Teaching Time: Blog Tips and Tactics to Improve your Craft Business

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Today marks the second of our regular series for our readers called "Teaching Time"! You have been asking... sending us countless questions about blogging, twittering, facebooking... etc. You want to know how to get started blogging, or how to use your blog to help your craft business. This new series is for you!

In our quest to bring you an expert viewpoint, today Craft Critique brings you Bob Beacham. Bob is a full-time crafter and craft business consultant. The Crafts Blog has all kinds of useful free information for craftspeople selling, or thinking about selling online. He also has runs the Small Business Blogging Course which will be of interest to those who want more in-depth, one-to-one help with starting blogging.




Blog tips and tactics to improve your craft business.

Written by Bob Beacham

Hello again. First can I say thanks to all the people who took the time to post a comment or ask a question last month. Seems quite a few of you are interested in the benefit a blog can bring to your craft business so let's hope I can help you in the right direction!

I'll just address one specific question before we get to this month's tips, and that's the one of content. Some people are worried they won't have enough to say to maintain a proper business-like blog. Really? Trust me, you do.

For one thing, there's absolutely no point posting five times a day when your blog is new. Two or three times a week is fine. More than four or five and to an extent you are "wasting" posts. You won't have huge numbers of visitors at the start, and once you've posted on a subject once it's not easy to revisit it. So gently does it. Rome - and a good craft blog - weren't built in a day!

As for what you're going to say, start with the foundations of your craft. Imagine that you are explaining what you do to a friend sat next to you. Type it up. That's a post. How many different things are there to explain to your friend before they'll understand in detail what you're doing? How many different tools and techniques can you describe? Each is a post.

When you've got through that lot, have a look at what others in your craft are saying and doing. Would you do it differently? That's more posts. What's your take on the latest developments in your craft? More posts... Not got enough to say? I doubt it. ;-)

You know sometimes short answers turn out to be not as short as you think! Let's get on to what I wanted to cover today. As it turns out, that question ties in quite well.

I wanted to look at posts and pages, because they two are different beasts, and it's important not to confuse them.

A post is the usual article you write. Almost always these are in date order and will drop down your blog, eventually to disappear into the archives. Down at the bottom of most blogs you'll see a link, along the lines of "older posts..." and often in the sidebar you'll see archives... February 2009, March 2009... sometimes going back years.

The trouble is, sometimes you have something important you want to say and you don't want it to fade away. You could argue that people will search through the archives, but frequently they won't. If you want as many people as possible to see this particular item you don't want to leave it to chance.

There are ways to keep a post prominent but usually a page is better. A page behaves pretty much like a traditional website page. You write it like you would write a post, but once you're done and you publish it, it's fairly permanent. I don't mean you can't alter it, you can edit it as much as you like. What I mean is it won't appear in the usual run of posts, so it won't eventually disappear. Instead it will have a separate heading or title bar somewhere obvious near the top of your screen. Just like normal website navigation, people will click it and go to that page.

So why would you use a page, not a post? Well you might be running an online store from your blog. Wouldn't be much use if that disappeared, would it! You might be offering a craft ebook. You might want a contact form (they tend to get you less spam than giving someone your email directly). One common use for individual crafters' blogs is an "About" page, which helps build trust in your visitors.

It's for anything that you want to be permanently - and easily - accessible.

Having said which, pages can also be invisible! I do like to keep you on your toes you know :-)

Why would anyone want an invisible page? Well let's say you have an ebook for sale and people get a download right after they've paid. You wouldn't want everyone to see the download page - they'd all get your ebook for nothing! Here your "hidden" page becomes that download area. Only available once you've got the cash.

Another example is if you have a membership blog. People get a certain amount of information free, but to access the premium content - let's say a set of knitting patterns or candle recipes each month - they need to become members. Again your "hidden" pages handle that for you.

They're for anything that you want people to have access to after they've performed some other kind of action. A lot of people give away a something useful in return for people signing up for their newsletter. Again a "hidden" page would be where your visitor went for delivery.

Of course not everybody needs pages at all. Our friends here at Craft Critique are a news blog and for them, pages aren't appropriate. Now should they ever start doing a range of t-shirts or mugs or something like that, and need an online ordering system, they would more than likely put up a page for it.

It's another example of the flexibility of blogging for your craft business. A craft blog can do all the things a traditional website can do and so much more. I hesitate to use the phrase "old-fashioned" when the internet is still so young, but I really feel that's the way normal sites are heading.

Next time we'll look at some of the peripherals. Adverts, links, little blinking boxes and the like.

Until then, have a great month!

Please send your crafty blog questions to Bob here at info@craftcritique.com or just leave a comment!