I’ve banged on about article marketing before (see post here). I probably will again. It’s a superb way to draw customers to your scrapbooking blog or website no matter what aspect of the business you’re in – and it’s free. Won’t cost you a dime.

The basics are that you can get your article (short, easy to put together) into Google and the other search engines faster and easier than you can with your site. Result? What every scrapbooking business needs – qualified visitors.

Anyway, like I said, check out that other post for the nitty-gritty.

The point of this post is to draw your attention to a new article directory Great Craft Articles. It has been started by Bob Beacham who knows a thing or three about running craft businesses and it should be particularly valuable because instead of being cluttered up with everything from Auto Spares to Zebra Breeders, it’s dedicated to crafts.

Registration is absolutely free – as it should be – and you can submit any articles you like so long as you are the copyright holder – even those you’ve already submitted to other directories. Bob’s putting some serious effort into promoting it so it’s going to build into an important resource for your business.

When someone offers something like this, that’ll cost you nothing and guarantees to improve your business in a number of ways, you’d be foolish not to take advantage of it. Full details here.

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Everyone loves a scrapbook freebie, right? Literally thousands of people a month search for scrapbooking freebies – perhaps you are among them?

And the best way to have a profitable business is to find out what people want – and then give it to them!

So freebies are a must in your scrapbooking business because giving someone a freebie gives you so many opportunities to profit.

For a start, give one for signing up for your newsletter. Follow up with valuable help and information, and eventually include the chance for your newsletter subscribers to buy from you. Make it a discounted price, make it a “subscriber special” for example, and not only do you get a chance to profit but you make your customer feel special too.

Another way to employ this tactic is with digital scrapbook freebies. Give someone a free sample to prove the value of your work. Give someone some digital scrapbooking elements to prove that your larger offer is of high quality and great value. Include a “satisfaction guarantee” and people will be comfortable buying from you.

Of course you always have to be careful to value that trust. Don’t abuse people’s confidence by offering second rate goods or by hitting them with a newsletter once a week that’s just packed with stuff for sale. That will just tick people off and word of poor service spreads much faster than the good.

Which will do your scrapbooking business no good at all. Use scrapbooking freebies as a way in, then treat people as you would like to be treated and you’ll go from strength to strength.

To prove I practice what I preach, anyone who signs up for my free newsletter gets two valuable scrapbooking business reports that can be downloaded instantly. Current subscribers are also getting a free digital mask of the USA too, and a 50% discount off a full set of high resolution US state masks (with full commercial use license) which will be indispensable to any digital scrapbook business working nationwide.

Want a look? Just let me have your details over there top right…

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Marketing is just a word for getting your scrapbook business in front of people. The more people you can get your business in front of, the better your chances of making a sale, right?

Well, nearly right. I mean it’s no good marketing your scrapbook business to people looking for mufflers for a Chevy!

The point I’m trying to make here is that it’s targeted marketing that is most effective. If you’re selling finished scrapbooks, you have a different set of customers to those if you’re selling digital scrapbook elements, yes?

Now really there are just two ways of trying to attract those scrapbook customers. You pay for them, or you get them for free. Paying for them is any of the advertising you might do, whether that’s on or off-line. What you’re betting on (hoping for) is that you get more profit than the cost of the advertising. If you don’t, you loose money, and that ain’t the idea at all!

So getting free customers is obviously preferable. If someone comes to your scrapbook business and buys something, and it cost you nothing, that’s a pretty ideal situation, right?

Off-line you might try to do it through PR – like getting a story in the local press maybe. Online we can use a blog and we can use Article Marketing.

The principle of Article Marketing is that you submit short informative articles to relevant websites (there are many to choose from). Those articles tend to do very well in the search engines. Individually they will certainly do better than a young website, often better than a blog for a short time.

Inevitably some of the people who visit those articles will also visit your site… and voila! Free visitors! Now all you’ve got to do is have a strong enough offer to convert some of those visitors into customers.

As you can see, it’s a powerful principle to use in your scrapbook business.

Obviously there’s a bit more to it than that and doing it right is a bit of an art, which brings me to a very special offer from my friend Bob Beacham over at Sellingcraftsonline.com

Bob is an acknowledged expert at Article Marketing and is the originator of Blog Power Posting, which is closely related and another very powerful business tool. Bob has written two ebooks which he is currently offering at a quite ridiculously low price – under ten bucks the pair – which I would thoroughly recommend you get a copy of before he puts the price back up. Full details here.

Under $10.00 to bring dozens, possibly hundreds of potential new customers to your scrapbooking business? Got to be a good deal.

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Do you know the old saying among real estate agents? There are three things that are important to the value of your property and they are location, location and location. The same is true of your online scrapbook business except the three secrets to success are traffic, traffic and traffic!

Traffic – the people who visit your blog or website – is obviously the lifeblood of your online business. You might make the best scrapbooks the world has ever seen, you might design fabulous digital scrapbooking elements, you might provide the best scrapbook supplies at the cheapest prices. Without people visiting your site – what we call “traffic” – all you have is a lot of stuff…

…and no income.

So how do you get that all important traffic?

There are two main approaches, pay for it or get it for free. Paying for it is easy and lots of people will be more than happy to separate you from your money while offering you the earth. Some paid-for traffic tactics can be very successful and, as you can probably guess, some of them are an expensive waste of time.

The trouble with “free” is it’s often associated with low value. Free traffic for your online scrapbook business might be looked at as kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel. A lot of effort for very little reward.

Well in some cases that’s true, but pro bloggers and article marketers will tell you a whole different story.

There is a particular blogging tactic called “Blog Power Posting” that has proven to be highly effective at drawing not only plenty of traffic, but traffic that is highly qualified too. People who we already know are interested in your scrapbook business when they arrive at your site. Affiliate marketing itself can be used for the same purpose, or for driving targeted traffic towards traditional websites.

These are not new internet buzz-words that are only going to work for the next five minutes, they are proven business-building techniques that top marketers in many industries have been taking advantage of for some time.

Whatever your particular kind of online scrapbook business, a blog and the techniques of blog power posting can radically improve your traffic. Affiliate marketing is closely related and can produce equally impressive results if you have a traditional scrapbooking website.

If you want further information on these tactics there’s plenty to be found online. I have two favorite ebooks on the subject by the guy who originally coined the phrase “Blog Power Posting” so you can’t get much better recommendation than that! They’re on special offer as I write this but I don’t know for how much longer. Full details here.

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Building a successful home scrapbooking business, like any other business, is to some extent a numbers game.

If you can get your scrapbooking business in front of more people you stand a better chance of making a sale, right? Stands to reason.

But testing the best method of doing that can be expensive online. Pay per click advertising can be very effective but there are dozens of books about the subject and a lot to learn. Quite frankly, it’s not what most scrapbookers want to be spending their time doing.

They’d rather be making scrapbooks!

The other popular method with people new to building a scrapbook business on the internet is paying someone to submit to lots of different sites or search engines. I’m sorry if you’ve gone down that route and I’m sure you now know what a waste of time that is. There are only three places that you really need to submit your site Google, Yahoo and MSN (maybe Bing now) and you can do that yourself for free.

To attract more people to your scrapbooking I recommend two things. If you’ve been here a while you’ll know that blogging is one of them. There’s already stuff here about blogs so I won’t go into that now (if you need one-to-one help check here)

The second is article marketing.

1. You’ll like it because it’s free,
2. It’s easy because you’re just telling people about the stuff you love,
3. It’s powerful because the search engines love the article sites and as a consequence your articles will shoot up the ranking.
4. So more people see your scrapbooking offers and you make more money!

Well that can’t be right, can it? I mean if that was true, everyone would be doing it wouldn’t they?

Well don’t ask me why they’re not, but they’re not! The upshot is that if you do it, you can expect to get great results.

In a nutshell, you write an article. A bit like a blog post. You then submit it to an article directory. They publish it and it appears in Google (or whoever), usually within a few days. At the bottom of the article is a link to your scrapbooking blog or website. Some of the people reading that article will click your link and visit you. Publish one article, a few people will visit. Publish twenty articles and it’s likely that hundreds of new potential customers will come to your site.

They will. Believe me, this works. I never, ever spend money on advertising. Every visitor to this blog has come either through a link from another blog or via article marketing. I have another blog that I’ve started recently that’s had several hundred new visitors in the last couple of weeks from a few articles I wrote.

How would you like hundreds of new customers for no cost?

Anyone can – and should – do this to increase exposure for their scrapbooking business online. I mean why wouldn’t you? It’s free!

Well actually I’m going to suggest it’ll cost you a whole huge $7.00 – because that’s what you need to pay for this ebook, The Art of Article Marketing which details exactly how to do it. Websites to use, screen shots so submission is a piece of cake, everything.

This is the way I do it, what more can I say?

You don’t need to buy it, you can probably find everything you need to know by searching online. Should only take you a couple of weeks. Or you could do it the easy way After all, isn’t it worth $7.oo to get hundreds of potential customers to look at your crafts? Order here now for immediate download. You could be using these great tactics in your scrapbooking business in five minutes!

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If you’re thinking about starting your own home scrapbook business, it will become part of an industry currently worth $1.4 billion per year in the US alone. What does that mean to you? Well if you want to make a substantial income working from home it helps to be selling something that people want!

Which might seem like an overly obvious statement but it’s something a lot of people don’t consider. Lots of people start a home-based business based on doing what they love. You might wonder what’s wrong with that? It might be exactly what you intend to do.

Well on the one hand, it’s great to be able to do what you love and get payed for it. The challenge is that what a lot of craft people and artists fail to do is research whether there is actually a market out there for what they make. In the field of “pure art” you might say “well I’m just going to paint it because I must” and hope someone will buy it. In the real world that most of us live in, we need to put bread on the table, don’t we!

So your plan for a home scrapbook business can at least tick one very important box. There’s definitely a market for it!

Now of course a big chunk of that scrapbook market is people doing their own scrapbooking. No doubt about it. But even if only 10% is people running scrapbook businesses then that still represents $140 million dollars per annum. How many scrapbook businesses do you suppose there are out there? A thousand? If there were a thousand professional scrapbookers in the USA then we’re estimating that they’re making $140,000 a year each. Not bad money!

Now I have no way of calculating the actual number of people who scrapbook full-time but even if we double that number, which seems a bit high to me, we still get you earning $70,000 a year from your own home scrapbooking business. Now let’s be honest, it’ll take some work. It’ll also take a while to build to that level. This isn’t “get-rich-quick” or any of that nonsense, this is about building a solid, sustainable home-based business. You can see what’s possible though, what’s achievable if you put your mind to it.

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Number one priority for your home scrapbook business has to be customers, right? You might be a great designer, you might have lots of scrapbook supplies, great ideas, etc., but without customers all you’ve got is a hobby!

The good news is that you have certain advantages over a lot of traditional business models. For a start, many business people are constantly chasing new customers. With your scrapbooking business there’s the opportunity to sell more than one scrapbook to the same client. Births, baby’s first year, weddings and other special events are all great scrapbook subjects.

Another advantage is that you sell something people will love and cherish. It’s not a box of soap powder or an auto part, a scrapbook can become a family heirloom. What’s more, people are likely to show it to friends and family, some of whom almost certainly want their own scrapbooks. There is no better way to do business than to be recommended by a third party!

What about a few other avenues?

How about a scrapbook party? Party plan has always been popular. This could be an opportunity for people to see your work, or perhaps you could offer scrapbooking classes? By diversifying your business like this you can build a consist income. If you only have few scrapbooks to make you always have a steady stream of students.

Moving on from the teaching theme, could you offer scrapbooking classes anywhere else locally? Where I am they have all kind of evening classes people can attend and the organizers are always looking for more teachers. There’s not just the class income, anything that spreads your name is a good idea!

Do you have other crafting friends? Is there something you could work on together to help promote each other? What about attending a craft fair? You can not only display a couple of examples of your scrapbooks but you can take some supplies and work while you’re there. People would much rather see you doing your craft than a static display. They’ll ask questions, which is a great way to explain what you do. Make sure you’ve got some business cards with you!

Beyond that, the internet (and blogging in particular) offer enormous opportunities to get your home scrapbook business better known, particularly if you’re doing digital scrapbooking which doesn’t have the distance limitations for some that traditional scrapbooking has.

Other opportunities to expand your home scrapbook business will occur to you if you just keep it on your mind. I don’t know why but we tend to find the things we’re actively looking for. Make sure you keep a notebook handy though – we have a tendency to forget ideas just as quickly if we don’t write them down!

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Hi there!

Welcome to the scrapbooking business blog. If you like the idea of working from home and making a living from your scrapbooking, this is the place.

I’ll start by saying I’ve got nothing to sell you! The idea is that I’ll research scrapbooking supplies, scrapbook techniques and people who can help you starting a scrapbooking business and I’ll let you know about them here

Some of these people might want you to invest a few dollars to build your scrapbook business but then you’d expect to have to do that anyway, right?

If you’ve got any comments or questions, please add them to the relevant post. I’ll be checking by often so you shouldn’t have to wait long for an answer!

Until next time, enjoy your scrapping!
Bob

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