I'm tempted to take a vendor I really like and do as much of this stuff as I could for him/her. He/she wouldn't even have to know I was doing it. It'd be interesting to see if it pushed them into a top sales category. :D :D

It doesn't. I've had skilled peopke do it for me, and i've gone through periods of not doing it at all, and diong it myself (i have decent marketing skilks and some marketing education too) and i can't quantify a difference. Things that make a dfference are

• product placement (make sure it appeals to enough people to be worth buying)

• product quality

• brokerage traffic where you sell. (No individual vendor or a small group can make even a tenth of the traffic a whole brokerage like DAZ or Rendo can) You're talking about a size difference of almost a lemonade stand vs. Starbucks.  With brokerages that let you see customer names or nicknames, you see very few people that you see on social media. Less then 10%.  I'm yet to see individual vendors affect brokerage traffic... well i've seen AeonSoul affect RDNA traffic on occasion by 10-20% for a day or so, and I think I've seen stonemason have some impact on DAZ traffic on occasion.  What seems to draw the buying crowd are sales, special events, themed 'oooh shiny' type group releases... storewide events.

• great catchy store promos.

• your long term reputation with respect to product quality and usability. lot of 'top vendors' fall into collectibe content category, you want it because they made it, and you hought it before you were sure if you need it or will ever use it.  This takes time to build... and... if one starts vendoring too soon and doesnt get known for really good stuff can be even harder to builD. Reputations (branding, really) are much harder reversed then built well from scratch.

-this market IS very impulse buy driven, many vendors are not too crazy about it, and have tried to play a different game. They haven't been able to reverse it. Even brokerages that created this don't really have the resources to reverse it any time soon. If they did, it would be a several year process.

• to make a living out of this, do the math... if it takes you a month to make a product (including promos, qa, documentation and marketing), and it sells for 19.95, brokerage takes 50%...  you need to sell 400 pieces to make $4000.  That translates into about $20 per hour.  Usually, you amortize that over a year.  This will put you in top vendor category If you do it each month.

I tried to list these in order of importance... although, i'm still writing it out of my head as a cadual forum post rather then a well thought out paper.

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Renderosity Store  Personal nick: Conniekat8
Hi, my name is "No, Bad Kitteh, NOO", what's yours?