Selling Crafts Online

Whether you are running a blog or more traditional website there are craft business basics that you need to use if you want to succeed. Keeping potential customers coming back to your site – making it “sticky” – is obviously pretty important!

You might hope that interesting info, nice pictures, easy and clear navigation would all guarantee that. Unfortunately it won’t. Truth is people skip by and skip on… there’s a very short attention span online. Your craft business needs to do more than just look good.

Even if your potential customer likes your site, they might never come back. They might think about bookmarking you… and they might not. We’ve all done it, said you’ll go back to a site later – but then not got distracted by something else, never to return…

The fact is your craft business loses out on customers every day. In business, not everyone will buy from you! However, you can do something very positive to try to grab those “hovering” people. Those “nearly” customers.

What you need to boost your craft business potential is a newsletter or e-mailing list, just like I’ve got here to keep you up to date with site changes or important news. Just think about it for a minute. If your visitor will give you their email address you don’t have to worry about them coming back to your craft site, you can get back in touch with them!

And because it’s via email you can do so as often as you like, for virtually no cost.

OK, there’s a cost for the management of these services (you let other people handle the software and all that for you so you can concentrate on what you do best) but you’re talking about a few dollars a month. Don’t you think it’s worth that? To have the potential to get back to your craft business visitors with news and special offers. To give them multiple chances to come and buy from you… even if they forgot they once visited? Frankly, you’d be mad not to.

I currently recommend YMLP because they offer to manage your first 1,000 subscribers for free! Can you imagine? A thousand potential new customers you can get in touch with with a couple of clicks – and it costs you nothing? Craft marketing doesn’t get any better than that!

Even when you exceed that, it’s literally just a few dollars a month. In fact you’ll likely find their prices in Euros because the operation is based in Europe – but who cares, this is the internet!

A slight word of caution though. Run well, a newsletter can add tremendously to your craft business. Done badly it will put people off. A lot of companies want your visitor’s email address so if they pay you the compliment of giving it to you, treat them well. Make them feel special.

As an added bonus you might want to give them a discount off their first order, or offer them something of value (like the dowloadable ebook I give subscribers). It’s easy for you to do and you’ll recoup any small cost many times over, so why not make a little extra effort?

Do that, right at the start of your relationship, and your new subscriber will feel that they are being dealt with personally. Chances are that will get you loyal, repeat customers who have a tremendous impact on the long-term profitability of your craft business.

Most people think it’s nice to be popular. If you’re building a craft business online it’s absolutely vital!

After all, if people don’t know about you, how are they going to buy from you!

The most straight-forward way of getting people to notice your craft business is to advertise it, and pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords can be very effective if you’ve got a budget to play with.

Thing is, most new craft businesses don’t. So how can we get some bang for no bucks?

Read the rest of this entry →

Your hand-made crafts are unique to you, which is what makes them special, but selling crafts is to some extent like selling anything else and when you’re setting up a craft business, making sure things are OK at the beginning is a lot easier than correcting problems once it’s all up and running. Today I want to look at getting your craft blog off to the right start.

But first, why a craft blog? Why not a traditional website? Well at it’s core, every business selling crafts online is still a people business, it’s still a question of getting as many folks as possible to see what you’ve got. A properly set up craft blog will do that faster and more effectively than a traditional site. Even if you already have a craft website, a blog will be a valuable addition.

Read the rest of this entry →

Good craft marketing can make an enormous difference to your business. To separate “marketing” from “selling”, lets call marketing the stuff you do to communicate with your potential customers. It’s not a precise description for those who are picky about these things, but it’ll do for us I think.

With the internet you have opportunity to market your crafts to a global audience, but how exactly are you going to do that? How are you going to benefit from the massive potential?

One way is by running a craft blog – and I’ll probably keep saying it until you’re sick of hearing it!

Fact is, they’re easy to start, fun to run and visitors love them. Done properly they’ll also rank very well in the search engines, often outranking craft sites that have been established much longer or those which might appear much bigger.

So particularly when you’re starting to sell your crafts online, when you’re just getting into craft marketing, a blog is a very valuable tool to have at your disposal.

Google's RSS reader page

One small, but extremely effective part of your craft blog’s armoury is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Sadly many people don’t actually understand what this is and so fail to take advantage. That’s a shame, because RSS really is simple! Here’s how it works.

If you’re anything like me you probably visit a number of different craft blogs. It’s quite time consuming to visit each one and if there’s nothing of interest we just move on to the next. Putting them in your favorites reduces the time, but sometimes we just don’t bother to visit because we don’t have the time or inclination.

What if we could go to just one page though, where we could see a run down of the latest posts from all our favorite craft blogs? That would be quick, wouldn’t it. Then you could just visit those who actually had stuff you were interested in. Great idea!

Well that’s exactly what RSS does and that’s why it’s important to your craft marketing. People might visit your blog every so often, but if you get them to subscribe to your RSS (otherwise known as RSS feed) then they can check up on your news quickly and easily. If you want to see it in action, click on “Subscribe” over on the right under where it says “RSS Feed”.

Now it might be argued that it would be better if they came by your blog – which is true – but you have to accept that most people aren’t going to do that with any regularity. It’s also a good idea to have a newsletter so you can get in touch and market to them directly (more on that in another post).

However, good craft marketing means taking advantage of every opportunity to get your message in front of your potential customer and RSS is not only fast and easy but once set up requires no further involvement from you – it automatically sends out new post information every time you write one!

It’s not going to be any surprise to you to find out that I’m a fan of blogging. After all, here we are at a blog. I’d go further than just saying I’m just a fan though.

If you’re serious about the desire to sell your crafts online then whether you already have a website or not, you really must have a blog. I’m not saying it’s something you should consider, I’m not saying it’s something that might help your craft business, I’m saying it’s a must. An absolute. Not having a craft blog is costing you money.

A pretty strong statement, right? Maybe, but a simple blog can radically change people’s craft businesses and the investment required is tiny.

You’ll note that I say an investment required. So that’s not a free blog then?

It’s true that you can go to somewhere like Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad and get a free blog. Blogger is particularly popular amongst crafts people, perhaps because it’s the best known. There are some very entertaining crafts blogs out there that run under that platform.

So what’s wrong with it? Well for me the main problem is that it’s not in my control. It’s not me who sets the rules and regulations. Blogger is owned by Google. Nothing wrong with that but they decide what you can and can’t put in your blog. They decide what is acceptable content and they really don’t like people directly selling from their blogs. To me, that’s an odd way to run a professional crafts business, particularly as running a professional craft blog to sell your crafts online can be done so cheaply!

You’ll need a domain name, which you can get for under ten dollars a year and you’ll need some hosting, which you can get for five or six dollars a month. That’s it. Total investment in your crafts blog is about the same as a family sized pizza per month!

OK, that’s definitely cost-effective, but I haven’t yet explained why it’s vital to your craft business. I haven’t explained why I’m so strongly in favor of a blog rather than a traditional website.

There’s nothing wrong with a traditional website to promote or sell crafts on the internet. It’s certainly better than nothing, but even if you’ve got an established site the addition of a blog will bring you more customers and make you more money.

Blogs are a great way to communicate with your potential customers. They’re generally lively, almost like talking with someone face to face. They’re usually regularly updated so they’re fresh and newsy – and people love to know what’s going on with your crafts. Which is nice for your visitors and good for your business… but still not the number one reason.

The number one reason is that search engines love blogs. If you want to sell your crafts online you need to do well in the search engines… or you need to advertise to get your customers. Advertising costs money but doing well in the search engines can bring you thousands of visitors for free. So which would you choose for your craft business?

I’ll get into this in more detail in coming articles but I’ll leave you for now with an example of a friend of mine who started her first craft blog in April. Never had a blog before.

So far it has brought in well over 3,000 unique visitors. That’s more than five hundred potential new customers each month and, for the moment, my friend only runs that blog part-time.

What would 500 potential new customers a month do for your craft business?

So this blog is about selling your crafts online, but is it just about the money?

Yep.

No.

Well kind of.

I am a huge fan of crafts and they give me a great deal of pleasure. I’ve been a woodworker for about ten years and more recently I’ve gotten into paper crafts. I’ve started mixing the two with some interesting results.

My wife is a potter (you can see some of her work at XandraCeramics.com). So I’m not the only crafter in the house!

I also love working with other crafts people and helping them develop their businesses.

So you could say craft is a passion for me, and it’s not just about the money (although let’s be honest, making a living is important).

This blog however, is about the money. It’s about helping people go from “kitchen table” crafts person to a full-time income that can replace whatever they’re doing now – and exceed it if that’s what they want to do.

If the money isn’t high on your list then that’s fine. For lots of people their craft is a hobby they love and they never want to take it further. I have no problem with that at all.

But the money is what separates a hobby from a business. If you ain’t getting paid, that’s a hobby.

If you ain’t getting paid as much as you’d like, maybe this blog can help!