Where did I leave off? Oh right, I left you with a pretty good cliff hanger on that last post didn’t I? 😛 So, back to my painful journey of self-promotion!
- Rebranded my whole store and Facebook business page with all of my new branding designs, logos and company name: Kaliverse Creation (separate post on this one later). By the way, it looked sooo much better the second time!
- Sent out apologies to my one follower for that false start and sudden change of direction (Ok, I didn’t name you specifically Ryan, but hey, thanks again!)
- Decided that I should join a bunch of dog lover groups in the hopes they might follow my page, since I really only had funny dog designs at that time.
- Realized it was not going to be a fast road to success with Facebook, so I opened a Pinterest business account! I followed the advice of my trusty YouTube teachers and made sure I pinned a bunch of other people’s stuff to my boards and then embarked on uploading designs directly from my RedBubble store. Hey, this RedBubble thing makes the pinning part pretty easy, you only need a couple of clicks…and then BOOM!
Roughly 1 hour after creating my new account (and only 10 designs uploaded), it was suspended!! Upon inquiry, I received notification from the lovely Pinterest people that my account has been suspended for violating their spamming policy! More on this in a separate post, but seriously, COME ON! Long story short, the next two weeks were filled with frustration and unanswered pleads to the Pinterest people to unsuspend my account.
I begged, I apologized, I also told them they really need to explain to me how I violated that policy, because for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. So of course, I was bound to do it again! Each plead came with an automated response that they will look into my appeal. In the end, two weeks passed, they finally sent me an announcement that my account was now unsuspended, and that was it! No explanation, no nothing!! Psshht!
5. Restart of my Pinterest Journey. I was much more cautious this time. Since I had no idea what I did wrong the first time, I was determined not to do the same thing again, just in case! This worked out rather well actually because it turned out that the one-click Pin option from RedBubble was really not the best way of posting new pins anyway!
6. My design genie (yes, that’s how I’m referring to my weird little brain) all of a sudden took off in a new and unexpected direction! I discovered Procreate! One of my YouTube teachers (Mey Aroyo) had such cool and awesome designs she had created on this thing, I was determined to try it out. Only a few small problems: it’s only available on Apple, I don’t have an iPad, and I have never really used Apple products! So you know, only a few small hurdles to overcome!
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- Solutions:
- I decided to download a dual operating system on my laptop to try and get Procreate to work on there. This was a complete and utter failure…step by step instructions my ass!
- I realized my dad had an extra iPad kicking around and he very generously agreed to let me “borrow” it. I mean, borrow it! Thanks Dad, you’re the best! 😛
- I spent a very long time trying to figure out how to work an iPad. Also, kept accidentally syncing all of my stuff to my dad’s cell phone…oops! This went on for several weeks…turns out I just had to create my own Apple account. Who knew?!
- Solutions:
7. I learned about these new fangled things called Facebook Reels, and how they’re really supposed to help extend your reach to increase your following. I started designing my own in Canva, and posting some to my Facebook business account, and some to my personal profile.
8. I woke up one morning and found I had over 300 new friend requests!! Oh my god! Could this be it? Could this be the turning point that I had really hoped for?
Unfortunately, I’ve reached the cut off length that I decided for my blog posts, and we will need to continue this exciting story on the next post. Join me there! The story really does start to get a bit creepy from here…
