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Posts Tagged ‘starting a scrapbooking business’

3 Online Scrapbook Business Secrets – Traffic, Traffic, Traffic.

September 4th, 2009 By Bob No comments

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 Craft Marketing Special Offeryou 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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Scrapbooking Business – Your Slice of $1.4 Billion?

May 22nd, 2009 By Bob No comments

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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Scrapbook Business Success – It’s about Beautiful Memories

May 5th, 2009 By Bob No comments

If you’re anything like me, before scrapbooking this will have been familiar…

You go to a family function (or party, or other event) and think you’ll never forget it. You take some photos. You gather a keepsake or two. You’re sure it’s a day you’ll always remember. Unfortunately the photos and bits and pieces get shoved in an old shoe box or a drawer out of the way. Some things get lost. The memory starts to fade…well it does at my age anyway!

The answer of course is to make a scrapbook. A scrapbook will preserve those memories as fresh as the day they happened.

But if you’re into scrapbooking you already know this!

The thing is, there are thousands of people out there who would love to make their own memorable scrapbooks but just don’t have the time or the skills. What they want is someone who runs their own scrapbooking business to do it for them!

That’s why the opportunity is so great and the market so big. And because each scrapbook you make is unique and your style is unique, there will always be room for you to build your scrapbooking business to whatever size you want to make it.

Just think about it for a moment. You can make a scrapbook of a birth, the first year or two of a child, a wedding, a club, a school, a building project. You name it, you can make a scrapbook about it. How many people would like their personal memories preserved like that?

The market is huge, tens of millions of dollars a year. You don’t need a very big slice of that market to make a very comfortable living indeed… doing something you love anyway!

You don’t need years of experience either. Don’t let that put you off for a moment. You’ll need some examples to show people, of course, but you can soon put a few together, or a collection of scrapbook sample pages.

There are many, many places to go for advice and inspiration. There are a multitude of websites, of course, and lots of useful books which will provide you with all the information you need: how to get started, how to find useful and free materials around the house, where to buy other scrapbooking goodies, how to arrange scrapbooking parties (you could get multiple orders on the same day doing one of those).

If you can draw, that’s one way you can add life to your scrapbooks. Same thing if you can sew. If not you can glue or staple, you can use sticky tape or self-adhesive materials. You can use your pc to print pictures and add titles with lively and attractive typefaces. You can stamp. Whatever type of craft or art you are already into can add something to each and every scrapbook you make – and doing so makes each one unique, a priceless personal treasure or a beautiful individual gift.

Starting a scrapbooking business doesn’t require a lot of space or dedicated tools either. You might want to get a few specialist bits and pieces eventually but most things, scissors, ruler, pencils, etc., you almost certainly have already. As for workspace, a table or even a patch of floor will do when you get started.

Any business takes work and dedication. Many require considerable investment. Fortunately starting your own scrapbooking business needn’t be expensive and doesn’t require a skill set that’s beyond your abilities. With the current huge popularity of scrapbooks there’s never been a better time to start!

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