Product Descriptions, Social Media & Twitter

 Lately most of my "free" time has been spent writing descriptions on eBay and Etsy to sell items that were left over from my online store. When I am not posting new items I am promoting items already posted using Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. The rest of my time is spent learning.

I have to admit all of this social media PR is new to me. We did not have a class in Social Media Writing, although it would have been a very useful skill for this day and age. So far I am using mostly Twitter to promote my products. Look me up if you want to follow my tweets I am ArvillaH on Twitter.

My dealings with Twitter started many years ago back when I opened the Sandusky Craft Mall, it was my real brick and mortar store in which I sold craft supplies, new & used books and handmade items on consignment. I read from some of the bloggers that I followed that they had Twitter accounts so I decided to figure out what it was all about. I am still trying to figure out what it is all about.

After all these years and my on-again, off-again, on-again relationship with the site I am proud to say that in the last two months I have doubled my Twitter followers and the numbers are still climbing. I still feel clueless, but I am starting to understand some of it.

Last week I learned about the use of hash tags (# then a word or phrase) thanks to HubSpot Blog and a great post by Magdalena Georgieva. Then I learned about how to use what is called Follow Friday to keep and gain more followers because lets face it this is marketing and the bigger the audience the better.

To find out all about Follow Friday I went to a blog called Ask Aaron Lee and read a post called "How to do a proper Follow Friday". I had read many posts from people that were just lists of names after the hashtag #ff or #followfriday and I knew that was useless. Aaron Lee explained in his blog how to attract followers for yourself and treat Follow Friday the way it was meant to be.

I'm still learning and as I learn more and find great blogs and links to learn from I will continue to share my journey here with you.

 Do you know of a great website to learn how to use Twitter? Have you recently learned something about using Social Media? Do you have a blog about using Social Media? Leave me a comment and tell me all about it. I welcome your links and advice.

Check out my eBay - Arvilla2012
Etsy Store - Artsy Arvilla
Pinterest - ArvillaH
Follow Me on Twitter - ArvillaH

My other Blogs
Simple Family Stories Blog
Coffee Bean Babblings Blog

Writing a Feasibility Study

I have a dream... I want to start a Small Business Incubator. In order to do this I need to create a Feasibility Study.

I have never even heard of Feasibility studies before now. I have been researching Feasibility studies trying to figure out what to do and so far this is what I have figured out.

"Definition of Feasibility Studies: A feasibility study looks at the viability of an idea with an emphasis on identifying potential problems and attempts to answer one main question: Will the idea work and should you proceed with it?" 
As found on http://womeninbusiness.about.com/od/businessplans/a/feasibilitystud.htm

The page above is AWESOME they go on to explain the six parts to a feasibility study. It goes on into seven lessons on how to create your feasibility study. I will be using this and continuing this post into several others until we have my Feasibility Study all done and ready.

I want to take this dream of helping small businesses to grow and compete with the huge conglomerates and make it a reality.

We need as a nation to support our local businesses and stop giving our money to giant stores that don't care about people only their own profits.

I don't have a name set in stone for it yet but for starting purposes and the need for something to call it, we will call it the Sandusky Business Incubator or SBI.

The first thing they want is a description of the business; products offered and how they will be delivered.

A full description of the SBI will be the next post.

Tell me please do you know of any great resources for learning about the process of creating a feasibility study? Leave me a comment and let me know. Have you ever created a feasibility study if so share your experience with me please. Thanks

Homeschooling Again

The girls wanted to homeschool this year so I have been working on lesson planning for them. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how I was going to write their Science lessons so that they could both view it and use online resources. I went to them, since they were home and ask them what they thought the best and easiest way for me to create their science lessons would be.


They considered my question and offered suggestions such as a USB drive, or emailing them the lessons. Both very good suggestions because part of my question was that I wanted them to be able to pull it up on whatever computer in the house they happened to be able to use at the time.


Considering their suggestions, I went back to my office/craft room and sat down at my computer to continue looking up resources for the first lesson when it hit me. I actually laughed at myself when I realized I could solve all the issues at once by creating a blog for their lessons. I can post the direct links for them to use to look up information and include questions and activities appropriate to their grade levels. So, you know me I immediately opened up my blogger to blog about my experience. LOL


 This is an exciting time for us, I homeschooled the boys when they were younger and they went back into school at about the ages that the girls are coming out of public school to homeschool now. My oldest is in 8th grade but reads at a college level and loves math so is going to be working from several pre-college and college books that we actually have here in the house. My younger girl has struggled with school since the beginning and really had I not been so busy with college and we didn't have anyone available to be with her when we weren't home, I would have homeschooled her much sooner and saved her a lot of unnecessary stress. For her we are using 4th through 6th grade materials depending on the subject. I am mostly using online information and some workbooks along with things we already have available to us from our home library, the town library and SVSU's library. She is excited to get going.


 Knowing that I am going to finish my last three classes in the winter to graduate with my bachelor's degree. I realize that I won't be able to put the time and effort in that I will need so, I am going to work it all out ahead hopefully so that now in the beginning of the year I get all the lessons planned and ready to go for them. It will be a lot of work but they are worth it. Maybe since I'll be blogging their lessons it will help out someone else too. :-)


 Wish me luck and if you have any experience or know of any good homeshool websites please leave a comment and let me know I can use all the help I can get. Thanks.


Here we go off on another writing and researching adventure.

Writing a Socratic Dialogue

This Rhetoric class is one where I read the assigned readings and they are interesting and different from anything I've ever read before, I understand them and what they are saying but then I go to class and listen to the people in my class (who have obviously had other classes that have read material like this before) talk and I feel like an idiot. I don't know what they are talking about half the time because they are referencing other authors and their writings that I have never heard of or read. My professor is awesome though and he usually has a way of putting it all together in a way that I can understand and then I get what they were referring to and/or comparing. Egads, this is all so new and weird for me it feels like I felt in my creative writing class when everybody else there seem to have a great time just creating and I struggled. Which brings me to this Socratic Dialogue assignment. I am struggling. Mostly because I do not have much experience with the creative writing world and this assignment is asking me to creatively write a Socratic Dialogue.

So I have started researching and I found a great website that has a lot of good information about how to write a Socratic Dialogue. http://www.philodialogue.com/Authenticity.htm as I find more I will update this post and include them and I'll update it again to let you know how it all goes or create a new one.

Hopefully someone else will find this useful to them. If you do please leave a comment. Thanks