Sell Handmade Crafts - It's Your Ticket to Freedom

By Steve Jardine

Do you have a hobby you love that involves making crafts? Do you wish you could just make and sell handmade crafts and leave your 9-5 job behind? It's not fantasy, it can be done. It's not easy, no it's not, living a dream never is! But it really can be done.

There are three things you need to think about before you can begin to live your dream.

1. What hand made crafts sell?

It's all very well having a hobby that you love to do, perhaps it's card making or pottery, but will it sell? The worst thing you can do is put time and money into starting a crafting business just because you enjoy making crafts and your family and friends tell you your crafts are lovely. This is not enough market information to make a start. So do some research. The best place to do this is online, look at popular craft websites, ebay, crafts forums etc.. You will soon get a idea of what is popular and sells.

2. Test your selling and marketing ability using ebay.

In order to sell handmade crafts you need to not only find the right product but you also need to learn a little about effective marketing and sales. Set up an ebay account and start selling your crafts. Your aim here is to test your sales abilities such as product headlines, descriptions, image creation, pricing and so on... At this stage you are not looking to get rich but to see if you can create good sales 'copy' that works for your products. Try out lots of different styles and approaches to see which works best. This 'testing' process is very important.

3. Choose an online or offline sales strategy, or both.

Once you have done some testing on ebay you can progress onto the next stage. Choose the sales routes you will use in order to sell your handmade crafts. Popular offline sales routes are craft fairs and shows, shop consignment, community and school fairs, craft parties and so on. These are great ways to sell your crafts. The downside is they are time consuming and you would need to have a good amount of stock. However the biggest drawback is that you can only sell to a small number of people, such as those attending a craft fair. The big benefit of online sales through a website or auction site is that you can sell to the whole world! Your market is truly massive. This is where the biggest potential lies for leaving your 9-5 job behind and becoming a full time crafter.

If you are seriously considering how to sell handmade crafts a good starting place is to think about what crafts sell, then test the market then go for it using the sales method you prefer. But remember your biggest potential market will be through online sales so put that at the top of your business strategy.

If you want to know how to sell your crafts online and increase your income go to http://www.howtosellcrafts.com/
Steve Jardine is a well known online crafting entrepreneur. He runs the popular crafting and internet marketing blog http://www.craftsblog.co.uk/
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