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Tuesday, October 21, 2008

New Found Knowledge...



As you know I recently decided to add PayPal to my website and blog
...

Well, at least in a round-about discreet way. I still haven't scummed to the big orange and blue 'PayPal Buy Now Buttons'...but the PayPal process has been fully implemented.

I had previously put considerable thought into how I was going to display my art on my blog and the topics I would associate with each piece in order to make them easy for the consumer to find. Now that I'm using PayPal this became even more important to me. After all...the reason for adding PayPal was to make purchasing easier.

Prior to adding the 'Buy Now' option I had considered the categories or topics I would use for my art with the idea that someday I may want to also show my watercolors. This was my thought process...

  • I chose the main topic of "The Story Behind the Image" to group all my art together. I posted a photo of the drawing and told a little about the image itself and the process I used.
  • I then broke this out into sup-topics for those who might only be interested in "Still Life" or "Portraits" for example.
  • I took this one more step and added "Pencil Drawings" as a topic...since that is the medium I'm working in now, (Watercolor is listed also) but only has some books listed at the moment". Hopefully there will be some actual art shown under this topic in the future.
  • So...each piece of art, (except those used in other articles), is listed under three topics...The Story Behind the Image, the medium used, and subject.
This was all working quite well...seemed organized and easy for the viewer to find what they wanted to know more about. NOW comes along PayPal!!

I'm using the same 'Topics' as before...just adding the price and the Buy Now feature. I realized that I had almost 20 entries in "The Story Behind the Image" without the new 'Buy Now' feature available. Well...with me being "Miss Organization", this just wasn't going to do!

So I had a brain storm...I would periodically pull up one of the previous posts and add the 'Buy Now' information, change the date, and repost it as NEW.

Well, I'm here to tell you that this won't work. You can update the information and change the date...and it will post again on your blog as a NEW current post. The catch is this...it will not appear in your Google Reader and I don't believe your email subscribers will be notified. Changing the date does not make Blogger recognize this post as new.

The only way you could do this is to Copy and Paste the new updated text into a new post and delete the old one. This would be OK if there were no comments....you never want to loose the comments as they are incoming links for your readers who took the time to leave their thoughts.
__________________________

Final Thoughts: I guess I will just update each entry under "The Story Behind the Image" topic with the 'PayPal' information and leave it as is. I had looked at this as a good way to periodically pull up an older posted piece of art and put it in front of the consumer again.

If I come up with a better way to do this I will certainly let you know. Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.


Links:
Website ...Marsha Robinett Fine Art
My Squidoo ...Drawing Techniques


PS...make a "Point"...leave a comment

6 comments:

Terry Krysak said...

I am working towards creating a blog and selling my watercolors via Paypal and decided to perform a due diligence exercise and see if I could find anything bad about Paypal on the Internet. One site I discovered http://www.paypalwarning.com/ details quite a few horror stories from current and past users.
I was wondering if you had heard of anyone having problems with them or not. I was concerned as well with having a link to my bank account with them and thought it would be a good idea to set up an account at a different bank with only a small amount of funds in it in case any problems arose unauthorized withrawals etc.
Would appreciate your thoughts on this, or any comments from others.
Terry Krysak

Marsha Robinett said...

Terry,
I'm afraid I don't have much insight on this as I am also quite new to PayPal. I did open a bank account specifically for PayPal and don't plan to keep much money there...just seemed wise.

Hopefully others will have more information for you.

Paula Pertile said...

This post made my head hurt a little Marsha. :~) I'm sure you'll get it worked out to suit you though. Everyone has a different approach.

You CAN make custom pay buttons. I've never done it, but have been tempted.

I've used paypal quite a bit (ebay, etsy, blog) and have had no problems whatsoever. Its nice to forget you have money in your paypal account and then remember! If it makes you nervous to have it there just transfer it out regularly.

Marsha Robinett said...

Paula,
Sorry about that...I tried to remove the 'pain' as I was writing this post. Believe me, when I discovered that "Major League Dreams" and "Afternoon Tea" did not appear in my Google Reader after updating them with the Buy Now buttons...I had a headache too!

I'm not unhappy with the PayPal set up as it is...I may try developing custom buttons depending on the feed back I get from customers. But for now I'm over it.

Thanks Paula for the input and sorry again about the headache:-(

Lorin said...

Regrding wanting to put older pieces back in front of your readers, you could just do an update post that links to the original post, edited to add the pay pal link. It could be something along the lines of "a reminder that these pieces (with their names linking to the original post) are still available" with maybe some new info on each one. Just an idea!

Marsha Robinett said...

Lorin,
Thanks so much...I hadn't thought of simply doing a new article and linking to the old post. I will certainly try this some time.

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