(One Hour Craft, the book.  Available on amazon.co.uk)

Have you been wishing to start a craft blog but need a little push in the right direction? 

So, why start a craft blog?  There are a million reasons for writing a craft blog.  Some are:

• To connect with other crafters.  Maybe you have been lurking around the net for a while, reading all the craft blogs you find and loving them.  Why not make the big jump and start your own?  Once you start craft blogging you join a huge network of people who are likeminded and who have alll sorts of wisdom and ideas and can help convert your passion into ta die-hard addiction .
• To catalog your creations.  Craft blogging is an amazing way of keeping track of everything you make.  I suggest taking a good photo of each one of your marvellous creations and putting it on your blog (if only I took my own advice) so that, even if you give them away or sell them, they are never lost!
• To help sell your stuff.  If you are thinking of an on-line business or are already selling on Etsy, a craft blog is an excellent marketing tool.  You can easily build a profile and a brand name with a good craft blog, that will allow others to have some inside knowledge of your wares.
• To get a book deal.  Starting a blog is now the best way to become a published author.  After having my blog for three months and having a daily readership of between 4,000 and 10,000 I decided to start applying for book deals.  Before I had time to start, I had received two offers of book deals.  I accepted the best offer, was paid a very nice amount of development money and a forward.  It makes sense that a blog is an easier way to get a book deal.  It is like having an on-line portfolio where a publisher can see the quality of your design, can learn a lot about you, and be impressed by your writing style.
• Just for fun! I reckon this is the best reason of all.  Running a craft blog is loads of fun.  It sends you down a new path, an adventure.  You will make loads of new friends, gain new opportunities, get involved in swaps, etc.  The great thing about starting a craft blog is that it doesn’t matter about your age, your weight, what you look like.  All that matters is that you are passionate about making stuff!

How to Start a Craft Blog

1. Choose a blogging site to start your blog.  Before I started onehourcraft.com, I had a site at wordpress.com.  They are fantastic.  I recommend you start with them.  Go to http://www.wordpress.com.  When you are there, follow the very easy steps to set up your blog.  It will literally take you ten minutes to start it!  Here’s a good video tutorial to watch on youtube before starting your blog!
2. Choose a great blog name.  Many, many names are already taken.  There are millions of craft blogs, so play around with selecting a name that is not taken.  Make it snappy and memorable or cute and fun.  Remember your blog name is the first thing people read, so make  it good!
3. Images.  Including photos is a great idea for a craft blog since all artists and crafters are visual people.  Take some good photos of your craft.  Photos of something you are making can be the best material for your posts.  Make sure that your photos are taken in good light.  You will then need to upload your photos to your computer and resize them.  Photos for the Net are at a low resolution.  You can resize your photos using Picknick.  You can either upload your photos straight to your blog or you can upload them to flickr (a great photo-sharing sight.  From Flickr you can send the photos to your blog.
4. Write now.  Now we get to the most important point – your written content.  I suggest writing about your crafting endeavours to begin with.  Make sure that your style is easy to read and that you are approachable and upbeat.  I have noticed that blogging tends to attract quite quirky people with great senses of humour.  Crazyauntpurl is one of my fave reads.  Your writing is the thing which will coax your readers to return again and again.   I have found that the posts that attract the most readers are either the inspirational posts or the informative ones.  The tutorials I post are read a lot!  But be warned these posts can take a LOT of time too!
5. Attracting readers.  There are loads of ways to attract readers to your blogs.  Here are some of my tried and tested ones:  organise a craft swap, get to know other craft bloggers and leave comments on their sites, get other people to link to you (good content will mean that you don’t have to ask), offer free giveaways like things you have made and offer photos tutorials on different crafts.  Above all, the way to keep people coming back is to provide good content that is easy to read and to post regularly.  I find that if I take a blogging break it always takes a few weeks to get my readership up to what it was again.  Also when I take long breaks, people tend to stop commenting.

Answers to Common Questions

• How long does it take to set up a blog?  Setting up takes ten minutes, maintaining it is a LOT more time consuming.  At first I spent about 15+ hours a week maintaining my site.  Now I don’t have that time.  I find that a good shorter post takes me about an hour from woe to go.  A longer post with more links like this one takes about 2 – 3 hours.  Be warned the Net is addictive and there is nothing worse than your whole life being taken over by it.  This is not your life, just as an itty bitty part of it, so make sure it doesn’t swallow you whole.
• Do you have to know HTML?  Not if you start a blog with Wordpress.  I have taught myself HTML along the way but only when I started this site.  You don’t need any programming knowledge at all.  Yay!
• Will my privacy be violated?  What you share is up to you!  I love having a craft blog, because it gives my blog an angle.  I can share about craft, yet not really tell too much about my personal life.  I can share a lot of myself but I also manage to keep all the private bits private.  And that’s the way I like it. To have to share what I ate for breakfast would bore me to tears (let alone my readers).
• Are there weirdos stalking around the Net?  Yes.  There are some very strange people.  But it’s like life.  There is a bell curve of normality in any population.  You will always find a few who are completely out of the norm and most who are fairly normal.   I have had a lot of really abusive comments and the more high profile your blog becomes, the more of these you will have to cope with.  All I can say is that you can filter out all the comments which are not to your liking.  The first time I had someone who sent me a long string of abuse, over a month, I felt intimidated and pulled back from blogging.  Now, I ignore it.  I just delete abusive emails and comments and feel sorry for those people who send them.  Really who has the time to send these anyway?  That said, I have had thousands of encouraging and wonderful comments and few bad comments really!  I find that crafty people tend to be happy people and these are the people who will mainly be reading your blog .
• How often should I post?  Most people post two or three times a week.  Some post every day.  That is a very big time commitment and I have found it is mainly people who are making money on the Net or doing some serious marketing via the Net.  I have mostly posted a few times a week and have managed to keep a large readership doing this.
• Is there a formula for success?  The success of you blog will be defined by your goals and these are different for each person.  And YES, the formula for success in anything is to passionately love what you are doing.  I love making things.  I go to bed at night thinking about making stuff and wake up in the morning thinking the same.  It is my life!

Good luck with your blogs. 

Have I forgotten anything?

Mia xxx

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 3:40 am and is filed under Chatter, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.