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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If you signed up for my free newsletter you’ll already have receive Dawn’s free ebook on starting a scrapbook business so you’ll know this one is well worth a look.

It’s also remarkable value.

The book is, in effect, the first eight lessons of her personal coaching course. That course itself is an unbeatable way to start and build your scrapbooking business but during what are difficult times for many, the monthly fee is perhaps a bit of a stretch.

Hence this book, which for eight scrapbooking business lessons actually adds up to the price of less than two. Got to be worth a closer look, don’t you think? What’s more, everyone who buys a copy will also receive a free personal email consultations with Dawn for a full 30 days – usually that costs $60.00 on it’s own! Full details here.

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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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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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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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Sometimes though, only a printed scrapbook will do. It’s also an important consideration if you are doing hybrid scrapbooking. You need to get a decent print out before adding extra “real” embellishments.

Printers suitable for printing digital scrapbook pages are available but they’re not cheap! You need to be producing a lot of pages to justify the outlay. Fortunately there are cost-effective alternatives and one such is Viovio.

Now Viovio are not the only company capable of printing digital scrapbooks. There are several large-format printers out there. However, Viovio are the only one I know of that have a dedicated section for digital scrapbookers.

They have a variety of digital scrapbook page sizes from 3.5 inch square mini-scrapbooks up to the 12 inch square format which is probably the scrapbooking standard. You can also have soft or hard cover.

There’s a huge amount of information at the site whether you’re new to making digital scrapbooking pages or more experienced. There are useful guides to walk you through the technical aspects and simplify the process.

With prices starting at only $4.99 for a soft cover and then 25 cents a page, Viovio offer a complete digital scrapbook printing service that you can customize precisely to your own requirements. They’re the best I’ve found but you’ll probably want to check them out for yourself and compare prices. You can find full details here.

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So I’m going to create a series of reports designed to help you in each and every aspect of building your own successful digital scrapbooking business.

But why digital scrapbooking in particular and not scrapbook business in general?

Well if you want to run a traditional scrapbooking business, the market is already pretty well covered. Dawn Segall’s “ScrapVentures” course is excellent and if you feel that’s not quite what you’re looking for, Richard Mann’s book, “Scrapbooking – A Profitable Business”, is a great alternative for those with a lower initial budget.

Digital scrapbooking is a bit different though, and although there are plenty of tutorials out there about how to use digital scrapbooking software, there’s little or no good, in-depth business advice.

Hence the new series of ebooks dedicated to making it fast and easy for you to get started, and then to help you build your success to whatever level you want.

So if you’ve got a burning question or two, now’s the time to ask. What are the things that you’d like help with? Which aspects of putting a business together are you struggling with?Are you concerned about starting your own blog or website?

Just leave a comment and I’ll make sure your question is answered in the upcoming fact files.

I thought it would be a bit of a laugh to call them “Scrap Reports”. The content, of course, will be anything but!

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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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Digital scrapbook freebies often take the form of templates, backgrounds, embellishments or brushes – things which are used for creating digital scrapbooks – but that’s only part of the story.

What about a sample digital scrapbook as a freebie? Something people can download. Use it to show off your abilities as a scrapbook designer. Very reassuring for your potential client if they’re new to the whole digital and downloading thing.

Set it up so you ask for their email (so you can send them a copy) and you’ve got an excuse to get back to them and add them to your mailing list. A mailing list can be can be an extremely valuable asset and it’s remarkably cheap to have a specialist company manage this for you (I use GetResponse).

Other digital scrapbook freebies? Well what about the aforementioned templates, backgrounds and such. Who said your digital scrapbooking business had to be selling finished scrapbooks? What about designing and selling digital scrapbook supplies?

If you’re going to do that, what better way to show off your skills and your products than with a freebie? Again, put in place a means of gathering visitor details and you’ve got another potentially very profitable business.

Do you like to share your scrapbook knowledge? What about teaching via an online course? A bit more complicated to set up maybe, but very do-able. Your freebie here could be the first lesson. This removes any fear of what people will get for their money.

The clever way to set up your scrapbook tuition is via automated payments (it’s called “continuity” in marketing parlance). This way your “student” has to actively cancel and so is actually more likely to continue. Emphasize the “first lesson free, cancel any time” and watch the money roll in!

Don’t want the work involved in managing a scrapbooking course? OK, write it as an ebook. Once the initial writing is done you can self publish your scrapbooking masterpiece and then it’s virtually a hands-free business. You really will earn money while you sleep! There’s an excellent book available that teaches all the ins and outs of self publishing called “Complete Craft Book Publishing“, I highly recommend it if you’re thinking of looking at that route.

I only have one proviso when you’re creating your digital scrapbook freebie. Make sure it’s high quality. Don’t be tempted to take short cuts because it’s being given away. Remember it’s a reflection on your business and do the very best you can with it.

Your digital scrapbooking business can take on any one, or perhaps a combination of the above disciplines. Write a scrapbooking ebook, follow it up with the advanced tuition. Write an ebook on how to use Adobe Photoshop Elements to create digital scrapbook supplies. The possibilities are almost endless and everyone is hooked by a good freebie!

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That’s about how long it will take you to read this piece – possibly less – and in a nutshell it contains everything you need to know to take your scrapbook business to any level you like.

Oh, and it’ll cost you less than fifty dollars to start.

Ready?

OK, first thing you’re going to need is to get yourself on the internet. Go get a proper dot com domain name so you look like a pro. Under ten dollars for a whole year. I use Namecheap.com

Next you need some hosting for a blog or website. Get professional hosting, not free. This is a digital scrapbooking business you’re running – emphasis on the word business. You don’t want to look like an amateur. Depending on the deal this can cost you between six and nine dollars a month. I use Hostgator, have done for years, what more can I say.

I’d recommend a blog rather than a traditional website and I’d recommend Wordpress. It gets in the search engines quicker, it’s easier to run and more customer friendly. Wordpress is free and has a huge number of themes so you can customize its appearance and plug-ins to extend it’s abilities. It can do virtually anything your scrapbook business needs. If you get hosting with Hostgator it’s a simple install – just a couple of clicks.

If you don’t have Word or a page-layout program get a copy of OpenOffice (free) so you can create sample digital scrapbooks. Save them as PDF format so that you can offer them as free downloads from your blog.

Now subscribe to a mailing list / autoresponder management service so that you can collect names and email addresses of visitors to your blog. I use GetResponse. This is absolutely vital and can dramatically increase your income. Your free digital scrapbook download should be offered in exchange for their details. This will cost you just under twenty dollars a month and will repay that investment over and over again.

Depending on your precise scrapbooking business model, find a couple of affiliate programs that you can promote alongside your own business for additional income. Any reputable scrapbook affiliate program will be free to join.

Finally promote your  digital scrapbooking business via your blog posts and article marketing. Both free and extremely effective.

Is our five minutes up?

OK, you might think this article is a bit tongue in cheek, and clearly there’s a lot more flesh to put on these bones, but the above really is all you need to create the framework for your own digital scrapbooking business. Building it from part-time pennies to substantial full-time money is just a question of putting in a bit of effort. Over the next few weeks I’ll be expanding on each element to give you the bigger picture, and I would be more than happy to answer any questions you have.

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