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HELLO FELLOW COLLECTOR:
Grab a cup of coffee, lets talk! Ok I’ll talk, you read!
Often in our busy daily lives we fail to say hi, or even get to know each other.
This is especially true when working on the web, without seeing each other face to face. We’re all just too busy working out our next deal. First we want to thank you for your patience as we’re going through some major construction on our web site, please excuse the mess. (That’s why you’re currently hitting a lot of broken links).
It wasn’t always this way way - there was a time when we had no web site. (We write this now, in hopes that you may learn from some of our mistakes). We, like many of you, worked our day job, and then in our spare time enjoyed collecting as a hobby. For us it was going to auctions. Going to an auction, is like Christmas - you never know what’s in the next package. We not only have a passion for auctions, but we love finding those things you collect. One thing lead to another, and we were soon working first part time, then full time, not only going to the auctions, but also maintaining a list of the things people wanted. We think half the fun is finding, and the other half is learning about and seeing your collections.
To this day we don’t know what really caused us to build a web site. Perhaps it was the hype - It’s the way of the future - everyone else is doing it, It’s an easier way to market , etc., etc. Or perhaps it was just a deep desire to share, and connect. Anyway, we started one. Not knowing what we were doing, but we at least started one.
We began with the free site the phone company offered. (Big mistake). Then got our own dot com address, and began building our website. We built over 100 pages, but we just were not getting the traffic we needed to pay for the web site. Someone suggested we add affiliated links to help subsidize the cost of maintaining the site. We spent over 6 month’s adding these to the site. The end result, we got paid a total of $72, and when we checked our web rankings, we were about #283,000. Think of this as a stack of paper, #1 (number one) is on the top of the stack, if you wanted to find us you’d have to go through the stack. After many years, we spent several thousand dollars to learn what we were doing. Within two weeks our home page was within the top ten on most search engines, when searching for “collectible buyers”.
We tell you all this because we know many of you, will also build web sites, or go to the latest marketing site to either find, or sell your next deal of the century. It took a lot of expense, trial and error to get our home page to rake where you could find us. It also distracted us from what we really wanted to do - Help you find your collectibles, or buyers there of. So this also brought us to another major decision, What about the rest of the web pages on our site? The daunting task of cleaning them up, (like we did with the home page) had us procrastinating. Do we close the site, or start page by page and re-build?
We decided on the later of the two. Which resulted in something we did not expect, - Growing Pains! By the time we were 1/3 of the way through re-building, we were getting 8,000 to 10,000 visits per month. This was so much of an increase that our hosting service, basically said we can’t handle you. So we switched services. Which meant re-build again, and brings us to where we are today. You’re hitting error pages, not because we haven’t built the pages, but because we’re cleaning each page up, and building each area on a solid foundation. To this we thank you for your patience . We know you didn’t come here to learn the technical side of finding what you collect, but online they go together. You either learn from your own experience or from the experience of others, the later is more expensive.
Our purpose is still to help you find what you collect, and be a resource for collectible information. Some collectors go to online auctions, but with rising selling fees, many sellers are building their own web sites, and the collectors haven’t found them. For many sellers, they don’t know who or where to start selling the treasures they are pulling out of the attic and basement. We allow the collector to tell you what they collect - this eliminates hours of searching, and missing the best items offered. Then sellers contact the collector directly - this eliminates listing time and fees, (and /or the expense of building a web site) not to mention the right collector may be on vacation (while your item is at auction), and not even know your selling their treasured collectible. Is not your ultimate goal to find a buyer?
We hope you will learn from our experience. We already know it’s easier to go directly to the collector, then it is for the collector to find you. We hope you will book mark us, re-visit and become a part of our growing collectible community.
Thanks for visiting the antique collector, Mister Find IT
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