I Get It.
Selling your crochet was supposed to be easy and a great excuse to spend more time crocheting. But it’s turned into a frustrating side hustle where you’re spending so much time trying to sell what you’ve made at a fair price and being undercut by other crocheters and it seems no one wants to or can pay proper prices.
All that time and effort you’ve poured into this, it’s exhausting and you feel totally underappreciated.
I get it. I was once in your shoes and many other crochet sellers feel this way too.
You’re doing everything that all the marketing advice is telling you:
- Raise your prices
- Get visible
- Sell more
But it’s not working.
You raise your prices to make selling your crochet worth all that time and effort, but then no one buys and everyone else is out competing you on price.
You get more visible but just spend more time on social media and sending newsletters to still get no sales because you’re still not competitive on price.
Just make more sales doesn’t work because how can it when it’s so difficult to make any sales at all unless you lower your prices?
And so the cycle goes back around. You can make sales if you accept making a very small profit. You can’t raise prices without losing sales. What’s the point in making more sales if you’re not making enough money to make all that time and effort worth it?
Traditional marketing advice just doesn’t work for crocheters and that’s the missing piece of advice you’ve been looking for.
So the next question is, how can you make this work?
I remember the first time that I realised that customers didn’t necessarily value my crochet for the handmade, skilled craft that it is.
I had spent days working on an order and then got it posted out. I didn’t hear anything from the customer so assumed all was well. That is until the parcel was returned in the post.
No one had been home when it was delivered, so it was taken to the post office to await collection. It was there for 2 weeks, but no one bothered to turn up or arrange a new delivery date. So then it got returned to sender as is standard for uncollected parcels.
It was heartbreaking that my crochet was seen as just another online order, just like some mass produced thing off Amazon.
That’s where my feelings towards my business and my realisation that something wasn’t quite working started to kick in.
It took a few weeks for my thoughts to really hit home and cut through that determination to make this business work no matter what.
But eventually I had to stop selling what I made. I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was too stressful, too exhausting.
So the question became, now what? I was shutting a door on selling the crochet that I made, but did that really mean the end of my crochet business dreams?
I had been following a few online business coaches for a while hoping for ideas to boost my sales. One of the things they kept talking about was recurring income.
I had dismissed all that talk because I had a physical product business, but now I took notice. That led me to selling crochet patterns instead.
I’ve never looked back. I wish I’d listened to that message long before and really looked into recurring revenue because it provided me with exactly what I needed.
What is recurring income?
Recurring revenue is where you do the work once and then earn from that work on repeat for years to come.
So for a crochet pattern, you create a PDF and then sell that PDF over and over again without ever having to write the pattern out from scratch again.
Other examples include YouTube videos where you can earn money from ads or affiliate links every time that video is viewed. Memberships where you provide content to your members as a group, but everyone pays you for delivering that content once.
There are many more examples besides these, but they all work the same way. Do the work once, get paid many times over for that one piece of work.
At first glance recurring income might sound like it’s for other people or that it’s going to be complicated to do. But it’s not.
Anyone can make this happen.
You don’t have to be shouting all over the internet like an influencer either. You can promote your crochet recurring income products in the same way you do your physical products. Let your crochet do the talking.
You don’t have to appear on camera, you don’t have to get deeply personal. You can do this your way, that suits your personality.
Am I saying that selling the crochet that you make can’t work for anyone? No, there are a few circumstances where it can work. If you are happy making a bit of extra cash from your crochet as a side hustle, then carry on doing just that. As long as you are happy with the money you’re making then you’re doing great!
But if you want to make a living from your crochet, then the 3 ways that selling what you make can work are as:
- Luxury Brand
- Collectors Items
- An Artist
Beyond these 3 options, recurring income is the only path forward, and it’s the least expensive and least time consuming option too.
Crochet Business School is here to help you no matter what path you choose for your crochet business.
Free Download
If you’re ready to start exploring recurring income and how you can bring that into your crochet business, then download my free PDF here on how you can Map Your Path and create the crochet business that both gives you the profit you need and works in the best way for you.
1:1 Support
If you need more personal support then you can subscribe to Kelly On Call, my private Voxer chat where we can talk through what you need your crochet business to do and I can help you set up and make the decisions you need to get you there.
WHO IS BEHIND CROCHET BUSINESS SCHOOL
I’m Kelly Thomas, crochet pattern designer, blogger, curiosity follower.
I’ve explored as many ways to make money from my crochet as I could. Because I was curious and wanted to discover what was truly right for me.
After all that wasted time and effort sunk into trying to sell what I made, I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. So I explored what was possible, took the time to see how it could work before settling on spending most of my effort writing crochet patterns.
I say most, because there is no reason to settle with just one way. You can use several methods alongside each other that complement your main business beautifully.
