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!