are:
Heritage Lace – the finest lace curtains and table linens made in the US
Victorian Heart – adorable quilted handbags
Popular Creations – Tammy’s Closet Jewelry Stands
Coynes – Keith Kimberlin, Harold Feinstein and Williraye Studio

Many of these companies have introduced new products that I am currently adding to what I already carry.

Yesterday, I got some new brochures from Heritage Lace and I’m really excited about add their new items as well.

Remember I mentioned at the beginning of this post that adding these new products would have been my short term goal?

Well, I upgraded my wordpress blog software today – I host my own blog – and now all of my images are missing! I have posted a thread in the forum, and hopefully someone will come up with a way to resolve this issue. And I apologize in advance – if you are unable to see the images in some of my most recent posts.

So my ‘current’ short term goal is to get that resolved.

As far as a long term goal is concerned… I’m already 64 and many of my long term goals – such as getting an education (graduated in 1992), retiring from a ‘real’ job (did that in 2006), surviving cancer (surgery, etc in 2006 – 3 year mark now), and having my own business (started by doing craft shows in 1995) have all come true. What’s left? Well, I would really like to see my online business take off. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I love what I do, and love that each year my number of sales has increased – and I don’t think that I want to get into a stressful situation when I’m ‘working’ 50-60 hours a week on my business, but I would like to see it increase each year so that our retirement income is adequately supplemented!

Now you ask – ok if you want your online business to really take off – what are you doing to see that happen.

#1 Adding more high quality products that show up in the search engines
#2 Updating my content so that search engines can find my website quickly
(I have a great content writer – Linda Lewis – and her skills have really made a difference)
#3 Having informative and interesting newsletters – again Linda is doing those
#4 Having giveaways to attract new customers
#5 Working on my website, to make pages load faster
#6 Making the purchase experience easier for the customers (not having the prodyuct pages be so long that they have to constantly scroll is what I am working on now – also working on eliminating the need for javascript which can slow down the load of a page)

I come from a background of computer programming so working on my website is a no brainer – it’s what I love to do. And hopefully I can continue to do what I love for a long time!

If you have any questions please feel free to ask – I love to write and I love to talk about programming, and everything in between

Sandi