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!

So, for instance, you could have any of Amazon’s huge range of craft books for sale on your blog. What’s more there are lots of ways to customize the offer to precisely suit your needs. If you sell candles, you can show candle-making books, not books on how to repair bicycles! Equally you could show books on soap and scent making and NOT candle making if you feel that’s too close. Just go to Amazon’s affiliate program, have a good read, sign-up and install the code. It works equally well for traditional websites if you prefer that approach.

You can also run small ads from people like Google (http://adsense.google.com) which take just moments to install and can also be tuned to suit your site. I’m sure you’ll have seen these on other craft blogs. When you’re selling crafts online there is a risk that a competitor’s craft products might show up, but in fact if you find an ad that clashes with what you’re doing you can just block them out.

Amazon generally pay you something in the region of 5% when someone buys although it varies. Lowest I’ve seen is 3.5% and highest 10%. The Google ads work slightly differently in that they don’t require a purchase for you to get paid - they will pay you a couple of cents per click. It might not sound a lot but it can soon ad up to a few extra dollars a day. It’s not going to make you rich on its own, but all you do to get it was install a little bit of code, just once, and then leave it to earn money for you.

It’s not difficult to imagine your craft blog earning you a couple of hundred dollars a month extra on auto-pilot. There’s no cost involved in setting it up, all you do is check your account balance!

To be fair their are other publishers and other pay-per-click advert networks if you want to search for them. I’ve chosen these because they’re the most common and anyone can apply. They also work just as well with traditional websites as with blogs - I just prefer blogs!

Some people worry that these ads might be intrusive and distract people from your own crafts. I’d have to disagree. On a properly set up craft blog they’re going to appear over on the right-hand side, out of the way. It’s not until people have finished reading about you’re crafts that they’ll look over there. Eventually your visitors are going to leave your craft blog anyway. If they haven’t bought anything from you (and therefore left via your checkout system), the least you can do is try to give them an exit route that’s also a secondary way of earning you money.

Selling craft online should, of course, focus on what you make. However, a successful craft business is also commercially astute and should maximize ways to get your customer to put their hand in their pocket!

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