If you can get your craft in front of more people you stand a better chance of making a sale, right? Stands to reason.

But testing the best method of doing that can be expensive online. Pay per click advertising can be very effective but there are dozens of books about the subject and, frankly, it’s not what most people making crafts want to be spending their time doing.

They’d rather be making crafts!

The other popular method with people new to selling crafts on the internet is paying someone to submit to lots of different sites or search engines. I’m sorry if you’ve gone down that route and I’m sure you now know what a waste of time that is. There are only three places that you really need to submit your site Google, Yahoo and MSN (maybe Bing now) and you can do that yourself for free.

To attract more people to your crafts I recommend two things. If you’ve been here a while you’ll know that blogging is one of them. There’s already lots of stuff here about blogs so I won’t go into that now (if you need one-to-one help check here)

The second is article marketing.

1. You’ll like it because it’s free,
2. It’s easy because you’re just telling people about the stuff you love,
3. It’s powerful because the search engines love the Article sites and as a consequence your articles will shoot up the ranking.
4. So more people see your crafts and you make more money!

Well that can’t be right, can it? I mean if that was true, everyone would be doing it wouldn’t they?

Well don’t ask me why they’re not, but they’re not! The upshot is that if you do it, you can expect to get great results.

In a nutshell, you write an article. A bit like a blog post. You then submit it to an article directory. They publish it and it appears in Google (or whoever), usually within a few days. At the bottom of the article is a link to your craft blog or website. Some of the people reading that article will click your link and visit you. Publish one article, a few people will visit. Publish twenty articles and it’s likely that hundreds of new potential customers will come to your site.

They will. Believe me, this works. I never, ever spend money on advertising. Every visitor to this blog has come either through a link from another blog or via article marketing. I have another blog that I’ve started recently that’s had 200-odd new visitors in the last couple of weeks from a few articles I wrote.

How would you like 200 new customers for no cost?

Anyone can - and should - do this to increase exposure for their crafts online. I mean why wouldn’t you? It’s free!

Well actually I’m going to suggest it’ll cost you a whole huge $7.00 - because that’s what I want for my ebook, The Art of Article Marketing which details exactly how I do it. Websites to use, screen shots so submission is a piece of cake, everything.

You don’t need to buy it, you can probably find everything you need to know by searching online. Or you could do it the easy way After all, isn’t it worth $7.oo to get hundreds of potential customers to look at your crafts? Order here now for immediate download. You could be using these great tactics in your craft business in five minutes!

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?

She’s right, of course. I tend to recommend Paypal because I’ve used them for so long, but it’s not like having one of those credit card machines that you can use just about anywhere, is it.

Well the good news is, for many people it now can be because of Paypal’s Virtual Terminal service.

What’s a virtual terminal? Well in a way it’s like one of those credit card machines on your computer. People can fax you their details, phone you, hand you their credit card like in a store, and all you do is key in to the Paypal terminal that you’ll have in front of you.

Benefit one: You can do it from home for those customers who would rather not put their details into their pc (there are still some who don’t like this).

Benefit two: If you have a laptop you can take someone’s money pretty much anywhere!

Benefit three: All your craft business transactions are being handled by the same people and go straight into the same account.

There’s no really complex technical set-up or overly stringent requirements like you get from a bank. There’s no extra hardware to rent. There are no set-up costs, the fees are very competitive, and everyone trusts Paypal. What more could you ask for?

Sign up for your free account here and then look under Merchant Services for full details.

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.

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:

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!

Opening your own craft store involves costs which are so prohibitive that few, if any, can even consider it. Even the most optimistic business plan would see such a business running at a loss for probably the first two years.

Which is one of the major reasons why the home craft business has for so long been seen as the province of stay-at-home-moms (and a few stay-at-home-pops!). Something to bring in a few bucks extra maybe, but not what puts the dinner on the table.

Well not any more.

Now you can set yourself up to sell crafts on the internet for less than the price of a family-sized pizza each month. A craft blog can be a hugely powerful tool and the software is so user friendly that even complete beginners can pick it up in no time. There’s no need to be scared off by the technology, these days if you can point and click, copy and paste, you can run a successful blog.

But there’s more than just the obvious benefits. What about development costs for new ideas? If you’re selling at craft fairs you can’t just make one, you’ve got to do several in case they sell. But what if they don’t? You’re stuck with them. If you’re advertising your crafts online and you want to try a new product you only need to make one, photograph it, put it on your blog and see if people like it. If it sells, make more! People even expect to wait a while for hand-made crafts to be delivered.

If you’re selling your crafts world-wide, production might be your only problem! You could end up with so many orders you can’t keep up with demand. Wouldn’t that be a nice challenge to have? Hey, it could happen.

Truth is, of course, that despite the obvious benefits and the incredibly powerful tools you have available, a home craft business still has to be run properly if you want it to change the way you live. It takes work and dedication. The internet isn’t a magic button for instant success, but it has made it considerably easier and quicker if you want it.

Put it another way. If you could work at what you love and make a good living doing it, isn’t it worth a bit of effort?

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.

Without people looking at it, nothing will happen. Obvious really. You don’t need a craft marketing expert to tell you that! But just how are you going to draw those vital visitors to you?

Here’s your next obvious statement: you’ll either pay for them or you’ll get them for free!

If you’re just starting to sell crafts online, there’s a fair bet you’d rather take the second option. The first method can be done relatively cheaply, and things like Google’s Adwords program can be very cost-effective, but there’s still that word “cost” in there. When you’re just getting going, “free” is definitely better for your profit margin!

The number one free method, without doubt, is search engine traffic. The problem with that is that it takes a while for your site to get into the search engines, sometimes several months. You don’t want to be waiting that long for your craft business to take off so you need to be a bit pro-active.

Forum’s are very popular and, handled carefully, can be a great source of traffic to your craft business online. Beware though, if you don’t handle it properly you’ll find yourself swiftly booted out. Once out, you’ve blown it. Remember, it takes a long time to build your reputation online but only seconds to ruin it.

So do a search and find a craft forum or two. Sign up and spend a week just watching. Rather unattractively it’s called “lurking” in the trade! Once you get a general feel for things you can introduce yourself and start to join in. Most important, don’t try to sell anything! Never, ever! Not your product, not your service if that’s what you provide. All you want to do is help people if you can.

So how does this get you visitors? Well you’re allowed a “signature”. This might just be a couple of words or it might be a line or two right at the end of your comment (if you check out the craft forums you’ll soon see what I mean). This is where you put a link to your craft blog or website, and it’s where the funny thing happens.

Some of the people who you help will be curious and they’ll click that link. There you have it, visitors! Simple as that. More powerful than that though, if you provide valuable advice, is that you’ll start to become recognized as an authority. The more that happens, the more people visit. People start linking to your blog or signing up for your newsletter. There are all sorts of business building spin-offs. People are also more inclined to trust you precisely because you did not try to sell.

Now it’s always argued that forums are populated by like-minded people and those people are unlikely to buy from you because they’re in the online craft business too. Really? Does that mean you’ve never thought about buying someone else’s crafts? That anyone who tries to sell crafts online never buys? Forum marketing works, if you don’t believe me try it and try to prove me wrong!

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.

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…

…which is the purpose of this new ebook, Blog Power Posting.

The first section is a very useful guide to the mechanics of posting (with some useful screen shots) and how to use tags and categories. It’s the second section that will really improve the results from your blogging though.

Again using screen shots, the book explains the principles and techniques of Power Posting and the tremendous effect it can have on how your blog appeals to both your human visitors and those all important search engines.

This is not some vast and confusing exploration of blogging, but then it doesn’t need to be. It’s concise, practical, and you can be putting the powerful ideas to work within a day. What’s more, at just $7.00 it’s something of a bargain.

For full details just click here.

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!

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…

The way E-Junkie handle it works very well if all you need is a “buy” button. Working in tandem with a Paypal business account it’s an easy and low-cost solution ($5 a month) that works very well and has the added advantage of letting you run an affiliate program if you want to. I use E-Junkie on this site, so I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.

It’s not the full online craft shop though. Until now that’s been rather more difficult to achieve and has required custom programming which is expensive - and then some!

Now though we have WP-Ecommerce from Instinct. A plug-in that really is superb. It’s been around for a while but I couldn’t honestly have recommended it before because it had one or two occasional faults depending on the theme you used.

That’s all fixed now, and I have to say the latest version is superb. It’s comprehensive yet simple. Just upload it to your Wordpress plug-ins folder and fire it up - it has everything your online craft store needs and integrates with Paypal so you can take people’s credit cards or they can pay you from their Paypal account.

Given it’s power and flexibility you’d have to be wondering how high a price tag it would have. Well it doesn’t. It’s free. You can extend its functionality further with a few bits and pieces that do cost, but in really I think you can start your online craft shop with the free version and then buy the add-ons if and when you need them - from profits you generate. That’s pretty much an ideal situation if you ask me!

Full details here: Instinct.co.nz

E-Junkie is still a simple solution if you have just a few products and definitely my preference if you’re selling a craft ebook. Their details are here.

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