Why Do I Feature Shops On TWITTER???

I'll tell you why. When I opened my shop in July, I was sooo excited! I just KNEW that I would get my first sale within the week. Well, I didn't. In fact, I didn't get my first sale until October 13! Before that happened I tried to frequent the Etsy forums and quickly learned that I needed to advertise my store OUTSIDE of Etsy. Occasionaly I would even see people posting threads encouraging others to post their shops for a "chance" to be "picked" to be featured on a blog or something. I tried posting my shop, but I was never picked and after being disappointed I decided not to do that anymore. I stumbled upon twitter by way of some discussion threads mentioning it in the forums and quickly learned that twitter could be an awesome way of promoting my shop and others as well. However, I still didn't want to make people feel like they had to be "picked" and I didn't want to promote shops that were always picked. I wanted to focus on the store owners that had the guts to open a shop but unfortunately were buried in the Etsy database of shops. I decided to develop a simple criterion which would give everyone a shot:

~ Promote shops with 5 sales or less

~ Require that they have a Twitter page

~ Tell them to tell all their friends (by doing this, they help promote their
shop as well)

Remember, all multi-million corporations were once the "little guy", but they were fortunate to get their foot-in-the-door and through time their businesses skyrocketed. Hopefully I represent the "little guy" and am trying to do my part in contributing to the success of the handmade movement.