Handmade fabrics – A guide to Small business owners

Handmade fabrics are a quality product that cannot be replicated in the chain stores.

If you are a small home business that makes handmade fabrics, then I have written a page of useful information that could help your business grow to the maximum potential that it rightly deserves.

Many times artists and crafters are highly talented in the design and production side of their businesses and deserve all the help that they can get from simple and small business tips that could take a smaller home business and turn it into an extremely profitable small business.

If you simply follow a few hints and tips and apply those tips using systems that are readily available there is a very high chance that you will never need to worry about the financial side of your life ever again.

Please feel free to visit the new page that I have just completed.

Click here - Handmade fabrics – some business ideas

Craft Ideas

Getting great craft ideas is almost as much fun as starting to do the actual craft.

What I probably need to point out quickly is that everybody looks for craft ideas for different reasons. Firstly let me cover the different searching types, and then I will show you some great places to get ideas and inspiration.

Existing crafter with existing tools

This person that is looking for craft ideas and has already got the tools and systems in place in their home to be able to do that specific craft – and is simply looking for inspiration for new projects.

Brand new crafters

Someone who is creative and wants to discover all the different ways that they could express their talents by starting up a small crafting idea from their home, either as a hobby or as a small home business.

Crafters looking to make money from their idea – or from new ideas

Crafters are known to want (or is it needJ) to try new and different crafting things and methods. One of the nicest things about doing crafting is that for everybody things turn out differently. If you sat down with a group of 10 crafters and you all made exactly the same thing, they would still all turn out differently.

Because of the crafter training systems that I offer I also realise that even those searching for profitable ideas need to be taught how to search for new and different crafting ideas.

Crafting types that are looking to make money from crafting

Now this is different, because when you are looking for a money making crafter idea you are really doing keyword research and niche research.

You would still need to follow the links that I have included below, but you would also need to do more intensive keyword research.

Places to get craft ideas and inspiration

• Blogger is often one of the best sources, as bloggers that are also crafters have found each other and link between their sites. Also blogger itself has a system where you can search for blogs within the blogger site. Nice!
• Searching Google and the other search engines, by putting in search terms like “how to make” – very often those tricks will bring up ideas that you had not thought of before.
• Search online for you keyword but add forums to the search string. For example crafter forums, beading forums or scrapbook forums and you should get a great source of websites that you could join and meet other like minded crafters.
• Go to Amazon or Google books and look through their stock to get ideas, and even buy some of their books to keep as a reference.

The beauty of putting this quick post up here on my blog is that if you have any great ideas that I have forgotten – I would love for you to leave a comment so that we can all get the benefit from your idea.

Work From Home businesses

All About Working from home

I have been working from home for 30 years, and while I have had some serious ups and downs, I have always gained the best of the work from home lifestyle.
Being a very creative person I attack life with a creative energy that is not always a good thing.

While I do not want to bore you with a long personal story of my life, I wanted to show you what I have been doing and how my path to this point in time unravelled.

This post is straight from my heart – written without revision and told like it is!

I designed kitchens and furniture for years, I was continually doing art and craft things like pottery courses etc while doing all the serious furniture design and decorating stuff.

Eventually the crafter in me took control and for 15 years I was making different products and selling them on the craft markets, flea markets and chopped and changed products whenever I got bored with whatever I was doing at the time. While this was great fun, a lot of the products were unprofitable and because they were time-users had to go, and I would move on to another new (and fun) idea.

However all along I have had a very serious love for marketing and this was probably 50% of the reason I was doing crafts on the flea markets. It became a challenge for me to take an idea that was never likely to make me a millionaire and at the very least earn a living from that specific idea. Some were hugely successful and others were complete disasters.

3 Years ago I took the step to become a real “full-time-artist”, and knowing that while I am very creative I will never be a Rembrandt, I was not worried and dived in to it head on.

It actually was working out really great and to be honest a little better than I expected, BUT a massive disaster was looming – The 2008 world financial collapse.

When That happened I had only just started to get very nice art commissions and was a little horrified to find all my new commissions canceled.

Now we get to where I am Today

I decided to go online to sell my art and the hammock chairs that I still manufactured and discovered a fantastic new world. I never realised until I started to do online marketing how brilliant the Internet really is.

You can literally target the exact people that you would like to communicate with and this realisation got me very excited.

It is now 27 months later – and I am still excited, still amazed and now have the skills to do almost anything that I like online. This is not an entirely good thing as I went a little berserk jumping from product to product, building websites and joining every forum, e mailing list, buying up every new training product and a whole lot more.

In between I have been earning enough to still be here, but had to try my best to stop being like an excited child at a toy sale.

I did a quick calculation and see that I have been sitting in front of this computer for something like 7200 hours. WOW! Now the really funny side to all this is that I wish that I had more time to be online.

About 5 months ago I decided to stop trying to grow all my websites at once and to target the niches that I knew very well, and was able to really help people achieve their dreams.

This meant that I had to focus on my past experience with the crafter industry, the marketing side of small home businesses and my new found skills as an online marketer. However I was still trying to do it all the long hard way and was not using laser targeted methods to go straight for the money. Now don’t get me wrong – I like money as much as the next guy – but it has never been a burning ambition of mine to just go for riches, I have always wanted to have fun along the way.

Having spent hundreds of thousands of rands (I am South African) learning almost everything that can be found out on how to do the different methods of Internet marketing I sat down and planned a few strategies that I thought would suite my interests.

The research that I applied led me to 3 or 4 systems that I knew would easily be  successful as a nice style of marketing and would stuill earn great money.

I did not plan to share any of these secrets with anyone. I had found out that those that do not know about Internet marketing at all think that it is some sort of scam or multi-level marketing system and would suddenly go deaf on me when I tried to explain to them that they had the opportunity to leave the nasty rat race and do exactly the things that they love and actually get great pay from the Internet.

Even worse – those that were already online and new quite a bit about how to use the Internet as a means to personal wealth and happiness – had become jaded and sick and tired of all the rubbish that was being thrown at them for silly amounts of money all day online. Personally I had also become very good at spotting the liars from the real deal.

What I now do for myself online

I still have my original hammock chair website running, perhaps partly for my ego, but also because my customers were very serious about doing bodily harm to me if I stopped making the hammocks. I also admit that it is great to occasionally get a day outside in the sun putting together a hammock or chair for someone.

I even still have some of the art that I produced back in 2008 – so occasionally someone who knows about it will come and buy a painting from me.

I have over 100 websites which I have already admitted is way too many, and plan to let most of those lapse when they come up for renewal. Some I am not sure about – like the 4 that I have on e mail marketing, because I know that the commissions from Aweber are residual, but I have not even asked you for your e mail address here. If you look at the banners that I have on the side of this website you will see that they do not even ask for your email address. My opinion is this – if you like what I offer, and want more you will come to me, I should not need to bribe you and continually harass you for your trust and subsequent business.

Having said that I am aware that the richest online marketers all have very large e mail lists and do get the bulk of their income from that e mailing list. In any training that I do, I probably will tell you that you need a good list or at the very least a well visited fan page on Face-book!

I do a lot of product creation and I have been doing more targeted marketing with methods like writing my own books for publication on Amazon and locally here in South Africa on Kalahari.

I also have a few selected clients that I do the SEO and social marketing for their websites and their businesses.

I have partnerships in websites and have at least 10 incomplete products at any time. I still love what I do and have an insatiable thirst for knowledge about how this all works online.

So why have I gone to all this trouble to write all this down?

I admit that I have a need to help people, I get a thrill from seeing someone that I have helped like no other thrill from all the things that I do. ( my wife says that it is an illness – LOL)

Mostly I find myself helping my friends and family that are either unhappy with what they do, or are unemployed and looking for something to keep them alive.

I decided only yesterday that I really should stop being sneaky about keeping my hard earned methods to myself, put them down in writing and offer them to a select few people that really want to do something online.

These methods are not brand new, nor unique, but they are ones that I know that if you sat down and did properly, without deviating and checking your e mails every ten minutes, you will make a nice living for yourself.

I often say that I wish I had known how to do this 2 years ago, but it wouldn’t have helped me then as I did not know how to do a lot of what I now will teach you how.

Now while this might seem like you have finally got to the sales pitch - it is not really true, as I do not actually have the time to spare to suddenly start to spend days on end training newcomers. So I have decided to limit the numbers, and limit the time that I spend doing the mentoring. Hell I have been doing it anyway – why not get a little back for the time and knowledge that I have learnt the hard way?

I have made a very quick banner and will add it here below this post, and went and put up a similar banner on one of my websites.

This offer is to you if you are serious about wanting to stop going about it the hard way and would like to know a couple of really targeted methods that will over time make you a very nice living.

I do not promise that you will start to earn a fortune within days, and to be honest it will still take you a few weeks before you see any return for your efforts at all.

So if you want to know more about this mentoring click on the banner below.

Please remember that I will still need to go and actually write the reports, but if you really are serious you can contact me directly and get yourself in line for when I get it all written down.

I expect to have it all ready by about the 20th of December 2010 at the latest.

I will put more details about what I plan to offer you on the actual page at my websiteMedic website.

Finally, for those of you who would prefer to find out all about internet marketing the free way, I have a lot of e books and will keep adding them to the same website, so you are welcome to go and see what those are all about.

Please read the PS below this banner – Just for a laugh!

Hi, Welcome to my PS section.

After telling you at length about how I know how to do online marketing I thought that I would point out a few major things that I know that I should have done to this post for it to get the best results – and then why I did not do it at all – even after knowing that it would make me more money.

1. My banner or picture is supposed to be “above the fold” as visitors are more likely to be attracted to a picture of banner to keep their interest.

2. I have not bothered to do any contextual linking at all in the entire post. It is known that Google and the other search engine spiders will give a stronger back-link to a contextual link in a post rather than one at the end of a post or in a sidebar.

3. If I was being serious about targeting the keyword phrase “internet marketing mentoring” then it should have been my headline, and it should have been mentioned a few times down the actual post. It should also have been bolded a few times. Those small changes will probably make the difference between your post or website getting ranked above another.

4. Every single important post that you ever make should be immediately put up onto a dozen web 2.0 sites and more social marketing sites. Naturally the more it get spread, the more it gets back-linked and therefore the more visitors you will receive.

So why did I not do any of the above?

Quite simply I would rather that you saw me as a natural person – which is the type of real person that I am, rather than you recognizing that I have done the entire post just to get a back link or two.

If I tried to optimize the post too much, it would not have written straight onto “paper’ like I wanted it to do!

Done!

Be cool, and be happy

Rob

Crafting Ideas for Kids

Kids love to do craft projects, there’s no doubt about it. But I consider kids, particularly younger youngsters like to possess their projects much less structured. I entirely believe this is true due to the fact they could be far more creative and have a lot more entertaining that way.

Do not get me incorrect, I come up with craft thoughts for my daughter and we possess a great deal of enjoyment with them, but she appears to possess much more entertaining creating her personal craft thoughts.

Several years back I went to our local beneficial will store and purchased a ton of craft supplies for extremely little dollars. I acquired beads, pipe cleaners, glitter, stickers, feathers, yarn, lace, buttons, and just a ton of crafty kind stuff. I put it all in a huge box with some glue and glue sticks and therefore my daughters crafting box came into existence.

We have since added stickers, markers, cotton balls, sequins, and other stuff we come across.

I acquired a massive tablet of thick paper and therefore her “scrapbook” came into existence. She loves to obtain it out and produce various pages of concepts and creations. She cuts pictures out of magazines and adds them to it too.

Often she just makes her personal craft projects out with the materials rather than performing her “scrapbooking pages” and she has an excellent time. The only drawback to her scrapbooking is occasionally she uses a whole lot of glue and we need to wait for it to dry just before she can turn the page and move on to her next crafting creation.

So do not generally believe structured when it comes to craft concepts for younger youngsters. You and they will almost certainly possess a great deal much more exciting in case you let their imagination rule the project. Following all it’s their creation so there’s no incorrect or proper to it. They may be much less likely to turn out to be frustrated due to the fact they can’t make their creations appear just like they may be suppose to too.

Website Design or Website Development?

So that you’re out of high school and even in job market and considering a career in web applied sciences however unsure on whether or not to pursue web improvement or web design; the reply to this queries relies upon extra on your aptitude and your career objective.

Say as an illustration, do you need to focus extra on the creative and inventive aspect like animation and/or graphic design or you’re keen on analytical stuff like web utility growth, database administration and stuff like that? Are you curious about growing interactive, flashy sites, e-commerce stores or corporate websites?

It is a logical assumption to make that web design is extra into the humanities and creativity whereas web improvement extra into analytical stuff, just do not forget that employers seldom make the distinction and lots of use the 2 phrases synonymously. Contrary to this, the Globe Organization of Webmasters, which is an right certification physique, there’s a clear lower distinction between the two.

In keeping with WOW, web design taps extra into visible arts and aesthetics and stuff that drives a successful website, it is a specialty that offers more with customer retention, interest creation and sustenance. And the event of usable designs that hook up the audience.

Web developers then again are experts at developing and optimizing website online interactivity and structure. They make use of database elements and custom apps to design a site that delivers top quality net expertise to the tip users.
WOW is specialised within the Administration of internet technologies certifications.

Internet directors are experts at acquisition and configuration of software and hardware infrastructure that works profitable internet sites. Internet admin are educated in net technologies such as routers, servers, security and maintenance of the overall web systems.

Web improvement and design are specialized fields and infrequently branded pc work. In many giant corporate organizations, the job of designing, creating and sustaining websites, lies on a variety of staff each specialised in a specific area.

Not long ago, an individual was required to be acquainted with HTML, those days are lengthy accomplished by as a result of novel technologies have emerged and previous ones preserve evolving. If you’re severe a few career in web design or net growth then you have to know that in this field studying is an on a regular basis incidence, something current in the whole world of computers. To find a great job at reputable organizations with large parks and privileges, you may require at minimum three strong expertise moreover HTML.

HTML remains to be a primary must, beneath are some of the Net expertise which can be hot, but not essentially in the order shown. Search each time period online to read more about it.
*Java
*CSS
*XML
*ASP
*PHP
*CGI
*C
*VB

Most employers seeking to rent mention “the right” candidate, this usually means they’re looking for a personal properly rounded and competent in plenty of internet technologies corresponding to listed above. Most employers require that their employees update their abilities steadily to satisfy trade demands. It’s subsequently essential that you just commit your self to frequent abilities updating to stay relevant.

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