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Guest series :: Some straight talk on monetizing your craft blog

by contributor on May 24, 2012

in Blogging Tips, Guest series 2012, Resources

Guest series 2012: I asked fellow bloggers, makers and creators to write on their creativity and focus their essay on one of four topics: creativity and health, creativity and business, creativity and parenting or creativity and process. I am very excited to have a wonderful lot of fellow creative folk guest posting here at whipup.net over the next couple of months. Please welcome…

Diane Gilleland makes crafts, podcasts, ebooks, and online classes over at CraftyPod in Portland, Oregon. When she isn’t making things, she’s tending to the every whim of her cat Pushkin, and what’s wrong with that?

Image by Windell Oskay, via Flickr Creative Commons

Hello, Whipup! I’ve been a craft blogger for six years. (And in this odd, still-pretty-new internet landscape, that constitutes a long time ago!) When I started blogging, it was purely a hobby, but within a couple years blogging became the center of my livelihood – and I quit my day job. I think this is a little bit because I was lucky, and largely because I’ve worked very, very hard to develop income streams from blogging.

I’ve learned some valuable things about monetizing a blog over the years, and I thought I’d share some of them here. I hope these ideas give you some real-world advice and useful food for thought!

Where does blog-money come from?
It’s tempting to think that monetizing a blog works like this: you write great posts, people like them, and the money comes in. Maybe you take some advertisers, maybe you create a tutorial and everybody buys it, or maybe you get “discovered” – but one way or another, all you have to do is be worthy and the money finds you.

There’s a tiny handful of popular bloggers for whom that strategy might work, but let me tell you: for the vast majority of us, making money blogging means treating it more like a business. There really aren’t any truly passive income sources for bloggers – that is, if you want to make a reliable part-time or full-time income.

Image by Richard Elzey, via Flickr Creative Commons
Small Income Sources vs. Large Ones

You don’t have to be shooting for a part-time or full-time income from blogging, of course. There are plenty of methods you can use to earn smaller amounts of income through blogging. You can sign up with ready-made ad programs like BlogHerAds, Google AdSense and Project Wonderful. You can join a craft blogger marketing program like The Blueprint Social and find opportunities to do sponsored posts. You can place Amazon affiliate links in your blog posts. These are easy-to-implement options that don’t require much upkeep, and will earn most bloggers at least a few lattes’ worth per month, and perhaps more. And that may be plenty for your needs, and that’s great!

Traffic-based income vs. Skills-based income
…But let’s say that you want to turn your blog into that part-time or full-time income. Well, your first decision is a big, broad one: will you make money based on the size of your audience, or will you make money based on selling your skills?

If you have a large audience for your blog, then you have the option to turn that audience into a kind of “product,” and sell exposure to them to companies. You might start up an ad program for your blog and sell space. You might place affiliate ads or links on your blog. Or you might sell sponsored posts. With all of these options, the larger your audience is, the more income you stand to make.

Or maybe you want to get hooked in with a craft company – to be hired as a designer, or write a book, or host a TV show. In that case, you need craft company decision-makers to see your blog, and you can reach out and start conversations with them on Twitter and Facebook to pique their interest. But you also need to cultivate a large audience of crafter-readers. Your readers provide evidence that you’re worth hiring, because you come with a built-in audience.

In order to make that  reliable part-time or full-time income through any of those options, though, you’ll need a lot of audience. It’s hard to put a firm number on these things, but I think your monthly site visits should number at least in the tens of thousands.

What if you don’t have that kind of traffic? Don’t worry! You can always start out monetizing your blog based on selling your skills instead. There are practically endless opportunities there. All you need to do is figure out three important things: 

Image by splityarn, via Flickr Creative Commons

Important Thing #1: What are your sellable skills?

What forms of craft do you love to think about, and make, and share most? Usually, knowing your best crafty skills is a good first step to creating money-making options for yourself. What crafts or techniques are you good enough at to teach other people? What kinds of things are you great at designing? What media do you know especially well? What crafts do you do differently than anyone else?

There are tons of ways to spin these skills so they can be sold. You might produce PDF tutorials or ebooks to sell. You might teach online classes. You might teach live classes. You might sell your skills as a designer to small business owners. You might make handmade things to sell. (All of these options require a receptive audience, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

More than likely, you also have several non-crafty talents – skills you’ve picked up at your day jobs, or through your education, or via the School of Life. These skills could be useful in monetizing your blog as well – how can you combine your crafty skills with your non-crafty ones to create interesting products and services for your readers? If you’re great at project management, for example, could you teach classes in project planning to crafty business owners? If you’re an accountant by day and a beader by night, could you write a simple ebook on accounting that creative minds can embrace?

Really, the question of what you sell comes down to our next important factor….

Image by BartNJ, via Flickr Creative Commons

Important Thing #2: What is your ACTUAL market for those skills?
This is a somewhat trickier idea. And I’m writing the word ACTUAL in all caps to make a big point: you may love to write about crafts, but that doesn’t always mean other crafters will pay you for it. You may love to make crafts, but that doesn’t always mean other crafters will pay you for them.

For many of us craft bloggers, our readership is made up of friends and kindred spirits. And while this is lovely for conversation, it just doesn’t automatically lead to income. In tight economic times, your readers have to make careful decisions about what to spend money on – and more often than not, this means your readers will be interested in buying things that solve some kind of problem for them, or that they have an actual need for.

…So if you want to make a decent skills-based blogging income, you have two options. The first one is to formulate some kind of product or service to sell to your existing readers. And if your readers are other crafters, then you basically need to figure out what those readers actually need. That might turn out to be something very different from the things you blog about or make.

For example, let’s say you’re an expert crocheter, and you want to sell hand-crocheted hats. If your blog audience is fellow crocheters, then they might not be the best market for your hats – they can, in fact, make their own hats. But maybe they’d be really interested in buying patterns for your hat designs, or learning your expert crochet techniques.

Or, if you’d rather blog about and make what you like, then your second option is to cultivate a new audience of people who actually need those things. So if you want to sell handmade items, and you want to use a blog to do it, then the people reading that blog need to be the people who need your handmade items. A classic example: let’s say you make quilted pot holders and embroidered dish towels. Are crafters the best buying audience for those items? Probably not – they can pretty easily make their own kitchen items. But people who love to cook? They’re a great market for your product! So, what kind of blog would appeal to them?

These are great big ideas, but they really just boil down to the same things that drive any successful business: what you sell has to have an ideal customer, it has to solve some kind of problem for that customer, and the customer needs to know it exists. … And that brings us to our third important factor.

Image by Jason Kessenich, via Flickr Creative Commons

Important Thing #3: How much time and energy do you have available for monetizing your blog?
To generate regular part-time or full-time income through blogging, you’ll need to invest basically part-time or full-time effort in developing, marketing, and supporting your business. Do you have that kind of time? If not, that’s okay – what DO you have time for? You can always start small (with some of the simpler options I listed above) and make adjustments as your income grows.

It’s important to be realistic in your expectations, and to understand that no matter how you choose to earn money blogging, in order to earn a sustainable income, you’ll be putting in plenty of effort. It takes time to write an ebook, teach an online class, produce a video, or write a pattern. It takes time to write the kind of blog content that keeps your traffic high (and attractive to advertisers) week after week.

You might want to pull our your calendar right now and set aside some regular blocks of time for working on your blog-based income.

Image by kodomut, via Flickr Creative Commons

Stay nimble, my friends
All of this may sound like monetizing a blog is really hard to do. Well, speaking from experience, it’s not the easiest thing in the world, but it’s well worth the effort. If you don’t mind, I’ll add one last slightly-challenging idea. Once you start making income from your blog, it’s no time to rest on your laurels! The blogosphere moves very fast, and it’s very likely that what’s earning income for you now won’t be the same thing that’s earning you income next year. To earn your income online, you have to be ready to keep a flow of new products or services, and change directions when your market changes – and that will happen regularly. Or, if you’re making your income based on traffic, then your nimbleness will involve keeping a stream of content that keeps lots of traffic flowing to your blog. And again, tastes change quickly online, so you’ll likely find yourself needing to change along with them.

All that said, I wouldn’t trade my little blog-based business for anything in the world. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a very satisfying expression of who I am, and what I love doing. It’s worth the amount of effort it took to build up, and the amount if takes to keep it going.

If you want to go deeper into this subject and come up with a customized monetization plan for your blog, you can even take my upcoming online class. I’d love to help you find your best money-making options!

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Guest series :: Two pink lines

by contributor on May 23, 2012

in Community + Creativity, Guest series 2012

Guest series 2012: I asked fellow bloggers, makers and creators to write on their creativity and focus their essay on one of four topics: creativity and health, creativity and business, creativity and parenting or creativity and process. I am very excited to have a wonderful lot of fellow creative folk guest posting here at whipup.net over the next couple of months. Please welcome…

Laura Bray is a designer, writer and lifestyle expert. She inspires creative women to live a life of balance & simplicity by sharing her modern twist on traditional home arts on her blog at katydiddys. Laura lives in southern California with her physicist husband and young daughter.

It’s amazing how two pink lines can change a person’s life.

When I was a young girl, I loved art. I dreamt of becoming a fashion designer. I sketched and drew. Then one day I signed up for art class at my high school. A tough semester ended in my art teacher telling me I had no talent. Young, impressionable, and embarrassed, I abandoned my dream.

I went to college, started a successful career in finance, and earned an MBA. I married a wonderful man and we were deeply involved in our careers and loved to travel. In 2001, we decided we did not want to have children and my husband had a vasectomy. It was not a decision we took lightly. We spent many hours discussing it and in the end thought it was the best decision for us. Our lives continued to move forward to our dream of retiring at 50 and traveling the world.

In October 2004, my period was late. We were afraid that I was ill or going into early menopause. When I called the doctor to make an appointment, I was told to take a pregnancy test. The two pink lines appeared, indicating I was pregnant. As I sunk to the ground in disbelief, I saw our future plans crumble before me. Over the next nine months we realized how little control we really have over our destiny and prepared to welcome our unplanned, but already loved, new family member.

In June 2005 our daughter was born. I tried to continue my business career through the first two years of her life. We had a part-time nanny but as a small business owner I struggled to make enough to pay for childcare, let alone contribute financially. I was also incredibly smitten with my daughter and hated the hours that I spent away from her. A small voice, hidden away since high school, began to whisper ideas about my creativity. I picked-up the book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and slowly began to heal the wounds my high school art teacher inflicted upon my creativity.

My daughter and my creativity have grown-up together. They feed and support one another and give me endless joy. My daughter’s unbridled belief that she can create anything she puts her mind to bolsters my confidence. She is my muse. At the same time, my creativity helps me be a better mother. Math homework is more fun when it’s turned into an art project and teaching my daughter to explore her emotions through her art are lessons that will serve her well later in life. Many of my project designs are created as toys or accessories for my daughter. As for my daughter, she’s a successful design professional at age six! She and I have had projects published in Create With Me magazine and she’s appeared on the online craft show, When Creativity Knocks.

Who would have ever guessed that those two pink lines held so much potential for two lives?  They announced the beginning of my beautiful baby girl and the rebirth of my creativity.

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Guest series :: Understand the value of creativity

by contributor on May 22, 2012

in Community + Creativity, Guest series 2012

Guest series 2012: I asked fellow bloggers, makers and creators to write on their creativity and focus their essay on one of four topics: creativity and health, creativity and business, creativity and parenting or creativity and process. I am very excited to have a wonderful lot of fellow creative folk guest posting here at whipup.net over the next couple of months. Please welcome…

Ellen Luckett Baker is author of The Long Thread, where she writes about her adventures with sewing, crafting, and kids. Her book 1, 2, 3 Sew 1, 2, 3 Sew was recently published by Chronicle Books and her debut fabric collection, Quilt Blocks, is being produced by Moda and will be available by the end of this month. Ellen lives in Atlanta with her husband, two daughters, and a growing number of pets.

Thanks for having me on WhipUp! Today I’m going to talk a bit about my creative process and how it’s connected to my family life. I never considered myself to be a creative person until I had children. I don’t know if it was age, maturity or motherhood that allowed me to distance myself from my insecurity and open myself up to creativity. But I think it’s essential to have both the physical and mental space to create.

My fondest memories from childhood are those of making things. Some memories include creating melted crayon drawings on a hot plate, dipping candles with my mother, baking in my toy oven, drawing pictures of my favorite cartoon characters, and writing poetry. But as I reflect, I wonder where that creativity went. As I hit my early teen years, I let it go and I didn’t get it back for almost 20 years. Whether this came from pressure to fit in my environment, or from fear of failure, I don’t know.  Even as an Art History major in college, I was deathly afraid of my studio art classes. But now, as a parent of a wildly creative child who does not respond well in a traditional educational environment, I see the importance of nurturing and rewarding creativity. There’s a lot of evidence that our culture is suppressing creativity so I think now, more than ever, we need to understand the value of creativity for innovation and overall happiness.

Just before I had our first daughter, I completed a Master’s in Non-Profit Administration, hoping to continue a career in arts administration. But I knew that I wanted to stay home with my children when they were very young. It was this opportunity to be at home, made possible by my husband’s commitment to support our family, which allowed me to find my creative space, both physically and mentally.

Over these past nine years, I’ve learned to sew, made many craft projects, created a successful blog, written a sewing book and most recently, designed a fabric collection. Since I work from home, my creative and professional life is very much connected to family life. My sketchbooks are filled with my drawings as well as those of my children. The kids and I make crafty messes all over the house. There are often toys scattered about in my sewing room and the sound of computer games at my desk. And my dog is usually taking a nap at my feet and the cat is sleeping on whatever fabric I have just cut. So, while my working life is unconventional and chaotic, and completely overwhelming at times, it’s nice to be able to combine creativity with my family life. It is in the quiet bits here and there that I find moments of inspiration and clarity. Whether in carpool line, waiting during a piano lesson, or in bed at night, I always keep a sketchbook handy for ideas. Most every sewing pattern and fabric design I create has been rolling around in my mind for weeks or even years before it comes to fruition.

Though I was first inspired by reading blogs and seeing the creative works of others, I don’t spend as much time these days looking around. Growing up in Alabama, I developed a love of folk art with its handmade feel and warmth, but I also have a need for clean lines and symmetry. Some of my favorite textile artists are Sonia Delauney, Denyse Schmidt, the quilters of Gee’s Bend, and Vera Neumann.

I’m always inspired by my kids and their interesting ideas. So you might find a page like this in my sketch book where I am sketching out instructions for a pattern, followed by my daughter’s drawing of a doughnut quilt she wants me to make for her. Excellent idea!

And there’s this graffiti in front of my sewing machine. My seven-year-old, who has long known better, did this. But I wasn’t even mad because it seemed like such an expression of love; it makes me think of my kids every time I sit down to the machine. Family life is integral to my creativity, so although sometimes I feel frustrated that work interferes with my family life and vice versa, I don’t think I would trade working at home in my pajamas amidst the mess and chaos of family life.

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Guest series :: Creating for children

by contributor on May 21, 2012

in Guest series 2012, Kids Crafts

Guest series 2012: I asked fellow bloggers, makers and creators to write on their creativity and focus their essay on one of four topics: creativity and health, creativity and business, creativity and parenting or creativity and process. I am very excited to have a wonderful lot of fellow creative folk guest posting here at whipup.net over the next couple of months. Please welcome…

Jo Ebisujima, otherwise known as jojoebi (jo-jo-eh-bee) is a British designer living and working in Saitama, Japan. She creates fun and educational products for kids and sells sewing patterns so you can create them yourself.

I have always been interested in creating for children. My degree was in Electronic Imaging and my final two projects for my thesis was to design and make a CD-ROM (yeah, it was a long time ago) for children with special needs and to write, film and produce an educational TV program. Then much of the time between graduating and having my son was spent teaching children.

When my son, Ebi-kun, was born I became interested in Montessori, the more I read about it the more I fell in love with it and I ended up doing a course so that I could learn more and equip me to teach Ebi-kun. As he grew I started making things for him, Montessori equipment that I couldn’t afford to buy such as the sandpaper letters and sound pouches, along with toys and useful items to help him become more independent.

Around the same time I got myself a sewing machine with the intention of making curtains for the new house, I never did get round to making the curtains but I did re-discover my love of sewing. I started off just making simple clothes and toys, I came across the Black Apple doll pattern one day and got hooked and things just grew from there. Friends started asking me to make things for them and one suggested selling my goods online, I soon discovered Etsy and set myself up a shop and I have built the business up slowly from there.

My son and his interests inspire me a lot and several of the projects I have worked on in the last couple of years have come from direct needs or requests from him. In Japan we have to make a pile of bags of specific sizes for kindergarten, Ebi-kun was very much into knights and dragons and asked for knight fabric for his bags. Now, Japan has a lot of great fabric but knights and dragons are not a common theme so this led me into the world of fabric design, Spoonflower had not long being launched, they saved the day, as I was able to print off my designs and make the bags. This year he started school and loves the fabric so much he requested his new school bags be made with it too.

Another design that grew from a need was the Steggie Back Pack, he had a kindergarten trip coming up and needed a backpack to carry his lunch and mat in, of course he didn’t have one and I figured it couldn’t be that hard to make! This time there was no actual request just a need for a backpack, dinosaurs are also a big favourite so after a few rough sketches I put together his bag. I like to think it was my perfect pattern making skills which meant that it all came together first time but I have a sneaky feeling it was more down to good luck. Seeing his eyes light up the first time he sets eyes on something new that I have made for him makes it all worth while. I hadn’t planned to make it into a sewing pattern but we got such a good reaction to it from friends and strangers, he was the envy of the kindy outing and it was a real confidence boost for me too. So I set to it and drew up the pattern properly.

I really enjoy the process of coming up with something new, working out how to make it and then bringing it all together. We often have creative time together, crafting or painting side by side sometimes we will work with the same medium but go off in our on direction other times I will be sewing and he will be building something out of cardboard boxes, creating in the same space but on our own. This is mirrored in our work room, at one end is my studio space and the other end, his Montessori shelves, the room evolved like this and works for both of us.

I would say a good chunk of my inspiration comes from my son, his endless stream of questions or his crazy stories he tells me as we cook dinner together and I get an equal dose of inspiration from living in Japan, a culture far from my own. I feel like everyday I am learning something new, remembering to see the world through a child’s eyes and pushing adult sensibilities out of the way are important parts of my creative process too. I also love to watch children play and interact, notice the similarities and differences such as kids here make rice balls out of mud not mud pies. Also, the online community is a resource I can’t live without. The Crafty Crow and Pinterest are great for coming up with new project ideas, often one idea found there will spark a whole new project and off we go again on another adventure.

 

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For more kids craft, creative ideas and activities go to the Action Pack website

Guest series :: Listen and watch

by contributor on May 19, 2012

in Community + Creativity, Guest series 2012

Guest series 2012: I asked fellow bloggers, makers and creators to write on their creativity and focus their essay on one of four topics: creativity and health, creativity and business, creativity and parenting or creativity and process. I am very excited to have a wonderful lot of fellow creative folk guest posting here at whipup.net over the next couple of months. Please welcome…

Jodi Anderson grew up in the woods of Sauk County, Wisconsin, and her past is present in most everything that she does today. She finds beauty in the mundane, refuses to let her struggles with illness define her, obsesses over local history, and tries to keep track of it all in her online journal, Daybook.

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
– Franz Kafka

I am lullabied, and a bit haunted, by daydreams. They are a combination of beast and wilderness, childlike wonder, science, and the more primal aspects of self. There is a guttural component to my thinking and overall vision, and as often as I can, I allow myself to be fully immersed in all of these elements. The most important thing that I do is listen to and watch what is going on inside of me.

When a concept is evolving, I feel it physically. It is not unusual to find that I am sitting, eyes closed with hands, fingers spread wide, placed upon my chest, as if trying to extract the equation from within so that I can unfold this into an outward expression, a stamp of my most authentic self. These feelings, this immersion, always come first, and it is a sort of love affair with my ideas. A right-quick affair actually, so I make haste or I am liable to not do the project at all. I need to move very fast and work while I still possess that first strong urge.

(If, on the other hand, I am following a crochet pattern or have specific instructions for a basket, I have all the time in the world.)

After that, it is just a matter of desire versus reality. What can I physically do with the objects that I have in mind? Can I learn any needed skills quickly? Do I have the necessary energy? Is this something that I will start and then abandon? What is my end goal? Do I even have one?

When working on characters and costumery, as I do in the unmasked series, I might sketch out an idea, but mostly I prefer to pull together materials and play with them. As they are gathered and begin to reveal more of their nature, I naturally work out the details and consider workability while everything is within my grasp.

An important element in my recent evolution as an artist has come in the form of a fearless friend, Jen, who is a skilled knitter and seems to quickly master anything that she attempts, like basket weaving. We have become crafting cohorts, signing up for classes to do things of which I’d not heard and otherwise raising my bravery status, as well as challenging my previous belief that an introvert wouldn’t enjoy company. (Ha!) It was she who suggested we try antler basket weaving, which, damn if that didn’t incite a whole internal revolution and rock my world.

Already at home in the woods and liking best those things that are alive, or once were, I find that weaving, whether baskets or a garden trellis, works well with my creative process. I have always been first inspired by the wild world, like the spring woods or a bustling river. You can work with synthetic materials, but I find that reed and cane fit in well with my personal design aesthetic. Although there are some general techniques in weaving, such as ojo de Dios (God’s eye) binding when the handle first meets the rim, the craft is remarkably forgiving and intuitive. I find that I don’t need to do much planning, if any. Weaving put a new notch in my figurative craft belt, and it shifted a bit the way that I approach unfolding ideas and then implementing them. It allowed me to more fully relax into making and the end result is like a timestamp of my creative self during that project.

In the end, I believe that our individual life journeys, all of the things that we make, the dreams that we mold, those thoughts manipulated by head and hand, even the art that is conceived and not taken any further, each of these is a step in the creative process, where the ultimate craft is the revealing of our true self.

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