The Crafts Blog

A while ago I did an article about the different ways you could take people’s money when you’re selling crafts online. You can see that post here.

Then just the other day a friend pointed out to me that I wasn’t really giving the subject complete coverage. I was confused. I’m not the world’s greatest writer maybe, but I thought I’d done quite a good job

Ah, she said, but what about all those people who sell crafts online but also offline at craft fairs and such. What are they supposed to do?

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I thought it would be nice to have a chat with some craft blog owners and craft business people. Our first interview is with Sarah Moore who runs the very popular CraftCritique.com.

Hi Sarah, thanks for sparing us the time to do this interview. I know you’ve been pretty busy lately. When did Craft Critique start?

• I started Craft Critique on a 2 AM whim back in January of 2007. I honestly just had an idea and went with it, seeing as I was already doing product reviews on my personal blog, as were all my blogging friends. I just figured we should at least be getting these products gratis, and if we were really providing a marketing service to the vendors in a professional way, why wouldn’t they go for it.

And what are you trying to achieve?

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I know this blog is about how to sell your crafts online, but most people need at least some supplies to create their crafts so I thought we’d all benefit from a list of people’s favorite craft suppliers.

So who are yours? It doesn’t matter what craft, what country, I’d like to know who you like best so I can share it with the rest of the craft community. I have just one tiny rule, they must be able to take orders online.

So where do you get special papers? Who do you buy your candle supplies from? Where do you get scents for your soap? Who provides your needles or sewing supplies?

Drop me a line here and let’s help crafters everywhere get the best deals and the best service for their craft supplies.

To start you off, here’s one I heard about just recently:

Starting a home craft business and building it from “kitchen table” beginnings to something that can provide you with a full-time income has never been easier. If you produce quality, original work it’s now possible to advertise and sell your crafts to anyone, anywhere in the world. The internet has revolutionized business and selling crafts online now offers opportunities that crafters a generation ago could never have imagined possible.

It’s not just the size of the potential craft market either. What about the start up costs? Not long ago you had three choices: craft fairs, craft galleries, or opening your own shop. Craft fairs are infrequent and you sometimes have to travel large distances with no guarantee of getting a return. Craft galleries, if you can persuade them to offer you an exhibition, will generally charge at least thirty per cent commission and can go as high as seventy!

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I suppose I should start with an apology to Stephen Sondheim whose mid sixties musical inspired this article title! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, never mind, let’s get on with some ideas about how to sell crafts online and how forums can help.

I’m big on craft blogs because I believe they have definite advantages over traditional websites. However, whether you go for a blog or a website for your craft business there’s one thing that’s absolutely vital to your success.

Eyeballs.

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In my opinion a home based craft business can do no better than a blog to promote itself. I run several craft businesses and they are either 100% self-contained blogs or they have other blogs supporting them.

Bottom line? If your craft business does not have a blog, you’re loosing out.

Blogging is no longer in its infancy. It’s a mature platform for divulging information to potential customers that is simple to use, popular with search engines and equally popular with people.

Why wouldn’t you run a craft business blog? The software is free, and it’s even a piece of cake to set up…

…or that’s what everyone tells you…

Truth is, while software like Wordpress (which I highly recommend) is indeed free, and relatively simple to install if you know your ftp (Wordpress call it their “famous 5 minute install”) that isn’t the end of the story.

If you want an efficient and profitable blog that pulls in the customers you’ll need a few additional bits and pieces (plug-ins) and you need to sort out a few vital settings within your blog.

So like a lot of things, it’s not complicated on the face of it (and definitely not rocket science) but more like a day to set up than five minutes.

Still well worth doing. Don’t under-estimate the power of blogging. Done properly, the reward for effort can be remarkable. People are earning six figure incomes from this stuff!

But for it to be effective and efficient in your craft business you need to do it right. The big question if you’re not blogging at the moment is where do you find the information you need to set up a powerful, high performing blog that will fulfill all this promise?

The Wordpress site has a remarkable amount of free information, and a search of Google will find you all sorts of help. If you have the time to investigate, experiment and learn new skills, you can do it all for remarkably little investment. Say $10 a month?

But what if you don’t have the time or the inclination? Well here’s the unashamed plug for one of my own businesses!

I run another blog at Firstmoneyonline.com. It’s not specifically about crafting (although many of my clients are craft businesses), it’s about how to put together your own home based business blog.

For just a few dollars more than doing it entirely on your own you can have one-to-one tuition, consultation and support.

I’m not going to give you full details here, there’s quite a lot to it and it’s all explained at Firstmoneyonline.com/business-blogging-system. As I write this there are a few places left before the planned price rise but as I don’t update the site daily you’ll want to check it out soon.

Any questions, just use the “Contact Us” form you’ll find at the blog and I’ll get straight back to you.

I hope you’ve either got a craft blog, or you’re seriously thinking about it. They’re low cost, easy to use and the most powerful tool you can have for (a) getting your message across to your customers and (b) doing well in the search engines.

You almost can’t do anything wrong if you’ve got a blog. Any blogging is better than none. Like most other things though, there are ways to do things more professionally, to make more impact and to get better results…

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Selling crafts online is getting easier all the time. The latest developments in blogging mean you can have both an ideal communication method and a super-efficient shop set up in the same package. Except for a few dollars a month for hosting, you can get it all going for nothing.

Beyond your own craft items you can also add extra income streams as well - and you need do little more than copy and paste a bit of code!

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Visitors to this craft blog will by now have realised that I’m quite a fan of blogging.

Great for communicating with your prospects and customers, loved by search engines, a huge range of plug-ins are available to expand it’s capabilities… what’s not to like?

The only thing that’s been something of a stumbling block has been using a blog for an online store. As somewhere to sell your crafts from directly.

There are lots of ways to do it with a traditional website, but turning your blog into a shop for your crafts hasn’t been easy. Until now…

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