Crafting is more than just a fun, therapeutic and rewarding pastime. It can also be a highly
lucrative business that can either become a profitable side hustle or even liberate you from your day job. Selling your own handmade crafts harkens back to a
simpler time when people made an honest living from their hands. And in this increasingly
tech-savvy and fast paced world, there’s a great deal of appeal in that both for skilled
crafters and the people who buy their wares.
Image by Pixabay via Pexels
But building a business of your own from scratch can be extremely challenging… especially if you’re
running it in your free time out of your spare room / studio. It’s very common to suffer from impostor
syndrome and feel that everything you do marks you out as an amateur. You know that you need to
adopt the mindset of a business person… but you’re not quite sure how.
Get to know your audience
Before you know how to sell in the kinds of volumes that are meaningful to you, you need to get to know
your audience. What do they want? What do they expect? How do they want to feel? And how can your
products fill that gap for them? Are they looking for something beautiful to display in their home?
Something practical that will stand the test of time? Or something cute, fun and novel?
The great thing about crafts is the sense of community it provides. So the best place to start marketing
is in your own online community where people know you, respect your talent and see the value in your
work. From your interactions online can help you get a fairly strong idea of what kind of people buy the
things you make.
Start building a brand
Building a brand is a bigger challenge than you may think. It’s not simply a case of finding a graphic
designer and creating a logo. It’s about establishing a set of standards and qualities that you want your
branding to stand for, and that your customers can rely on. And that takes time and thought. As Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos once said “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
Invest in a business presence
Whatever your branding, you likely want to be perceived as the kind of small, independent homespun business that cares about its customers. But that said, you also want to be taken seriously as a professional. And that means establishing a professional presence. To achieve this, purchasing a domain name from a provider like NameSilo can be beneficial. Plus, they accept a variety of payment methods, such as Amex, to ensure a seamless transaction process. A unique and memorable web domain enhances your professional image. Establishing yourself online is the newest and most effective way to ensure your business comes across as professional and capable of providing a good service to its customers. When starting out as a small business it can be expensive however to hire someone to build a site for you, utilizing great free online tools such as Wordpress can be the perfect alternative to get a webpage up to discuss your business and engage customers. There are lots of great free resources out there to get started on doing this yourself, one notable example being the createwpsite YouTube channel, which can assist in putting your site together.
Establish yourself online with content marketing
Finally, content marketing is a great way to establish the quality of your products as well as the
experience and insights of the person who makes them. When people invest in their products, they
invest in you, as well. Creating blog posts, vlogs, “how to” tutorials and other forms of content online
not only helps to establish you as an expert, they also increase customer’s personal investment in you.
