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Deja Letov

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  1. I asked my accountant about this and was told unless I were to get audited the IRS wouldn't request it. Linden Labs wouldn't send it on their own because the tax season for previous years have already closed. Having said that, just make sure you claim all your income and treat it as a business and you've got nothing to worry about. My biggest confusion with them was since I already claim all of my income as income to my business, I was concerned about being double taxed if I received a form and claiming it as receipt income. Luckily I have an awesome accountant who handles all of it so I'm a bit less stressed about it.
  2. I've got stuff in there but honestly, I don't see people using it over the Marketplace. I just auto list it when I add items but nothing ever happens with it.
  3. It's not always about gaining a large following from your blog. I use my blog to some extent but it's always linked from my Facebook page, which does have plenty of followers. While they may not go to my blog, if you're a big Facebook user, you know that things come through your feed. When we make a blog post, I post it to Facebook and then that shows up in feeds of my customers. That's really the main point of it for me...and to have something to be linked to from other blogs like from hunt sites, bloggers who review your items, etc. I find it very useful in the grand scheme of things. Also keep in mind, not everyone can log into SL every single day. Messags get capped or just closed without reading. For those of us sitting in an office from 8-5 and can't get on at night, sometimes reading blogs or Facebook or whatever is how we find out what new items you've come out with.
  4. Honestly, nobody even needs to do this. You can go set up a Google ad with the secondlife.com website as your target channel and choose to only be shown on that channel and pay per click. Only bad thing is your competitors will click your ad to death I'm sure
  5. Yes have to use a second alt. I wish they would implement second store option.
  6. Ok Ill just keep an eye on that one then.
  7. Pamela is there another "common" pinterest page other than one I saw earlier? I think the one from sl universe.
  8. Spica Inventor wrote: O.k raise of hands. How many merchants here are more concerned about loosing market share to the 'video game stuff' than they are about I.P. rights and violations thereof? Just curious. ;-) I'm concerned about both...why wouldn't we be? Is there something wrong with not wanting competitors to have an unfair advantage over those who do business with legitimate and legal products?
  9. ya I've been following the thread on SL Unviverse but it's many pages and hard to sift through. I wish there was just a "list", alphabetical. To make it easy.
  10. BadEddy wrote: I kept this question at the back of my head for a while now. Most of my merchant friends prefer when a client buy inworld instead of online and it is very common to see online listing that invite you to go check inworld for a better deal. Rarely I see it done the other way around. Why do this? Can someone explain me? Whatever how I put this I only see huge advantages in online sales and very little in inworld sales. Is there something I am missing? I prefer in world and here is why: 1. The marketplace is not stable. One day you can be at the top of the search engines and then next day, nowhere in the first 5 pages. And nobody can say with 100% certainty how it all works. Once you think you have it figured out, it seems like something changes. So why bother? 2. When people use the Marketplace to search, say something generic like "furniture", you are competing with 100 or more other merchants. If they come in world, especially ones that you have built a loyaly with, they focus on you. They don't have 100 merchants to compare options with. Build a loyalty with your customers, show them you appreciate them and they will always come back to you first...and then if you don't have what they are looking for, they might go elsewhere. 3. I mentioned loyalty in #2. You can't do that if you never meet them in person or at least have them into your store to fall in love with your place. It takes more than just a single good purchase. That's why I always try to invite people into my store after a MP sale. 4. There is too much gaming going on in the MP to make it fair. 5. In world can be easier to find things...if you're store is done right. It's funny I see people say they prefer to use the MP over in world because it's easier to find things. I find the MP to be horrible with the search. Most of the time if I put in a phrase for what I'm searching for it has NOTHING to do with what I'm searching. Why? Because the Marketplace search is not smart. For example if I search for something with 2 words or more, it searches on each of those words individually, rather than as a phrase. That's just dumb and will yield bad results. Make your store easy to navigate. Give them other tools like a complete searchable directory of your items (I'm not talking about the MP) where they can search for items there and TP directly to your store (or MP link if you prefer). Yes it does take work, but the more I can keep them off the Marketplace searching through mine and 100 other merchants items, the better for my pocketbook. 6. Related products? Limited to just 8 in the MP and really...they are tiny pictures and not very noticable. In world? I can put them in a section of my store with TONS of related products all rezzed out and ready to demo. And how about Latest Releases? They will never see my spotlight of new releases if they don't come in world. As far as it increasing your ranking for purchases, sure it might, for a few days. But as soon as you stop marketing that one item to be bought in world, it drops again. Don't get me wrong I do it when I first release a product, just to get it off the last page and to hopefully get them to leave a review, but the marketing only lasts about a week or two. After that, I want them back in world. As for me, I use the MP as a secondary sales tool and always will. It's there because if it's not I can't compete with other merchants who do use it. But I don't focus on it. I don't freak out when my products fall in the search, I really don't even monitor that, and I don't do much of anything to trick people into finding my products other than to try and be creative with my keywords and hit lots of categories. I fortunately have put so much focus on my inworld store and building customer loyalty, that I don't need to worry about the MP. I have customers who refuse to go anywhere else and will wait weeks if not months, just for me to make something custom for them because I didn't already carry it, even though a competitor might. Why do you think they do that? Because they found something on the MP? Heck no! It is because they come to my store so often to check out what's new, to explore the sim which has stuff to do (we have 2 sims of exploring areas) and they have gotten to know me...if not personally, then through group chat, notices or my subscriber group. I just wouldn't give any of that up for increasing MP sales.
  11. You know...I know we can't legally post things on the forums with these merchants names, but are we legally allowed to say...I don't know...make a website of our own, not a forum, just something quickly and easily, like the BB, quick lookup list to see if a merchant is in the list? Could we get into trouble for that?
  12. Or maybe the hamster turned on the developers and ate them.
  13. I just noticed I had gotten a review as well that I never received an email notice for. It was working great there for awhile. Wonder what happened.
  14. I actually had never been on SLUniverse until just the other day when I was googling some info on ripped mesh. I actually bought something from a full perm "creator" with plans to turn it into something but I just had this uneasy feeling that I had seen it somewhere before. So I started looking for ripped mesh resources and almost immediately came upon that thread on SL Universe. Wow is it cool! Everyone should go take a peak there. Honestly, I was scared to death I would find myself on there since I do buy from several other full perm creators. What if they sold me something they ripped? Luckily I didn't find anything but who knows about tomorrow? Aside from trying to stick to buying from the same full perm creators that we know and trust or creating the mesh ourselves, we are at the mercy of the creator. That really sucks. I'd like to see a "name" list, compiled and easily searchable of creators that are 100% honest and trustworthy mesh creators. Ones you can buy from and know it is their original creation. That...or a nice searchable list of all the losers that rip mesh so we can avoid them.
  15. Compared to the last 2 weeks ya, I guess it's slightly worse, by like maybe 5%. But compared to this time last year, actually quite a nice large increase about 40%. I don't think it's a great idea to compare from week to week, mainly because it's so finecky the way sales are in the MP. Sometimes with the way search works, I'll have great sales on a particular item one week and crap the next, then back up the next. Annual monthly comparisons I think are a better way to look at things to see if you are generally increasing or decreasing and gives a broader range of success or failure to look at. But I definitely wouldn't worry about a sales decrease because one week or less or more from the previous week, it's going to happen.
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