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

Portfolio Websites

I am back at Saginaw Valley State University and back in my writing classes. I'm currently working on a personal website. It has been a struggle trying to decide on a theme and something original and interesting that would give the site my own personal style.

I found these great blogs and websites that show examples of other great personal websites. Seeing them has really helped me along my path.
- 20 Inspiring Personal Portfolio Sites You Should Explore

- 50+ Fresh and Unique Personal Portfolio Websites

- 35 Professionally Designed Personal Portfolio Websites

My school project website will be found at svsu.edu~alhowe 

My site is still under construction and what is there today may be completely different two days later but come on over and check it out then leave me a message and tell me what you think. 

Please take a moment and let me know if any of the links or my own site inspired you. Thanks.

Writing Biotechnology Scientific Reviews

 I just wrote my very first Scientific Review for my Biotechnology Writing class this morning. Very early this morning like from 2 to 6 am.

I had dreaded doing it wasn't into it at all in the beginning. I had started it several times this past week but life and school and four kids kept being to big of distractions to let me get very far. By Tuesday I had most of the researching done. I found several articles about transgenic food and allergies in children. They were all very interesting and informative. I read them several times in my false starts that got nowhere with actually getting started.

I think that it actually was a blessing for writing a Review paper to have read the articles so many times. I knew what they said and could easily put them into my own words for the review by the time I sat down this morning to write it.

What I had dreaded was the rules and the abstract. Which is funny in a way because I had already written an abstract for the class and the rules are good guidelines that really give every scientific paper a consistency that allows them to be thorough and interesting. It may have been more of the distraction issue again. It was definitely easier to get homework done when the kids were in school. Either I may have more all night writing sessions in my future or I'm gonna have to take it out of the house for a few hours like go to the Library or somewhere.

I was amazed when I started to write ad then finally after the second time through editing looked at the clock to see that it was 7 am and I had been writing for five straight hours. Well, reading and writing and a little more researching of some facts then of course editing and doing the final formatting.

The awesome part was I was writing and doing all that for five hours and it just flew by. When you are doing what you love to do time flies and it doesn't seem like work at all. I love to write whether it is my thoughts, a business report, a guide, instructions, grant proposals or scientific writing, it is all writing and even though sometimes I have issues getting going I always find that in the end no matter what kind of writting I am doing I really love to do it!

I can't wait to someday get paid to do what I love that will be the best!

So here are some links that could help you if you want to learn about writing scientific reviews.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19531932/How-to-Write-a-Scientific-Review-Paper

http://www.parint.org/isajewebsite/bookimages/isaje_2nd_edition_chapter5.pdf

http://www.istl.org/06-summer/review3.html

Finally I will get my paper "More needs to be Done to Protect Children from Allergenic Transgenic Food" posted for anyone who is interested in checking it out on my online portfolio 

http://arvillasportfolio.webs.com/

Have a great day and please leave me a comment let me know, What have you been writing lately?

Writing in HTML

I'm just finishing up my very first HTML class and I have come to a few realizations.

1. People who write in computer code are still writers like me, they just use a different language.
• I always thought that writing in code was something completely different than writing a document. 
• Writing an entire site requires knowledge of more than just HTML one must learn CSS and PHP too, similar to writing a great document requires knowledge about the subject and background which may include learning the meanings and backgrounds of words.
• Computer code requires one to not only be a good writer but also to be visionary and creative thinking not only of the wording but of graphic design also, much like creating a good magazine layout.
2. Writing code is much like writing a report or document.
• First you need an idea, a sketch or an outline of what will be written and how it should look.
• Good content always makes a better document, there are structures to follow in code just like in writing a sentence in English.
• Editing is not just a necessity but with code if it isn't correct it won't work.
3. Writing code can actually be pleasant.
• Once a style sheet has been created and a basic page layout, the background work, then the code that creates each page is much easier.
• I love writing and expected to dread coding but was happily surprised that I like it.
• Graphic design is always present in writing layouts and is also important for a good webpage and I love designing pages and places to look nice.
• It has come in handy for my blogs, my black board posts and in other places that I hadn't expected.

If you would like to see what I did for my HTML class I would be proud to introduce you to my live online website. It is called Easy Sales Shop and I will be using it to sell things that I have made and maybe someday things that other people have made too. 

Yes, I plan on taking more computer code classes. My degree requires it and my curiosity demands it.