Deja Letov

It could be that the item is no longer available or has been relisted as a new product due to a new version or some other reason. This is usually the case when it's happened to me.

I agree...go forth with it! It's nice logging in to see your activity and not see "failed delivery" on half your list for the day.

Pamela Galli wrote: I starte selling Thanksgiving dinners in Aug. :-) Great research, Deja, thanks for sharing! And your dinners are so amazingly yummy Pamela

hahha OMG such a great song Phaedra! I think i should post their lyrics outside my shop.

phaedra Exonar wrote: Deja Letov wrote: I think you're definitely onto the answer there...the market. I can tell you I've considered starting to design for other markets as well. I know being "goth" is limiting me somewhat. It's a niche market and I know if I designed for the general public my buyers market would be bigger. But my problem is that I love the goth style so much, I honestly think I would suck the big one if I expanded outside of it because my heart wouldn't be into it. One of the good things about the goth market is that it gets the general public at Halloween, all so big tie in to the vampire scene, and Victorian age Gothic revival. This is true...but it's only for a month. My sales are definitely great in October!

Medhue Simoni wrote: At that time, other than doing charcoal portraits, which was maybe 1 every few months, I had no other endevours that made any money. I've always done side jobs that were art related tho. Like for a few years, I did murals on the sides of buildings, and huge backdrops for photographers. When I started doing SL, I stopped all those other things, so I quit my day job strictly on SL income. I had saved up quite a bit during the year because of SL, so I was not that worried about the future. Plus, my sales were incredibly stable or rising every week. That is awesome Medhue! I would love to do that one day...and you're right, especially with a new baby on the way. The thought of going back to my 9-5 job after 12 weeks of maternity leave literally makes me sick to my stomach. I'm really jealous of my husband who is gonna be the stay at home dad and stay home to take care of her. I'm glad he is, but I wish it were the other way around. Unfortunately (or fortunately however you look at it) I am the bread winner and make too much money. ya I know...why would I complain about that? Well I'm not really...it's just that when you become used to having a specific lifestyle, it's hard to change that. And I can't imagine my SL income every coming in anywhere close to what I make in the real world...but I would most definitely welcome it if it did!

bejjinks wrote: Solaria Goldshark wrote: Without using coercion, perhaps you'd be so kind as to bestow upon us simpletons this amazing evidence you have for us to examine, since as you say, having examined the same evidence you have we would come to the same beliefs as you have. The entire flaw in your position is that troublesome issue of "Belief" The problem is that it is not my attempt to prove anything to you and it was never my attempt in the first place. My real objective is to ask whether people of differing beliefs can be friends or not. I used to believe that people of differing beliefs could be friends but the more feedback I get from the forum, the more I begin to doubt that people of differing beliefs can be friends. The more aggressive people are to try to get me to change my beliefs, the more I wonder if it's even possible for a Christian, an Atheist, and a Muslim to have a CIVIL conversation. I will share my evidence, not in any attempt to coerce you or force you to believe as I do, but just out of hopefully friendly dialogue. I cannot share all the evidence I have because there's just too much but I'll share some of the most memorable. For nearly my entire life, I have had respiratory problems. My nose was nothing but problems. I went to doctors and their treatments helped. I even had surgery but the doctors said that some of the problems were too deep and they didn't want to risk trying to fix it. So I was resigned to live the rest of my life with repiratory problems. I was not seeking a healing. I was not looking up any miracle workers. I'd given up. Then three people from church spontaneously prayed for my nose and within a week, the problem went away and has never come back. Not only can I breath, I can smell things that I never could smell before. Before October 3, 2008, I was in major financial trouble. I was regularly coming up in debt at the end of each week despite all my best efforts to manage my money. It was supernatural why I was in so much debt. All the searching I did through my records could not find where the money was disappearing to. It was just disappearing. On October 3, 2008 I had a life changing encounter with God. The next week, I had thirty dollars left at the end of the week. The week after that, I had three hundred dollars left at the end of the week. The next week after that, I had six hundred dollars at the end of the week. I'm not wealthy but God has helped me not be so desperately poor. God has also spoken to me. Now I'm sure several of you are gonna accuse me of being schizophrenic but this was not a delusion. God didn't speak in audible words. He's a spirit. But it was absolutely convincing that it was God and not a demon or my imagination. Frequently, I have also been impressed by God's timing. I've gotten sick at the best times I could have gotten sick. God is not similar to Santa Claus in any way. God makes it rain on everyone, good or evil. But . . . Romans 8:28 NASB And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. In other words, God doesn't prevent Christians from suffering but directs the suffering for our benefit. I have seen this time and time again in my life. I've had some horrible things happen in my life but do to timing or some other circumstance, even the most horrible thing wound up benefitting me. I'm not just talking about "that which doesn't destroy us makes us stronger" I'm talking about it as if God was an athletic trainer purposefully controlling when I hurt so that I would get the most benefit from it. That has been one of the most significant miracles in my life, the amazing timing of God. I'm not a great person. I struggle a lot. I have faith though that God will see me through this year. If God doesn't exist, I'm going to wind up homeless because I don't have enough of an income to keep paying the rent. In fact, if it wasn't included in the rent, I wouldn't have internet and wouldn't be able to write to you. My life is scary right now but God has seen me through scary times in the past so I know he will continue to see me through. There is my evidence of why I believe. The reason I can't convince you is because it's all experiential and you've had different experiences. I respect that. So I'm not even going to try to convince you of anything. I'm only asking that you respect my experiences. My experiences are my own. Absolutely people of different faiths can be friends. I have friends of all sorts of religions plus some atheists. We are all good friends. Do we discuss religion? Not really. Why? Because of the way this thread has gone right here. People get bent out of shape and will defend to the death what they believe in...and honestly...no amount of defending will ever convert anyone. So it's really a pointless conversation. Honestly, I know we have freedom of speech and all that, but there is truly no point in even making a post like this except to get a rise out of people. You know the answer for yourself to every question asked...does it really matter what others think? Of course not...it's just a futile attempt at spreading the word of God around and attempting to convert people...but it never works. It just ends in bad feelings and tons of drama. As far as all the rest of it...I would hardly call that evidence. I would call it your opinions based on experiences you've had. I could get better from a sickness as well...and that's not evidence of divine intervention nor is it evidence of the lack of it. but I will tell you what I think caused it based on my belief. But none of it evidential.

Bree Giffen wrote: Should we treat people who believe in God as people who are mentally disabled? If you see an adult who still truly believes in Santa Claus you would immediately discount them as having some kind of mental ilness and certainly functioning as a truly lesser person. All kidding aside, to all the atheists here, why must we continue this charade that somehow these 'believers' possess something that we should we even discuss with them. How long must we talk with these child-minds? If I were to see a normal person constantly arguing the existence of Santa Claus with a crazy person, how long til you think that the normal person has a problem as well? That is us, the sane person, constantly holding a conversation with the ill. It's time to just stop. Treat them as they truly are. Show them compassion for their folly but do not let them eat at the adult table. It's actually kind of funny. If someone were to start claiming that they believe an invisible man exists, who can perform magic and actually talks to them...they are crazy. But get a whole population to claim the exact same thing...it's a religion.

Medhue...when you quit your job, was it 100% revenue from SL? Or did this include your other endevours as well?

I wouldn't change a darn thing, not even your bloodlines group. In fact, most people in groups will rally in your favor. he does not own the copyright, he is full of some serious turd business.Shadow Demons have been around long before 2004, he didn't invent them, and after checking with any government patent and copyright checker, he hasn't registered it. When something isn't registered, if in fact it is even copyrightable (is that a word) the ownership goes to "first in use". meaning whoever used it first and ONLY if they go to file a copyright. And I can promise you shadow demon was not first used by him. Perhaps we should make him watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

phaedra Exonar wrote: Deja Letov wrote: phaedra Exonar wrote: I spent 12 to 18 hour a a day 7 days a week for 2 months doubling the number of items I have for sale for an other much larger brand I own upgraded the items and scripting and advertising, results was a 50% loss in sales. For the brand you see under this avatar I just spent over a year doing a script upgrade for my creatures, 2 of which were released last week, one of them is my best selling item, results so far 90% loss in sales. At this point I'm afraid to put any amount of time in to SL, other then having fun and customer service. I think my biggest problem selling with the items I sell are the markets I build for are much smaller then I originally thought they were, but it took years to get to the top of search placement to realize that. As more people leave SL the smaller communities and markets are taking a bigger hit that others. I guess my biggest question to this would be....what added efforts are you doing to market...not double items for sales, or redoing the scripts or upgrading items. I could add new products all day long and never get increased sales if I'm not marketing correctly. After doubling my items for sales I spent 6 months on just marketing and community building, and sales have just keep going down. I did a lot of research on community market sizes, it was quite an eye opener, the markets I build for don't even show up on a bar graph compared to the over all marketplace size. The info I collect on the market size suggest that your main market is at least 18 times the size of my main market, and is growing about 10 time as fast, you have 21 more pages of items listed then I do and you sales are 22.5 times higher then mine currently, but compared to my last year sales which was before I started doing any marketing and before I doubled the number of items I sell, your current record is about 5.5 times higher from where I use to be. I've talked to some merchants that create for a very general market in SL and the volume of their top selling item is 700 time more then my top selling item. My top selling item is in the top 3 listing for inworld, marketplace and google image searches, which to me suggest that I'm building for a small market that is in decline, I'll keep building for my current markets for fun, but any serious effort is going in to new markets. Any way it's good to see that some people are making $ in SL doing less it makes me hopeful that some day I'll get there too, I just need to find the right market, I all way was surprised at what items became my best sellers lol which might be one of my biggest problems. I think you're definitely onto the answer there...the market. I can tell you I've considered starting to design for other markets as well. I know being "goth" is limiting me somewhat. It's a niche market and I know if I designed for the general public my buyers market would be bigger. But my problem is that I love the goth style so much, I honestly think I would suck the big one if I expanded outside of it because my heart wouldn't be into it.

Also to add...my plan from here on out... I am actually considering doing this test again for the month of September, just to see if I can repeat the success of this and maybe that will help me answer the question for myself (do I want to work more). But as of right now, my answer is no. Yes an extra $420 per month is great, but how can I replicate some of this without actually having to increase my time in SL (mainly so my husband doesn't disown me)? Well for starters one thing I've noticed is people are reading my blog and facebook. When I started doing all the new postings in it I was getting messages from people telling me how much they loved it. Facebook especially because it seems like everyone is on facebook. So, my answer to that...hire a blogger. I found a customer, someone who loves my products and would do an awesome job writing for me and she is now handling that department. That right there makes up probably 1-2 hours of the time I spent blogging, facebooking and writing. She is also going through my MP listings and rewriting descriptions to make them "prettier" and analyzing my keywords to make sure I'm making the most use of them. Voila! Tons of work done but not by me. Yes of course this will cost me some giveaways of my products to someone who loves them and some linden pay...but not nearly as much as my time. My biggest time sink...the time I spent "hanging" around or greeting customers as they came to the store for the promotion. Im talking hours upon hours. One days event was 4 hours long. So, I've hired two girls who are now my greeters in the store. No they are not there all the time, but they hang out occassionally during the week but now, if I want to have a huge promotion, I could spend just 1-2 hours marketing that promotion and then letting them handle the customers as they arrive while I sit my pregnant butt down on my couch in my living room. This is ideal! I don't know if I will see the exact same success, but if I could delegate out 7-8 hours of the 10 hours extra I had to do this month, and pay a little linden to make that happen, it could very well be the answer.

phaedra Exonar wrote: I spent 12 to 18 hour a a day 7 days a week for 2 months doubling the number of items I have for sale for an other much larger brand I own upgraded the items and scripting and advertising, results was a 50% loss in sales. For the brand you see under this avatar I just spent over a year doing a script upgrade for my creatures, 2 of which were released last week, one of them is my best selling item, results so far 90% loss in sales. At this point I'm afraid to put any amount of time in to SL, other then having fun and customer service. I think my biggest problem selling with the items I sell are the markets I build for are much smaller then I originally thought they were, but it took years to get to the top of search placement to realize that. As more people leave SL the smaller communities and markets are taking a bigger hit that others. I guess my biggest question to this would be....what added efforts are you doing to market...not double items for sales, or redoing the scripts or upgrading items. I could add new products all day long and never get increased sales if I'm not marketing correctly.

Wow Medhue...color me inpressed. I think that is awesome you are into so many things. I have an outside business as well where monetizing my "info" websites are starting to produce a decent amount of income. SO I totally feel ya on the $10 from youtube. I remember several years ago when I first started how excited I was when I received my first google ad words profit. LOL

Hey Medhue I've always wanted to ask you exactly what you do outside of SL? Are you in video game design or what exactly? I'd love to see where I couldn't expand into! And yes I agree, it's not always about the more time I spend the more money I make. Which is why originally, in that first thread, I didn't think there would be much difference in sales. Obviously with the promotion this directly related to it...but you're right...time alone does not do it. What does do it is effort and ...ideas I guess you could say. My plan for future is actually not to spend much more time but I think I have a plan that will give me more promotional sales and events without...the time!

Ok so here comes the nerdy number cruncher in me again. Once again bringing you a silly study and test of my business in SL. :) Obviously you can skip if you feel so inclined...again this is mainly an inworld test, however, my sales are lumped together with ALL sales, both in world and marketplace because I did market the marketplace listings in my promotion. Now that we have that out of the way, onto the experiment! Awhile back we had an awesomely eye opening conversation about the time we spend in SL versus the amount of revenue our business brings in. It starts right around on page 6 of this thread http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/MP-Sales-collapsed-3-weeks-ago/td-p/1576513/highlight/true/page/6 Toy and I were talking about the time vs revenue. Both of us agreed we don't want to spend our life in SL. There are far to many things outside of SL that are more important to us. And there is definitely a point where you spend so much time in SL that the revenue you make just isn't worth it. I mean who wants to make $2 an hour right? In fact, I think a lot of people just assume everyone practically lives in Sl. Even Toy, when first throwing out some possible numbers, estimated I was spending possibly 4 hours per day in SL working on my business. When the actual reality was I wasn't even spending that many hours in a week working on my business. So my hourly rate was actually pretty good. I think we estimated that after expenses, in June I made approximately $40 an hour for the 12 hours I spent working for the month. If you read that thread, of course you know part of the reason my time is so limited in SL is because I'm going through a high risk pregnancy and can't spend a lot of time at the computer, plus my hubby is a huge "spend time with me" nut so there's that. But...near the bottom of page 6 of that thread, I made mention that if I ramped up my hours to maybe 20 hours a week, that I could spend in SL I would probably see only a minor increase in sales, so I probably am right where I want to be with working 10-12 hours per month. In fact, I would be surprised if there was a revenue increase at all, simply because of the SL economy. Well...here comes the number crunching nerd in me. After that conversation in July, I gave myself a little experiment for the month of August to see how true that case would be. Well no way could I add in another 20 hours per week. My baby and my husband would have nothing to do with that. But...how about just an overall additional 10 hours for the month. How much of a difference would it make? I told myself I'd only do it for a month, just to see, so if it failed, I wouldn't be too hard on myself for wasting all that time in SL and not seeing any profit. My extra 10 hours spent mainly went towards towards marketing for a big sales promotion over one weekend plus more blogging, more facebooking, more flickring, writing newsletters, submiting for my shopper groups, making new products, hanging out during promotions, etc. Most of this I already typically do with my normal 3 hours per week but I did ramp it up a bit to cover this promotion. As a baseline, when we had that discussion, my total revenue for the month of June was 177,997L (I think it was like 1,000l higher approx in my initial report but I had some returns so deleted a few transactions). And if you look at my annual comparison you can see, this is fairly average for me for the last few months anyway. However, take a look at AUGUST! 10 hours of extra working on a major promotion brought in an ADDITIONAL 103,874L (approx $420 USD) and a total for the month of 281,871L ($1141 USD). This is my highest month ever. While I am extremely happy with the results...there is a discussion to be had here. If you could bring in an extra 100k of linden per month by increasing your time in SL by a full 10 hours (which to me is a lot) would you? Toy, especially for you, you and I are very much on the same wave length about this topic. I will tell you my plan for this after a few people respond, just because I'm curious.

Actually what we were all told is that the child phantom issue would not affect legacy builds if they were never touched. Meaning anything older that' already in place wouldn't break and become non-phantom even on rez. It wouldn't only change once an item has been nmodified. I thought this was good news...except it isn't true. Several merchants have already been complaining in another thread elsewhere that items are breaking without modifying anything. I just wish they would have given us the "none" option like they do now but without the double prim count. Doesn't make any sense to me.

xDramaQueeNx wrote: Ιt will break the nerves!!!!!!!!!!!! Every time that someone buys from my marketplace a product, it comes a notification message on my email .... This has the impact to have filled all my EMAIL BOX with full messages. How do I disable this option does not come messages to my email? i know only the option for offline ims in account settings but it is not for marketplace I have a separate email exactly for this reason. All my SL notifications, marketplace notificatations, etc all go to this other email address I made. I use it as a catch all. I rarely even open the email inbox unless I was waiting for something specific. I go in maybe once a month and do a mass delete on just about everything. Then I don't clutter up my normal email or worry about things going into to junk.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Rya Nitely wrote: Many builders have used the phantom child link to hide the huge bound boxes of sculpties. Now that this so called 'bug' has been patched many buildings that use sculpties are going to break. I don't believe that the pathfinder rollout has hit all sims yet but when it does then the problem will raise its head in a big way. Pathfinding was rolled out for the whole grid w/c August 6th, so I would think any problems people were going to have with PATHBUG-69 will have made themselves felt by now. It has. It's a huge issue right now. Especially once a customer gets an item and modified it in anyway. I am dealing with this right now as well. The third option that I have started doing and I HATE it, is to make the entire build phantom. This makes it phantom like the script did and doesn't double the prim count. But of course, you're entire object is phantom. I've already started redoing several items of mine because customers are startig to flood in with the complaints for it. The funny thing is, they call this an exploit in the system as a bug, but honestly I never knew that. I got the script from a vendor, to turn child prims phantom and never knew what the code was or why it was a bug. I had no idea it was an exploit. Honestly, I don't understand why they took the functionality away. It's causing loads of problems and unfortunately because of what we are limited it in terms of fixing it our customers aren't always going to be happy with it.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Spica Inventor wrote: "Uhm ok...Again I say...have you actually read the intent of this survey? Obviously those who read the original post can see the only point was too track in world traffic so how exactly are in world results of an in world study totally not valid? And how does it relate to a marketplace search at all? I know I haven't made any guesses as to how easy it is too find me via a marketplace search". It wasn't obvious at all. In fact you seemed to go out of your way to not mention that the statistics where to be based exclusively on your inworld store purchases. I'll try this one more time and speak more slowly...in Deja's first post she said: "I realize this information is probably only interesting for an inworld store owner, this isn't going to help any of you MP only shop owners." Thus indicating clearly (for anyone with a scintilla of common sense) that this was strictly for her in world business. Argue on, Spica...I'm out of this thread. Yup I'm with you Czari. No point in arguing over something with someone who is just twisting things in a way that's fitting to them. Anyway, I have a greedy post to make today.

I agree...plus Toy is kinda pretty as is.

I think it was done just in the spirit of all the other business network groups out in the real world...there are a ton of them. But don't you worry...if you make a mans group I already own a giant missle I can strap on lol

Tiffy Vella wrote: Wow, you are a nerd for numbers, but yes this is interesting. I'd like have similar info for my store. I often wonder if the few hunts I've been in have helped at all, by tempting hunters to revisit later. Deja, did you make the survey a dropdown box, with ticky buttons for answers? (I've never foisted one of those on visitors, but wonder how on earth else to go about it.) Oh ya I am a total nerd for numbers. Just wait til end of the month (1 more day to go) and I tell you all about a little experiement I did for the month of August by increasing my marketing time in my business by 2 hours each week...and how MUCH more money it brought me in. THAT I think might be interesting when you guys see my results. The survey was button based. The system I bought had a ntoecard where I could fill in the options and I could have sub options as well. For example, if they choose "Advertisement" as their source, they got a submenu of "Profile Pick", "Display Ad", "Classified", "Market Stall". Same thing the "Other Group" option, I listed out all the groups I advertise in currently. If you want to see what it looks like you're welcome to come by my shop. I'm planning on leaving it up for the month of September at least.

Toy I have some girl parts you can borrow. lol

Thanks Toy! I will be pouring over the old threads...even if it is just for informational purposes. But if you ever start it up again, I'm on board!