Today's Best!

I was a definitely a happy camper yesterday. Just a day after I released the Old Soul 2012 New York Calendar into the digital marketplace, it gained immediate recognition on Zazzle. It was the only calendar to receive a Today's Best Award for August 29 (August 30 in my side of the world), and it also got into the Top 10 for Calendar Views on the same day! Fellow Zazzlers took a look at the calendar and left a number of comments, others joined the Store's Fan Club, and one even featured the calendar on his Squidoo lens. The lensmaster promised to feature the product in his lens for the remainder of 2011.

The Old Soul 2012 New York Calendar by The Old Soul Store
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One of my older calendars also received the TBA almost two years ago (it was also the only calendar to get the award that day), but this recent one feels a bit more special considering the amount of work I put into it. The nature of my day job and the number of other responsibilities and activities I currently have limit the time I could really dedicate to designing products for the store (I think I currently have about a dozen designs that haven't had the time to publish yet). So, doing all this had me squeezing out every bit of time I could so I could get it done before the so-called "-ber" months arrive (one day to go!). It took me about a month to make the Calendar --- adding an artistic twist to the photos, looking for the right elements to make the calendar look nice, putting together the whole thing on Picnik and Photoshop... down to double checking if everything was spelled correctly! It was quite tedious and I would sometimes get impatient as I wanted the calendar out as soon as possible. Well, it's out now, with two little red ribbons to boot!

In the end, winning the award may not really seem like a big deal. These awards are given out daily, meaning thousands of other products get the same award. But at least for a day, yours was one of those that stood out among 15 billion products on Zazzle... for a day, your product got featured on Zazzle's home page. You get a number of congratulatory comments, 5-star ratings, new fans for your store, but most important of all, more site traffic for that day... all enough to satisfy one's vanity. Well, I certainly rode the wave as soon as I found out about the awards. I put up an announcement on both The Old Soul Store's Facebook fan page and Twitter page immediately after, and now here I am on the blogosphere. HAH! With that, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for what this will do for my sales!