The idea of starting a digital crochet business is scary. You fear that you don’t know enough, that the tech will be hard to learn and people like you just don’t do this sort of thing. Well, all of that is absolutely not true and I’m going to prove it to you.
If you prefer to listen, you can find the podcast here
Look At How Far You’ve Already Come
Cast your mind back to when you first got the idea of selling your crochet. What did you know then about selling stuff? I’m guessing not a lot. You threw yourself in without knowing how deep you would be getting into the world of business. Did you even think of yourself as having a crochet business?
Yet you carried on. You learned how to set up social media accounts, learned what kind of content to post. You learned about pricing and how to photograph your crochet. You learned how newsletters worked and started to grow an email list. You became a sales person, content creator, social media manager and an email marketer all rolled into one – oh, and you crocheted too.
You learned to do all of those things without thinking twice about it. And I bet you just did it because all the other creative business owners you saw in your social media feed were doing all of those things and making it look easy.
When you take your crochet business digital, you still need all of these skills. You will be using everything you already learned in the next chapter of your crochet business. That leaves not a lot left to learn.
It’s amazing how quickly you went from trying to figure out how to sell your crochet to having a daily routine to promote your crochet. Do you even remember the point when that happened?
I don’t know about you, but learning how to sell my crochet in better ways and more effectively came as second nature. It just became part of the routine and once learned it just got added to my repertoire of selling skills. No fanfare, no celebration at another new trick learned, just onto the next thing to learn and keep on selling my crochet.
It gets to the point where you don’t even register that you have learned something new, it’s just something you do now. Which means that you don’t even register that you are gaining new skills.
It’s Not A Knowledge Problem. It’s A Belief Problem.
But why do you believe that you can’t create a digital crochet business?
Humans are social beings. We like to stay within groups that have the same interests, have something in common. So if you’re doing something different to everyone else in your circle, that feels uncomfortable. You’re stepping outside the norm and that makes us feels that it’s wrong somehow.
But if no one ever tries anything new, how will anyone ever discover the thing that will change their lives for the better? So you may be the first, but you won’t be the last.
What’s really stopping you from taking the leap into turning your crochet into a digital business is not knowledge. It’s belief.
Your confidence and self belief are holding you back. You fear that you can’t, you fear that you’re not capable, you fear that you simply won’t be as good as everyone else out there who have taken that leap already.
This was never a problem of how much you know. It’s how much you trust yourself.
But look at how far you’ve come already. Look at how much you’ve learned and achieved. You are clearly capable when you put your mind to it, you obviously have no issues learning what you need to learn. You’ve proved this with your crochet business as it is now.
So let’s get past this thought of “I could never do that”, give yourself credit for what you’ve already built and remind yourself what amazing things you’ve achieved already and start walking into your new chapter.
You Don’t Have To Feel Ready To Start
It’s easy to reason that you’ll start when you’re ready. But what does being ready really mean? When life gets quieter? When you’ve done some more research? When you find the perfect course to guide you step by step through the process?
None of this will ever make you ready. Life never gets quieter, there’s always something else you can research, there will always be a reason that the course that you find isn’t good enough — price, the timing, the content isn’t quite right. These reasons to wait are really excuses. They’re really you saying that you don’t have faith in yourself to work it out as you go along.
The only way to beat this problem is to just do it. Just start — the fear is real but it’s not a reason to wait. Stepping into a whole new world is scary, it can be overwhelming and it’s also filled with new opportunity and it’s where your dream of making a living from your crochet lies.
When I started my crochet pattern business I was making it up as I went. I knew I needed social media, I knew I needed to show off my crochet. I just started, there was no plan, I just created a Facebook page and started posting about my first very simple patterns and kept talking about them.
I had 2 patterns – a ripple blanket and a shower puff. I talked about them endlessly both on my own page and in other Facebook groups. My audience slowly built and just like in my first crochet business where I sold what I made, I learned as I went. But I only needed to learn what was specific to writing crochet patterns. I already knew how to sell on social media, so it wasn’t the uphill struggle that I had feared.
Your First Step
So what is that first step that you need to take? Let’s start with a list. What does your new crochet business need? A social media page, a newsletter, a list of social media content to create. Pick one of these and get started. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to exist. Taking the first step makes it easier to take the second step, and if you’ve taken a second step it would be silly not to take a third.
The biggest block to any new venture is often that scary first step which often feels like a leap of faith. And it is a leap of faith – faith in yourself and how much you believe that you are capable of succeeding.
Take that first step. The Map Your Path workbook is here to help you through this whole process and is free to download here.
I’m Kelly Thomas, crochet business owner, pattern writer, blogger and coach. I started my crochet business selling what I make and made all the mistakes along the way. Let me show you what I learned so you don’t make the same errors.
You can listen to the podcast episode that goes with this article here. It is a bit different to what you’ve just read, but the message is the same.
You can check out the rest of my podcast here to discover more about how to turn your crochet into a successful business.
I also have this free workbook that you can download to Map Your Path and work out what your next step in your crochet business is.
