Knitting For Profit

Knitting information, ideas and success stories from women who create real cash flow from their knitting and crochet.


Archive for the ‘Knitting Websites’ Category

How To Make Money From A Knitting or Crochet Blog

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

I have been getting some questions about how to make money online from knitting and crochet, especially from blogs which many of you already have.

If you are going to the effort of regularly writing on your knitting blog (knitting website), and you have built up a following of people who like to get your information and ideas, then it's worth setting up a system so that you are rewarded financially too!

There are many ways to make money from a knitting or crochet blog besides selling your own knitting or crochet products, two that you may not have considered are:

1. Adsense Advertising – you allow Google to place those small text ads on your site, and you get paid every time someone clicks on them. This strategy may not make you millions, but its great to have a little flow of money coming in each month that covers your hosting and gives you a bit of cashflow.

2. Affiliate Marketing – if you have a blog that has a reasonable amount of traffic and subscribers, then you can actually make a nice income online by finding information, products and services that would benefit your readers and putting them in touch with the people who provide them. I learned how to set up a blog like this from Yaro Starak, who is a really down-to-earth guy from Australia. I actually met him a couple of weeks ago and was inspired by his relaxed and friendly style, and how he has created a six figure income just from blogging!

After chatting with him, I realised that his information and ideas would be really valuable for anyone writing a knitting or crochet blog. So with his permission I have included one of his articles that gives you his top 10 tips for starting a money-making blog. He also has an amazing report that gives you his complete blog building system for free – if you are at all interested in making money from blogging, I would highly recommend getting a copy.

Click here to get your copy of "The Blog Profits Blueprint" for free.

And now here are Yaro's top 10 tips for starting a blog (you might be past this stage, but there are some great ideas for increasing your readership and also giving your readers really great value)…

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn't news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don't have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that's the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you've done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people's blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger's article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it's sort of like your blog telling someone else's blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it's so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it's worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn't bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it's worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I've listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won't stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I've put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it's certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, who is now a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is also the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

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Posted in Home Business Tips, Knitting Websites, Make Money Knitting | No Comments »

How To Build Your Knitting Website – For Free!

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

knitting websiteThe Internet can provide knitterpreneurs with a fantastic opportunity to find customers from all over the world. So how do you start your knitting business niche website, process payments and get your customers to find it – all for FREE?

There are so many ways to create a presence on the web these days it can all get a bit confusing – do you start a blog? a website? an e-commerce site? a craft-mall store? an E-bay store? And then how do you get people to find you – on search engines? From advertising or promotions? Through links and recommendations? Is your head spinning yet??

Don’t worry! In this article I’m going to show you how to decide what sort of site you’ll need for your knitting business, and where to find the resources to build it easily, and for FREE. But the first thing you need to do before jumping in and starting your site is to sit down and do a bit of planning – this will save you a lot of time and headache!

The first step is to decide what you want your knitting website to achieve. Think about the following questions:

• Do you just want an online catalogue so people can get more information about you and your products? (Like an electronic business card)
• Or have you found a knitting niche that you want to become well known in?
• Do you want to be able to make sales online? Can your products be shipped around the country or worldwide?
• Is your goal to get people to find you online? Do you want lots of traffic to your knitting website? Do you want to be found through search engines?
• Or are you going to be mainly promoting your knitted products or services in the real world (like at markets and fairs or in stores etc)?
• Do you want to keep in regular contact with your customers? Do you have lots of good information about knitting or crochet that you can share with them?
• How much time do you want to spend on this project? Do you want to ‘set and forget’ or are you willing to make a long term commitment to updating it?

Following are the three main types of knitting website you can create, and depending on your answers to the above questions, you’ll find that one will stand out as the most suitable for your knitting business.

A Static Knitting Website – often used as an online catalogue, these websites are called “static” because their content does not tend to change. They are designed to give people information about you and your knitting business and products, and they are the easiest site to set up and maintain because once you’ve got all your information and pictures there, you don’t need to do anything but get people to visit it!

Many static sites rely on off-line promotion for their traffic, in other words, they are great to list on your business card or in advertising so people can go and find out more information and see your complete range of knitting online.

You can create a great static knitting website for free on services like weebly.com. I created a sample site there today and it was really quick and easy, and looks great. Have a look at http://gentletouchknits.weebly.com to see what’s possible in about half an hour! This site was completely free as it is hosted on weebly, there is also the option to register a domain name and host it yourself (but this means you will need to set up a hosting account – which is easy and cheap, but not free!)

The main disadvantage of static sites is that search engines seem to prefer “dynamic” sites like blogs, whose content is regularly updated. This means that your static site may be more difficult to get listed high in search engine results, and if thats the main way you want to get traffic, then perhaps a blog is a better option.

A Knitting Blog – like the one you are reading! A blog is a website that is regularly updated with “posts”, rather than static pages with information and product listings. It can be a great interactive way to keep in contact with your customers, and also a good way to get listed quickly and prominently in the search engines.

There are lots of places where you can start a free blog, the two I have used are blogger.com (which is owned by Google, and some say is faster to get listed and ranked because of this), and wordpress.com, and if you’re looking for convenience you can also create a blog through weebly.com. All are easy to use and quick to get started.

Blogs can be very personal and friendly, and will help you create an ongoing relationship with your customers. They are also a good way to dominate a niche market. But you do need to keep them up to date, so in that sense they are an ongoing commitment where a static site requires less maintenance.

A Knitting Shopping Site – This is similar to a static site, with listings of your knitted products, photos and descriptions, but it is also able to take orders and process payments.

There are a couple of ways you can do this. The fastest, easiest way is to set up a shop front through one of the online craft malls like etsy.com (I will do a whole post about craft malls and which are the best value, so look out for that one very soon!).

These are great because there is already lots of people searching on there for handmade products, so you’ll probably get some good instant traffic. These services usually charge a listing fee or a monthly access fee, as well as a percentage commission on every sale, so they’re not free. And most of the time you won’t really own your own site, so you might be limited in design or layout, and with some your store won’t get listed in search engines.

The other option is to add a shopping cart to your already existing static website. There are services like romancart.com or paypal.com which provide you with order buttons to place next to your knitting items for sale. Payments are then processed by secure servers. These two services are free to set up, but they do charge a small percentage commission per sale.

Now, you don’t need to limit yourself to just one of these types of site. Many people start by building a static site, then adding a shopping cart, then adding a blog. By doing this you get the benefit of all three models – and this is of course a long term plan.

If you are new to the online world, just start by going to a site like weebly.com or blogger.com and have a play around. You can’t break anything, and the best way to learn is by having a go – you’ll have your knitting business up online before you know it!

Let me know how you go with these sites in a comment below, or if you have found any other good free services for creating websites, blogs or shopping carts that other knitters may find useful, please share your experiences with us!
 

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