Learning curves

I started my online jewelry selling officially on January 8, 2008 at Etsy.com with my main shop, Earthly Creations. I'm self taught with some help from books. That part I've loved and I love designing and making the jewelry. What I HATE the most about this venture is the need for promotion and advertising. I simply am too cheap to spend the money on advertising and simply don't "get" merchandising. I can't see spending $150 a month on it when I'm only making perhaps $20 in profit a month.

Yet today I visited a popular blog, Modish.com, with ads spending $40-65 or more a month and three sellers that I checked out also spend a lot of money listing and renewing on Etsy. Two of them sell high point jewelry but the third one sells for my lower points. Perhaps in the beginning I need to dish out the money for advertising and perhaps make it up later, if and when I actually become a good seller?

Sometimes I'm sorry that I started this jewelry business, have invested more than $6000 in equipment and supplies so far, but I just don't have the heart to quit now. I really like making it and designing it and I don't feel that I've done everything possible to make the shop(s) a success. And right now the economy is in real bad shape and people are tightening their belts quite a bit. The last is just an excuse, because plenty of high volume sellers on Etsy are selling daily.

I just don't know, wish I could afford to hire someone to do the pesky marketing chores for me. I'm simply inept at these things. Sigh!