Mini treasures 5th advent calendar opened today

A christmas tree by Redrickshaw

We opened our 5th advent calendar on Mini treasures wiki today.

The new thing is that we are encouraging people to contribute during the calendar, e.g. today we are asking people if they have mini villages as Christmas decoration in their home.

Come and see it now! :)

How to fill our advent calendar pages

I have been busy with my several projects and have not been hanging around on Mini treasures wiki for awhile.  Now I saw that only 8 calendar pages have been reserved so far. Haven´t you got any Christmas projects to share with us? If you don't I do :).

Just a warning: in the end of this month I am going to reserve all the remaining pages and fill them with stuff I find, e.g. from our Flickr pool or some nice YouTube videos about (e.g.
about miniature villages) and so on. So think creatively: you can use also stuff created by other people. Do you have a favorite miniaturist artisan you would like to interview or whose minis you would like to showcase for us? Or maybe you have a favorite Christmas poem (or story) you could write and use other people's mini pictures in it?

So if you now got a new idea, go and reserve your page before I take them all ;).

Time to reserve your page on our advent calendar

We are starting to reserve the pages of our traditional advent calendar. 

It is a fun way to promote your miniature projects - for free.

Last year some of the people also organized a lottery. One of the people who had left a comment on their page won the mini on that page. Hopefully this tradition continues this year too :). 

If you need help with reserving, we have a Yahoo group for giving support to each others.

Basically you need to 

1. log in to Pbworks (for that you need a PBworks account)
2. choose one of the days from  http://minitreasures.pbworks.com/w/page/62245469/advent_calendar_2013
3. open the page with that date 
4. press edit
5. write your name on that page
6. wait until Linda or I hide the page from others (change the security of the page)
7. fill your page
8. wait that Linda or I open the page for others again just before your own date
9. enjoy the comments and link traffic you are getting :)

What are the most popular topics on miniature projects currently

I just learnt about List.ly and wanted to try it out. And you can be my test bunnies. :) I want to use it to learn about what kind of mini projects you are currently working at. I added 10 proposals but hope you continue to add topics. For me, a kitchen is not a topic as there are kitchens in almost every dollhouse but a restaurant would be a topic. Hope you get the idea. :)

The most popular mini projects

View more lists from Johanna Janhonen

You can also promote the projects you are working on by pressing the arrow up.

The MTW Awards are here again

I just finalized our list of 25 biggest traffic bringers to Mini treasures wiki. In the beginning of MTW most of the traffic came through miniature blogs, sites and forums but now the situation has changed. People have bookmarked our site and most people visit it via Google and other search engines. So now I needed to go back to 255 biggest traffic bringers to get this list. The links on this lists are mainly blogs or website hosted by either private people or companies. They are sites where I can leave comments telling them about the prize they have gotten. I also found some inactive blogs and secret blogs which were left out from this list as I could not reach their owner.

I want now to thank these wonderful sites for the promotion efforts you have done for Mini treasures during the last year. Keep on the good work :).

I added all these award winners on our Pinterest board dedicated to MTW Awards. They are all nice sites worth of your browsing too :).

1. casita-mini-1.jouwpagina.nl
2. poohbeers.eigenstart.nl
3. true2scale.blogspot.com
4. inchscaled.com
5. mysmallobsession.com
6. littleroomers.blogspot.com
7. greenleafdollhouses.com/
8. tusminiaturas.com/
9. miniaturemavendiaries.blogspot.ca/
10. jazziminis.blogspot.com
11. nukketalo.vuodatus.net/
12. vame.org.au/
13. minisonja.blogspot.com
14. vesperminiatures.blogspot.nl/
15. debbiestinytreasures.blogspot.com/ 
16. mindymaxminiatures.blogspot.com/
17. theminifoodblog.blogspot.com/
18. dollhousebrazil.net/
19. monique63.jouwpagina.nl/ 
20. a-miniature-life.blogspot.com
21. cinderellamoments.com/
22. linnanneito.blogspot.fi/
23. stalbertmini.blogspot.ca/
24. tiina2005.vuodatus.net/
25. candidcanine.blogspot.com/

If you want to be included on this list next year, start promoting our wiki now. Add a wiki button on your site and tell your blog's readers about our wiki and what it means to you. :) The winners are found also on our 4th birthday page.

Winners of our birthday contest

Hi there

We have had a very nice birthday party on our site :). And we got quite many participants on our big contest where we had 9 (NINE!) the cutest mini prizes.

I just did the lottery and here are the winners.

Saara Vallineva, Hegemony77, gingeranna, Pat Wareing, Linda McD, Micaela Lehtonen, Danielle LeBrun, A.Dourou and Wendy Riggins.

Congrats to you all and check our site to see what did you win :). I would love to see the photo of your prize when you get it, so please leave a comment below.

The people who have donated our prizes have now been contacted. I gave them the winners email address (the one they use for logging to our wiki) so they can ask for a snail mail address and be enable to send them to right destination.

Thank you for all the nice people who took part in our contest this time. :)

Welcome to our 4th birthday party!

Mini treasures wiki will be 4 years on Sunday 14th April 2013. We are celebrating the occasion with several ways:

• we are show-casing the cakes from our Flickr group
• we have a special Facebook event 
• we will be tweeting about our birthday using #mtw4y
• we are giving away the MTW Awards for 25 sites bringing us most traffic
• there are give-away (feel free to donate too by this Sunday, e.g. by leaving a comment on this blog post)

Come and join our party (the main page for the event is of course in the wiki itself) and do not forget to spread the word about it :). Make us a birthday card or leave your kind words in the comment section of this blog. 

Our 4th birthday is coming soon with a contest

On 14th April Mini treasures wiki will be 4 years old. We have a habit of celebrating that by thanking the miniature bloggers who brought us most traffic.

See the 25 bloggers or site owners who got the MTW Award last year and think if you could join them by spreading the word about Mini treasures wiki in your blog or site. :)

But before our birthday have a happy mini Easter!

Mini treasures wiki's year 2012

White swan by Nina-chan

I told you earlier that I have been busy. I still am. But next week I am going to start a new course targeted for community managers. And as Mini treasures is my biggest community I am going to do some stuff for us during the course - two tasks at the same time :). On the first time we are introducing ourselves and our communities and for that I updated the presentation I have been doing earlier showing the highlights of last year from the social media point of view.

When I started the Mini treasures wiki in 2009 I used A LOT of my time for building the site and starting the social media channels for it. It acted as my portfolio then showing what I can do. It still does that but now I have also other communities and my own business to take care of.

But looking at the figures shows me that the site can survive and grow even if I am not spending that much time on improving it. We have Linda and and we have plenty of fans and users who like us, thank you :).

Flickr used to be my main arena where I did the community management stuff for Mini treasures as the pictures are critical for miniature hobby but last year I got hooked up with Pinterest and used more time for that. I still believe in the possibilities Pinterest can offer for us but every now and then I try to find time to spend in Flickr too.

Now look at what we accomplished last year and have fun with us this year too. Any help with Mini treasures world is appreciated as always. :)

 

Mtw 2012 from Johanna Janhonen

Why I have been away from you...

You might have noticed that I have not been with you for a long time but now I am back. What was I doing then?

First I was planning my research exchange time and then doing it: me and my family spent 6 weeks in Graz, Austria to study social media in automotive industry. Boy was it interesting! It is always to work in foreign country and learn about new cultures. The visit was in November-December so me, an old Christmas fan, was been spoiled by different goodies Graz has to offer, e.g. Christmas fairs. :) Loved it! During the Christmas time I was promoting our advent calendar but the main work was done by Linda, thank heavens we have her onboard!

After we came back to Finland we had of course plenty to do, e.g. meeting the family we had not met during Christmas. But I was busy with other things too.

The loveliest dollhouse blog in Finnish, Nukkekoti Väinölä

Source: maria-malmstrom.blogspot.fi via Johanna on Pinterest

Before I started Mini treasures wiki I had another wiki, Nukkekotiwiki, a wiki about dollhouses in Finnish. After all the time I spend with you the first wiki was lacking my attention so last year I decided to give some love for it too. My idea was to host a contest: the cutest dollhouse blog in Finnish. First I planned to run it after the summer but something happened: a major Finnish blog service called Vuodatus crashed. And it deleted the photos of its users from several years! Many dollhouse bloggers were using Vuodatus so to give them more time to recover I postponed the contest till the end of the year. The deadline for voting was 15th January and since then I have been telling the results day by day. The top ten bloggers are found on a Pinterest board.

Aamulehti interviewed me for CMAD, I am the lady on the right

Source: twitter.com via Johanna on Pinterest

But this is still not all! I am not only the community manager of Mini treasures and Nukkekotiwiki but I run other communities as well. Being a community manager is one of my passions - I want to learn how to do it well and how to get the most out of you. This is the reason I brought Community Manager Appreciation Day to Finland last year. Last year we were about 15 persons in that event but this year we were 150! And I was still one of the main organizers of the event. So you can guess I was busy with that event, I was thinking that it was almost like my wedding (we had the same amount of visitors back in 2000): I had been inviting a big group of people to celebrate a day (party) with me and to hear the speaches we had chosen for them. I WAS nervous but luckily everything went quite well.

So now my life is back to so called "normal mode". Of course I still have a business to run and a family to mother but nothing so special so should be able to spend some weekly hours with you from now on. :) I just wanted you to know why I stayed away from you for such a long time - hope you understand now better.

Mini treasures is not part of my business (yet) but just a hobby. I got the bill from the Pbworks again, 499$ a year. An expensive hobby I have, don't I? If I want to make my living out of Mini treasures we would need to get 100 times as much as visitors than we currently (14 000 montly visitors) have or to get our visitors to buy 100 times more from Amazon using our affiliate links (e.g. Mini treasures store). The combination would be easiest to achieve: 10 times more visitors and 10 times more Amazon shopping. So the next time you are thinking to buy something from Amazon, use one of our links. Consider also if you can promote MTW to your mini friends - it will encourage me to pay the Pbworks bill again next year.

Till later friends, I have been missing you!

MT wiki Prizes on their way!

Well, it is the New Year and time to reveal the prize winners in the Minitreasures Advent calendar
Christmas Gold Glitter Table Centrepiece

Carolyn Brown from Canada is sending Leny Frings from the Netherlands this Christmas centrepiece with lycopodium and faux greens, gold glittered branches and gold glass beads. Green and gold cloissonne beads hold white candles. Accented with silk burgundy bows.

Tea Light Pram

Anne Dourou from Greece is sending Lisa Topping one of these lovely prams.

Christmas Store
Gloria Wright from Canada selected Eileen Morgan from Nanaimo,BC,  Jaz Ash from Australia and Joyce Greenwood from Rugby, England.

 
 Lots of Christmas printies.
 
Tree decorations, stickers and ornaments with boxes.
 
 Miniature nativity figures. Could be used on your own tree - but might make a cute Nativity scene outside on the lawn of one of your houses at Christmas time.


Thank you all for participating and sharing the fun!