Sell your Products

A great way to help earn extra income is by selling products you create. Do you like to take photos, sell your prints, Like to knit or crochet,  sell some of your creations. There is a huge amount of things to make and create and a great market focused on selling hand crafted items.

Where to sell

There are many different sites to sell on. Etsy is a popular one for hand crafted items. They allow you to open an online store for 20 cents per listing along with a small percent of profit taken per sale. It is easy and secure to set up. There are other online stores around that are similar so check around to find what might be best for you. Another option is to create your own website. Some themes and plugins for WordPress do a great job of setting up an online store with minimal website building experience. One thing to think about is to create a simple landing page website and link it back to something like Etsy for your sales. This keeps everything nice and secure. Don’t forget to market yourself on social media as well. Some people even do fairly well just selling through Facebook.

Time is money

If you are creating a blanket to sell and it takes you 16 hours to make, and you sell it for $100 then remember that you are effectively working for $6.25 an hour just in production time alone. When you factor in the cost of material and any additional associated costs, you are working for even less. This is not necessarily a bad thing if it is a passion of yours and you like making blankets in your spare time anyways then this is just a way to make some money through your hobby. But if you really are looking to start selling to earn a satisfactory income, think about efficiency. Work out what your material costs are and your production time. Always think about how to make things efficient, keep working on increasing your efficiency until you are in the $40 an hour range. This can start to turn a hobby into a full blown extra income or even a primary income if you market your self right.

Marketing you product.

Understanding the power of Social Media is important to get your work noticed. Get a Facebook business page running for sure. I would recommend a Twitter account, along with an Instagram and Pinterest account if your products are very visual. The amount of information you post on varies by which Social Media account you are using. You can achieve great outreach on Facebook by posting  two or three good visual content posts per week.  You can be much more active on your Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest accounts but you need to be mindful of not being too intrusive.  You will also have to work on building up following for each of your Social Media accounts.

I am going to write a separate post about Social Media that will provide hints and tips for setting up integrated accounts that will help to successfully market your products.