CraftMarketingTutor.com

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.

Even if you can’t do it yourself – or don’t want to – there are extremely cost-effective services that will do it all for you for less than a couple of hundred dollars. You’ll have to manage your craft blog yourself, of course, but that really is easy. If you can operate a digital camera and click a mouse, you can run a blog selling your crafts on the internet. No problem.

What’s also nice is you can add extra income streams as well.

So, for instance, you could have any of a huge range of books for sale on your blog. What’s more, the bookstore themselves will provide you with a clever bit of code which will show appropriate books. If you sell candles, you can show candle-making books, not books on how to repair bicycles! Installation is again as simple as copy-and-paste.

You can also run small ads 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.

The first option will generally pay you something in the region of 5% when someone buys. The small 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!

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 blog anyway. If they haven’t bought anything from you and 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!

Practical, professional craft selling advice: Selling Crafts Online.