Sticker Mania

Well I do feel a little manic! I have been working on a new range of kids stickers for my kids wall sticker category and they have taken me ages to do! My alphabet wall stickers sell very well, these are a large vinyl sticker and the 26 of them take up a lot of wall space. With my new range I wanted to create a cheaper range made of paper. They are printed on an A3 sheet and there are 12 stickers per sheet. They are 9.5cm in size.



They idea was to have an animal and a sound associated with the animal. Some were hard to do, so some artistic license was needed on those ones! I think they are fun, colorful stickers for kids or babies and can be used on doors, walls, books, bedheads, windows, lunch boxes etc!

These new stickers can be purchased for my American and EU clients here and my UK clients here.

Zambia

I was a big swimmer in Zambia, as you can see!

When I was young I lived in Zambia. My dad was positioned there with the Irish airline, Aer Lingus, they were doing work for Zambia airways. We lived there for nearly five years and in the early 80's we moved back to Dublin. I lost contact we everybody I knew there, and over the years there were two people in particular I was eager to have news of. I tried, with no luck to track them down. One, was my my best friend - Juliet Mwanza, the other was one of my first boyfriends - John Lindop. I heard nothing about both of them for over thirty years.

Bradley Cox & John Lindop

Then another old friend from Zambia caught up with me through Facebook and suddenly I received news of them both. Juliet had died, I was heart broken to hear this news, it really shook me and John lived in Denmark and that was all she knew. Well this week I finally tracked him down, he really was hard to find! He is living in Denmark with his four lovely children and seems very happy, some of his family still live in Africa.

Africa had a lasting effect on my life, I think it shows in my work! So it was great to hear news from the people who made my Africa experience so special.

Google Adwords

As you know my pet hate in life is seo (search engine optimization). There are a lot of sharks out there in the seo business, and because the average person wouldn't have a clue about keywords, CTR, etc, etc, you really can be taken for a ride, and an expensive one at that!

I have done a lot of my seo myself and have dipped in and out of paying for seo services, some good, some bad. The bad was when I payed for a company to do a Google adwords campaign. They blinded me with terminology and spent my money with very little returns!

Google adwords has always baffled me, I couldn't see how people worked the whole system out! Before Christmas I read an article on a small Irish company who used Google adwords and I thought that this must be something I could use to promtote my online businesses CarlaDaly.com and CarlaDaly.co.uk. So I set about doing my campaign.

Wow, it is hard, it has taken me the guts of November, December and still into January to work out my campaign. You have to make your ads informative and interesting to get people's attention. You have to look at your CTR (click through rate) the % of clicks you get, the cost of a click, the relevance of your ads to your keywords and more!

My campaign has run successfully and I have been thrilled with it. I still think I might pay to have it professionally done as in the right hands a company can really benefit from a good Adwords campaign.

I would love to hear from anybody else who uses Google Adwords, any tips to give me?

Branding

General label with info about myself and my art.

You should have your website and a strong brand image as much as possible on your product. I do change mine all the time. The last one I had was a little boring, and I have just designed new labels. These are placed on the outer packaging of my products, when shipped to a customer.

Label placed beside stamp listing my kids
wall art sites CarlaDaly.com and CarlaDaly.co.uk

I put a label with both my websites, CarlaDaly.com and CarlaDaly.co.uk, on the outer packaging beside the stamp and airmail sticker. Any promotion of my kids wall art online shops is a good thing and is a cheap easy way to promote a product.

Wall Growth Chart Label

I would love to hear your affordable ways to promote your product or brand. Please leave a comment!

New Year, New work.

I am slowing trying to engage my brain back into the working world! The Christmas break was good but like any holiday it takes a while to get back to work! In the New year I will start to paint more pictures for my Nursery Art category, Baby Keepsake category and Kids Wall Art category category. I have also recently added a new category to my site - Name Art category.



I really like these prints as I use my illustrated alphabet to create the child's name. I also add Mum's name, Dad's name and brother/sister's name and date of birth. Each print is associated with an animal, for example there is a super hero cat whizzing through the sky, the name title of the print is Super Hero - John, Born- 24.2.2010 etc.


These prints take quite a bit of work and are sent off site to be printed, because of this it can take a few days before dispatching but they are worth it!

You can purchase my Name Art on both of my kids wall art site CarlaDaly.com and CarlaDaly.co.uk