Many crafters jump in head first when starting a web based craft business. Unfortunately, many of them will fail due to lack of planning. Planning your craft business is a very important step in your success as a craft entrepreneur. There are several important aspects of the development of your online craft business that you should understand before you actually create your website.
Define your goals – It is important to understand what your goals are so that you can understand what you need to proceed with your craft business. Without an understanding of what your goals are for your craft business, you may find yourself in a position of having wasted time developing business ideas you don’t need and missing key elements that you do need.
More...
Find your niche – The world wide web has grown to enormous proportions. There are countless websites out there and odds are a great number of them are devoted to the same craft idea that you have. If your craft idea is too broad, you will find yourself competing for business against a much greater number of other businesses than if you narrow your focus down a bit.
More...
Discover your target market – Regardless of what your craft product is, defining your potential customer is essential for effective marketing. Your time and money are valuable, so don’t waste it marketing to people who won’t be interested in your crafts.
Why is this important? If your scope is too broad people won’t find you. The Internet giants have already carved out their space in the marketplace. You need to find the gaps and carve those out for yourself. Since this small gap is your target market, you need to find out who is searching in that gap and find ways to advertise to them.
More...
Develop key words, phrases – What are key word and key phrases? When search engines crawl the web, they make note of certain words on your site that are relevant to your site. In their magical way, search engines ignore unimportant words like “it,” “the,” and the like. The remaining words paint a picture of what your site is about and the most relevant of those are your keywords.
More...
Purchase a domain name –
Domain names can be a very important tool for creating and maintaining traffic to your website. A domain that is easy to remember will keep people coming back.
So, what is a domain name? It’s what you type in your into your browser to visit a particular website. Here are a few of the more well known ones you may be familiar with: Amazon.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, Cashcrafters.com. Okay, so maybe that last one isn’t so well known. More...
Determine your software needs – Your software needs for your online craft business are influenced by your goal and goal solution. This is going to be one of the most difficult steps in planning your craft website, unless you already have a lot of familiarity with the software you need.
More...
Choose a web host – Once you know what functions you need for your website and what software you plan to run, it’s time to start looking for a web host. The software you plan to use may require server side features like access to a database or the ability to run certain programming languages.
When choosing a web host it is important to find out if their servers will be able to run the programs you plan to use. Hosting plans on various sites will usually show a list of the various features they offer. If you are unsure whether a particular host will work for your craft site, contact their support team and explain what you plan to do with your site. They should be able to tell you if they can support your applications.
More...
Build your site – Building your craft web site is something that you can do on your own computer using a web site building software program or depending on the applications you plan to use, you may build it directly on your server.
More...
Market your craft products to sell – If you plan to sell your crafts online, you will need to give some thought to how to market those crafts to sell. Many people think it is enough to market their websites and do nothing to market the actual craft product they are selling. They then wonder why it is that they get considerable traffic to their sites but those visits don't turn into sales. You don't have to fall into that trap.
More...
Drive traffic to your site – After your online craft business is completed you will need to find ways to build traffic. Your site can be found from searches that people that people perform through Google or other search engines or it can be found by following links on other sites.
More...
