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?

• We aim to be the “Consumer Reports” of Crafting, providing unbiased reviews of the craft products and tools everyone is curious about.

• We also know that using a product isn’t always as simple as it seems. The companies that make these products don’t always know the best way to use the products, but crafters do! We want to spare new or less experience crafters the mistakes we all made learning to use a craft product with a learning curve.

• In addition we’d like to be a place where crafters of all genres can come together to learn about products that cross all markets. For example paper-crafters using embroidery on a card, or sewing on a scrapbook page, may not be as familiar with those products but have a desire to use them and learn more about them.

Well having browsed around the place a fair bit, I must say I think you’re doing a great job.

Any particular reason for choosing a blog rather than a traditional website?

• It all started as a blog, and within the Stamping/Scrapping blogging community. We contemplate switching formats quite often, but we always come to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” conclusion. We really feel that crafters, and women (our main demographic) are still so new to blogging, they are just now figuring out how to maximize blog reading through feed-reeders and really become a participant in the blog community.

• Rather than switch to a more traditional website we are instead trying to educate our readers about how to use the blog more effectively, how to participate in the process.

Now how about a few details? Do you mind sharing with us? Stop me if it gets to an area you’d rather not go into.

Can you give us a rough idea of daily visitors?

• We currently have around 4000 email subscribers. We also have about 1,500 unique daily visitors outside that number so about 165,000 unique monthly visits. Our daily numbers tend to double when we are hosting a giveaway or carnival.

How do you go about attracting them? Is it all word-of-mouth? Do you do any advertising or off-site marketing?

• We do some ad swapping and have even played with google advertising, but most of our new visitors are brought in from Google searches for information about specific products, or other social networking.

• We like to capitalize on the network of bloggers that read Craft Critique. Asking them to participate in Blog Carnivals, exchange links, and doing artist/company features really helps to get the word out.

• We are a blog collective as well, and our team of reporters are all active bloggers with an audience of their own. They each participate in different online forums and crafting communities. Craft Critique is a place where all our individual blog readers can meet on a common ground. The reporters do a lot of our word of mouth legwork.

• You also have to remember we are providing a real service. Product reviews, tips, tutorials and industry information that people love to read, reference and share with others.

• We have also found recently that using Facebook and Twitter has been particularly good for us in meeting new readers.

I’m not expecting you to give me numbers, but I can see your blog has a couple of affiliate programs to generate income. Are there any things you’ve tried that work particularly well?

• Google ads generate the most income for us, but it’s new for us and takes time to build.

• We had heard great things about Project Wonderful (projectwonderful.com) and we like how that is going so far. It seems within the spirit of what we do, and the ads don’t conflict with our product reviews. But our work with them is very new, so it’s too soon to tell if it will generate and real income.

• That has been the biggest struggle for us, finding advertising sources that don’t conflict with our product reviews. We don’t want to create any bias, intentional or otherwise by accepting advertising from companies whose products we are critiquing. In the future we plan to start soliciting companies that fall outside of the realm of what we can critique, and coordinating our own advertising. The reason we haven’t done that yet is just because their aren’t enough hours in the day!

• You also have to remember that the products themselves are a source of income for us. Many (but not all) of the products we review are gifted to us by companies. We like to say it’s like skipping the middle man, why give us money when we’d spend it all on craft products anyway?

Anything that didn’t produce the results you’d hoped?

• Affiliate programs have been disappointing, mainly because for them to work effectively you really have to be promoting the products, and that’s just not what we do.

Is this what you do full-time? Part-time? A hobby that’s got a bit out of hand?

• I refer to Craft Critique as my accidental job. It’s definitely part-time. Full time I am a mother. But the more we put into the site the more we obviously get out of it. When I say “we” by the way I am referring not just to our reporting team, but my Managing Editor, Melissa Norris and my Assistant Editor, Dana Vitek. They are the best unpaid employees a girl could ask for

What’s next? What are your aims for the future?

• We are thinking about other ways to expand the community. Better rating systems, improved product search features, and better ways for our readers to participate.

Sounds exciting Sarah. I’ll let you go now, I’m sure you’ve got plenty to do! Thanks very much for letting us have a peek inside your business.

If you haven’t visited CraftCritique.com I thoroughly recommend it. Great blog and very useful for all crafters.

If you’re looking at blogging for your own craft, you can get course details here.