Small Business Showcase Award Winner!

I am thrilled to have won yet another Twitter award & posted a guest blog on their website as part of my win. As I know many of you are not Tweeters, Twitterers or whatever you like to call them, I thought I would share it here too.  Hope you enjoy it!

Showcase Winner – Ali’s Craft Studio
Published January 28, 2013 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

To anyone who doesn’t know me or my business already… hello! I’m Ali & after a family bereavement in 2007, I changed my whole life and started my business creating beautiful hand painted window clings for people to get the look of stained glass without breaking the bank!  I have had some practice – as I have been making them for myself since the early 1990’s!! These are static clings so there is no sticky stuff on your surfaces & they are removable & repositionable.

Perfect for all ages – now your children can also get creative too with their own spaces & you won’t have hours of scraping & screaming ahead of you when pink fairies or pirate ships aren’t the design of choice any longer.  They make wonderful gifts, are fantastic for temporary decorations such as Christmas, Easter, Halloween, etc or as a more permanent  feature as once they are in place you can wash over them & just leave them up for as long as you’d like! No mess, no fuss & by buying handmade, you can have any colours you would like!

I am so thrilled to be chosen as Freddie Pig’s Showcase of the Day however, as I will explain below, this might never have happened… 

A couple of years ago, a fellow crafter whom I had never met apart from in that vast universe commonly referred to simply as ‘online’ had been telling me I should join Twitter. I had always resisted, insisting that I had no interest in knowing what everyone had eaten for breakfast that morning, what TV programme was currently ‘in vogue’ or other such gems; and I certainly did not feel that letting people in on my day-to-day movements was either interesting or essential to my wellbeing!  Having no experience to fall back on, the only things I had seen were mentions of celebrities with millions of loyal followers! I don’t mind admitting that I was also rather afraid of finding myself sitting in the corner of the Twitterverse with no followers like Billy No Mates just tweeting to myself a 140 character personal breakfast & daily habits journal! 

January & February are my ‘chill, regroup, restock & get ready for the year ahead’ months after the mayhem that is the craft fair season from Easter to Christmas so in 2012, I made a decision… I joined Twitter! 

Well, one year later and I have a wonderful group of followers, thanks to whom I have also developed a whole new business ‘arm’ – that of printed clings and keyrings for business promotion and now also for all the amazing awards seen across Twitter from famous Tweeters like Theo Paphitis & Jacqueline Gold right through to the infamous Freddie Pig! Winning any of these online awards is a great boost to small businesses, many of whom are sole traders without the funds for large scale advertising promotions. We are at risk of being very small fish in scarily large ponds! I have been amazingly fortunate to win #SBS from Theo Paphitis, Double #Purplebiz from The Purple Dog Network, #QueenOf Window Clings from Aqua Design Group, #UDBOTD from U-Do and now #FPSBS from Freddie Pig! I guess I must be doing something right! 

So sometimes things happen that make me sit up, pay attention and, in this particular instance, sit infront of a mirror and give myself a damn good telling off!! There is more to this Social Media malarkey than number of cups of tea & soap opera plotlines…. 

As you can see, brevity is not my strong suit so if ever I need an new CV, one of my skills will definitely be ‘getting messages across in 140 characters or less’  Hopefully, with the help of Twitter and wonderful people like Freddie & his piglets, I may never need a CV ever again!! 

So, please join the ‘Campaign to Keep Ali’s Craft Studio Alive’ by visiting www.studiocrafts.net & come and join me on Twitter @AlisCraftStudio I’m just about to update my cup of tea count for the day & you certainly don’t want to miss that now do you!!