Image by (Jc), via Flickr

(A little note, before I begin: this is one of those posts that could be construed as inflammatory, but I also think this is an important idea at this moment in our community. So, know that above all, I mean no offense. OK?)
 
So, here’s how it happened for me…

Back in 2006, I started this blog. I had no idea what I wanted to do with it, and certainly no idea that it would come to change my life profoundly. I just wrote things and took pictures. I shared them, and people sometimes commented. Yay!

Then, in 2007, I started getting what Betz refers to as “The Magical Emails.” I started hearing from bona-fide companies! They wanted me to do things for them! Sometimes, even, for money! In fact, I heard from enough companies that I was able to quit my day job! Holy crap! How lucky was I?!

…And all around me, other bloggers were playing out similar scenarios. Many, many bloggers I knew got book deals. Some of them went on TV shows. Some were hired by magazines. We were all super lucky.

Image by décalage, via Flickr

So more and more people decided to start blogs, because they’d seen things work out so well for so many Lucky Bloggers. There were widespread dreams of turning a blog into a creative small business. It was a hopeful and exciting time.

See, in the Lucky Blogger Era, because blogging was so new and different (and way fewer people were doing it), you could hang out your craft-bloggy shingle, post whatever caught your fancy, and sooner or later, you had a pretty good chance of being noticed by someone with money to invest. You didn’t really need to think about your blog as a business tool in the traditional sense. You could just share your blog posts and whoever offered you paying work would then help define what your crafty career was going to be.

Image by London Permaculture, via Flickr

But Then…

Then 2008 came, and the economy tanked. (Perhaps you’ve heard?) And with that, the Lucky Blogger Era came in for a landing, and the way blogging works for business began to shift.

This may sound like a gloom-and-doom kind of story, but it isn’t. I think it’s healthy if we can recognize the Lucky Blogger Era for the bubble that it was, and understand that the online world shifts quickly and we’ll always have to reinvent and adapt.

It’s still wholly possible to start a blog and have it grow into a livelihood – people are making this happen every day. But I believe that nowadays, it requires us to do some very focused thinking. We need to get clear about what we want from blogging, who we actually need to be blogging for, and whether blogging actually fits our lives as an ongoing marketing tool. The days of making nice crafty posts and waiting for someone to notice are pretty much over.

Image by dilatedpupil87, via Flickr

Why Bloggers Got So Lucky

Here’s why so many bloggers got lucky during the Lucky Blogger Era: all the eyeballs were leaving mainstream crafty media and coming to craft blogs instead. So, mainstream publishers and producers naturally thought, “Ah, so blogs are where the craft consumers are going. We’ll invest money in those bloggers, and that will bring us all those consumers.”

…Which is an understandable assumption, given that it was the early days of blogging and nobody fully understood the impact blogs would have on how we consume.

The point is, companies invested in Lucky Bloggers because Lucky Bloggers had the attention of other crafters. We got gigs because companies wanted to make money from our audiences. (Don’t get me wrong – it also happened because we were talented and had great ideas. But at the end of the day, I believe there were often corporate-growth angles behind it.)

Companies are still capitalizing on craft bloggers’ audiences now, but on a vastly narrower scale, as there’s less available money and waaaay more available bloggers.

Nowadays, if you want to start a blog and have it become your livelihood, it’s not really enough to blog for other crafters – unless you can offer crafters a product or service that they’ll actually buy regularly. There’s nothing in the world wrong with blogging for other crafters as an act of sharing or personal fulfillment! It’s just that the business game has changed.

Image by MyEyeSees, via Flickr

Time to Take the Reins!

If you have dreams of building your blog into a business, it’s time to stop waiting for those “Magical Emails” and get more purposeful. What do you want to be doing for your living? Do you have the skills you need in order to do that? What additional training, equipment or access do you need? Who do you need to connect with? Who is your ideal customer?

…And then, is a blog even the right marketing tool for this business you’re seeking? Contrary to the mythology, blogs aren’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all proposition. Blogs are effective storytellers, but they require time and energy and planning and focus. They’re not the best tool for marketing everything in the world. Nor is every potential customer in the world even reading them.

In the Post Lucky Blogger Era, it’s time we stopped seeing blogs as our ticket to an undefined goal of “doing what we love for a living.” It’s time we saw blogs as what they are – potentially-valuable tools in a business-owner’s toolkit.

Image by Michael Dales, via Flickr

See what I mean? There’s a lot of focused thinking to do!

My friend Tara and I have had so many conversations about this whole subject, we finally decided to join forces and offer an online class. It has a whale of a title, too: Busting the Blog Myth: How to make a blog that actually markets your business (without being gross). It’s a four-day intensive, starting on February 20, that aims to help each participant dig deep into how blogging can best work for their businesses.

By the end of class, we want you to have a clear picture of the kind of blog (and the kind of audience) you need in order to reach your business goals – or, whether blogging even makes sense for you. We’ve built a whole bunch of worksheets to help you get there, and we’ll be deep in discussion with our whole group all four days. We’d love to have you join us! Get more details here, or just register right now.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

‘Tis that time again! I’m gearing up for my next edition of my popular Craft Blog Tune-Up online class, which starts on Monday, February 13. (That’s next Monday!)

This is one of my favorite classes to teach. After all, it’s really easy to start up a blog, but keeping it going over time, especially if you want to tie it to a creative business at some point – that’s much more complicated. My class is all about good, usable information to help you improve the way your blog reads, looks, and engages with the craft community.

…And it’s always fun to see how each group bonds through the weeks of class. Many blog-friendships have been made in these sessions!

You can get all the details and register right over here.

…And if you aren’t available on the dates of this class, you can always take the self-guided version.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Image by trickypup, via Flickr

So, after twelve months, it’s become a firm habit with me to make a few purchases in support of our community. I wasn’t sure whether I’d continue the practice of reporting my purchases to you each month, though. Are you over this post series by now? Or is it still useful/interesting to see how it works for me each month? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments!*

Meantime, since it feels normal now, here are my acts of community support for January:

This month, I decided to focus on supporting bloggers whose work I’ve been reading for a long time.

I ordered a copy of Carina Envoldsen-Harris and Nicole Vos van Avezathe’s e-zine, Colour & Stitches. It’s a beautiful digital publication about embroidery, and this issue is filled with awesome tools and advice for choosing colors for stitchery projects. And like Carina’s blog, it’s filled with eye-candy.

I’ve reviewed some of Carina’s other digital publications before, and I always love supporting other indie publishers.

I also ordered my very own customized crochet hook from Lisa Clarke. I’ve read her blog, Polka Dot Cottage, pretty much since I started reading blogs. She used to do a lot of polymer clay work, but had taken a long break to focus on fiber arts. But she recently came back to poly with these embellished hooks, and I snapped one up. It feels absolutely lovely in the hand.

*I should say, I plan to continue this monthly project in 2012, even if you decide you’d rather not hear ongoing reports of it. So there are no wrong answers. :-)

Happy Monday, everyone! Later this week, I’ll have some craft-project-y things for you.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

I just started a three-post series over on the Vianza blog. It’s about getting more purposeful about your online activity if you’re online to market a small craft business. These posts are getting at the core of some big things I hope to say about blogging and social media this year, in the form of that third ebook I’ve been promising since, oh, 2008.

I’m also the featured Crafty Superstar this week on Cut Out + Keep. All week long, they’ll be sharing some “greatest hits” tutorials, and there’s an interview with me over there, too.

Lastly… Boy, am I wanting to start up a Handmade Cats website, where we can all share our awesome handmade kitty pictures. (None of us really needs this distraction, of course, but then again, ca-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ats!!)

But I shouldn’t be taking on big projects like this solo right now. Anyone interested in forming a team play on this? I need a group of people who have time on a regular basis to help with posting submissions to the site, moderating comments, etc. Email me if you’re interested!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

This post continues a discussion we started several months ago about online overload. Because it’s January and I’m thinking a lot about healthier living (don’t we always), I’ve also been thinking about my online activities in terms of their healthiness. And I’m realizing that there’s a lot of similarity between the diet we eat and the informational “diet” we read, watch and listen to online.

Frankly, I see so many of us simply gorging ourselves on internet. I do it, too. We’ve allowed our RSS readers to become overstuffed to the point that we zip right through all those posts, barely glancing at each one as we search out those we’ll quickly bookmark, star, or tag. We create these stockpiles of barely-read posts, saving them for “later.”

When Twitter and Facebook arrived, we discovered that with one mouse click, we could Like or Favorite any link or update. So we started building stockpiles of these, too. And then Pinterest showed up, and we started building boards – creating even more stockpiles.

Image by Carbon NYC, via Flickr

I worry that we’re evolving in a rather unhealthy direction with this gulping of online media. If we were doing it with the foods we eat, we’d be in for all kinds of health problems. Will we see similar impacts from overindulging in information?

And interestingly, I don’t think we’re even reading and absorbing all this information – we’re acting upon it. We’re using increasingly truncated tools to process, categorize, store and move on. Every single blog post, photograph, tweet, and Facebook update represents another human being’s effort (in some cases, many hours of it). But it’s hard to see that when you’re focused on grabbing and stashing.

Image by Robert Scott Photography.ca, va Flickr

What does all this saved stuff do to us?

If we stretch that food metaphor a little more, then don’t we look a bit like chipmunks packing our cheeks with seeds, storing up for some kind of informational winter? Many of us are sitting on massive information archives at this point – thousands of hours’ worth of reading and making. What will we ever do with all that information?

I have personally bookmarked, Liked, Favorited, retweeted, starred, tagged and pinned thousands of craft tutorials at this point. How many of them have I actually made? Probably fewer than ten. I’ve also saved hundreds of articles and pictures. How many have I even looked at a second time? Probably a similarly small number. And you know what? The mere presence of all those articles waiting to be read and projects waiting to be done acts a bit like a post-binge torpor – I get too overwhelmed to move and I stay on the couch.

Image by United Nations Photo, via Flickr

I think what we’re engaging in here is simply unconscious scarcity behavior. Think of it: your whole life, information, inspiration and project ideas were sequestered in newspapers, books and magazines, and to take advantage of them, you had to pay. Then the internet came along and suddenly you were awash in lovely free inspiration and instruction, and they were so easy to grab. So of course your instinct was to grab as much as possible – you’d never been able to do that before, and if it was free, why not?

The question, though, is how many saved tutorials are enough? How many pinned photos are enough? And what good are these stockpiles actually doing us in terms of creative development?

Image by Bob Franklin, via Flickr

What does a healthier online information diet actually look like?

So, faced with an impossible amount of information, what does it mean to consume it more sensibly?

From a crafty standpoint, it might mean spending less time gulping other people’s project ideas and more time actually making our own things. But it might also mean focusing our intake a bit more carefully. If I love crochet, for example, is it healthier for me to stuff myself with more crochet project ideas than I can possibly finish in a lifetime, or is it healthier to fill myself with my interest in 1920′s handbags, so I can bring those design ideas into my crochet, thereby creating something the world hasn’t yet seen?

Or, is it healthier to limit the number of crochet websites I subscribe to at any one time? Or to re-visit my archives of saved projects a few times a year, and weed out the ones I don’t really want to make anymore? I think everyone will have her own solution here.

…And I think a healthier information diet also looks like letting go of the “keeping up” myth. The internet is a firehose. Trying to see it all is like trying to eat my weight in M&M’s every day – pleasant enough in theory, but with huge potential for unpleasant results down the road.

I think it’s about consuming fewer informational “calories,” but also about making sure the ones you do consume are actually nourishing you in some meaningful way. This brings me to…

My attempt at a healthier online diet for 2012

With all that said, I’m embarking on a new monthly project for 2012. I’m going to try to figure out what it means to have a healthier online diet, and to take stock of what benefits I’ve gained (or lost) as a result. As a starting point, I’ll identify a handful of subjects each month that represent what I’m most interested in right now. (You can see January’s roster above. ) And then I’ll use that filter on my internet time. This means I’ll be worrying less about “keeping up” and instead, seeking out those information trails that seem to lead me to my interests. When I catch myself idly surfing, I’m going to gently stop myself and re-apply my filter.

I’m going to trust that the internet will deliver me the things I really need to see, without my needing to frantically stockpile. Instead of stockpiling, I’m going to read less, read what I do read more deeply, and synthesize the ideas I’ve taken away.

And I’d love to report back to you monthly, because the accountability of your presence was so helpful for me in last year’s supporting Free project.

Image by micagoto, via Flickr

I’m also thinking about “information health” in terms of what I share online this year. How many links to cool things from the internet, for example, do people really need on Twitter? How many blog posts are too many? At what point does online sharing stop being helpful and start becoming noise? I can’t begin to articulate my thoughts on this yet, but I hope to blog about it sometime this year.

For now, I’ll wrap up by saying that of course, part of the delight of the online landscape comes from stumbling over amazing things. Of course I’m going to need a little directionless wandering here and there – we all do. All work and no play and all that. But I’m curious to see how much I can grow my creative skills, my business skills and my thinking if I start letting go of those informational M&M’s more often.

What do you think? How healthy does your online information diet feel to you? What strategies have you tried to make it more nutritious?

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Pssst: if you’ve been thinking about getting into crafty ebook publishing this new year, my next online class on the subject begins soon – on Monday, January 9th! We cover everything from refining your book idea to formatting it to setting it up for electronic deliver to marketing it. We’ll also touch on what’s required to publish on Kindle and the iBookstore.

You can get all the deets and register right over here.

Image by SewPixie, via Flickr

Annnnnnnd, there are self-guided classes now!

I’ve also been hard at work converting my online classes to self-guided options, for those who want the information but not the interaction. (And those who are too busy for the class at the time it’s offered.)

The first two are available now! You can take my popular Craft Blog Tune-Up class and my Making a Crafty Podcast class anytime you like, at your own pace. (And you can email me with your questions on these classes whenever you need.)

More self-guided stuff is on the way! If there are particular media-making classes you’d like to see in that form, give a shout in the comments.

OK… see you in class, then!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Happy 2012, Everyone! Let’s start out the year by wrapping up my 2011 project – supporting a little of the Free I enjoy online every month. I’m happy to report that I did this for twelve months straight!

(If you’re curious, here are my reports for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and November.)

First, here’s the Free I supported in December:

I scored myself a copy of Jennifer Ackerman-Haywood’s CraftSanity Magazine. Jennifer’s a fellow podcaster, of course, so I’m acutely aware of the time and energy she puts into making and sharing Free. And her magazine is really delightful – great writing, great photography, lots and lots of value. If you listen to the Craft Sanity podcast, then this magazine is a wonderful way to show a little support.








I also ordered a pack of fat quarters from Daisy Janie. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because the proprietress, Jan DiCintio, was my guest on the most recent podcast.

(Daisy Janie fabrics are sold at many retail outlets, but Jan maintains an online store of older designs.)

I met Jan in October at Fall Quilt Market, and have been loving her blog ever since. She puts a lot of heart and soul into what she does, and I have big plans for these fabrics. Big.




So, what did I learn from supporting Free each month?

Well, several things, really…

Image by kayaker1204, via Flickr

It wasn’t expensive.

One theme I hear regularly when we have discussions about supporting Free is this: “I’d love to support my fellow bloggers, but I just can’t afford it right now.” And of course, these are lean times and some people really can’t afford it.

But honestly, I’ve lived for most of this year on a low income, and even so, I was able to find a few spare dollars each month. (One glorious month, I found a couple hundred! But that’s not at all the norm around here.)

The thing is, it doesn’t take much at all to reach out and say, “I like what you’re doing, and here’s a tangible expression of my appreciation.” You can use Flattr for as little as $7.00 per month. You can click someone’s donation button for even less than that.

This doesn’t have to be a big investment. It just has big meaning.

Image by Livia lacolare, via Flickr

I found myself wishing for more ways to support good content.

Here’s what I mean by that: remember this informal chart I made a few months back? I investigated all the blogs in my RSS reader to see what ways they had available for me to support them.

It makes sense, of course, that a community of crafters would mostly have online stores selling their crafts. But you know what? I’m a crafter, too, and my house is already overflowing with crafts. What I would love is a way to pay more of my favorite bloggers for the wonderful posts I enjoy on their blogs. Honestly, I’d love to have access to more PayPal donation buttons, and more Flattr buttons.

I still adore Sandra Juto’s brilliant “online store where you don’t buy anything” model. (Which, sadly, she seems to have taken down.) I’d love to see more bloggers providing opportunities to chip in for their content – I think it only helps all of us move into more active support of each other.

I’ve said this before, but there’s a difference between your community and your market. Your community needs your support, but it may not necessarily need your product. Your market needs your product! Give both groups a way to support you!

Image by jakejohnson, via Flickr

I really wish I had more company!

I was thrilled when my Mom decided to join me in monthly reporting on how she supports her community each month. And Kim has been doing something similar lately. How about you joining us in 2012?

The more visible we can make this idea of community support, the more people we can encourage to join in. And here’s the important part: the more people participate, the more we all can benefit. I would love to hear regular reports on how you’re supporting Free!

Be the change you want to see in the world. Water the gardens you want to have growing. If receiving more support from your community is important to you, how about giving your community more support this year?

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Spoonflower is doing a giveaway today only of my book. Kanzashi In Bloom, plus a collection of six fat quarters I curated. Wanna enter? Pop over to their blog and say howdy – today only, remember!

Next up, I wanted to share this video from CCE, which happened over the summer in San Francisco. CCE’s videographer Kirthi recorded this interview with me about why it’s important to stay connected to your creativity, even as you’re working hard to keep a business going. I think she did a bang-up job of editing here. Hope you enjoy!

In case you missed this on Friday, Flattr has given me a limited number of 5-Euro coupon codes to hand out to y’all. If you don’t have a Flattr account yet, email me with the subject line “Flattr” and I’ll hook you up with free money you can use to micropay your favorite bloggers.

(This is an offer for new Flattr accounts only. Hurry and claim one!)

Just an FYI for those with a Kindle: I’ve got this here blog listed in the Kindle store now, in case you want to subscribe to it on your device.

…And lastly, in case you want to mark your calendar, I’ve just listed my early-2012 online class offerings in my online store. I’d love to see you in a class!

Have a good Monday, then!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Before I get to my report of how I supported some Free this month, I want you to know about a pretty cool day, organized by the folks at Flattr.

Pay a Blogger Day is tomorrow (Tuesday, November 29th). The idea is that, if you read and enjoy blogs, you take this day to say “Thank you” to your favorite bloggers by paying them something tangible. You could click on their donation button, or their Flattr buttons, or buy something in their online stores.

As you might imagine, I love this idea! Go forth and appreciate your favorite bloggers, OK? And if you’re a Flattr user yourself, comment here and I’ll come Flattr you!

Image by tonx, via Flickr

Now… in other news, here’s how I supported some Free in November.

I finally got off my patootie and made a donation to Wikipedia. Seriously, I use it a dozen times a week, and if there’s any site to which I owe a debt of gratitude, it’s that one.

What websites do YOU use all the time for free? Is there any way you can offer a little support?

I also had an interesting experience with a fellow blogger, Linda. I’ve read Linda’s illustration blog for a while now, but I had no idea she had other creative bloggy enteavors going on. That is, until I saw this post in my pingbacks.

In it, Linda writes honestly about her stuggles with sustainability – about how much Free she’s sharing, and how few sales are coming back. I think it’s a brave and important step for any of us to be open about our challenges. How else are our readers supposed to know there’s an opportunity to offer meaningful support? So I ordered a new copy of her excellent zine, Persieri.

But more importantly, I was able to share with Linda that, until that post happened, I wasn’t even aware that she has multiple blogs and online stores. We had some productive dialog about how she might make these channels more visible.

In talking about our challenges, we come closer to finding solutions. If you’re having trouble making your blog sustainable, I really encourage you to talk with your readers about it.

Image by Dana Rocks, via Flickr. This is not me, by the way.

Thank you, as always, for witnessing this little project, which I’m proud to report is in its 11th month. Turns out, it’s not at all difficult to integrate regular community support into even my tight budget. How are you supporting your community? I’d love to hear – please leave a comment!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Image by the trial, via Flickr

Since the holiday sales season is looming large, and a bunch of you liked the tutorial roundup earlier this week, I thought I’d also round up some posts I’ve written for other websites about the ins and outs of holiday-season marketing. Go forth and make sales!

If you’re new to online marketing, and running around joining Twitter and Facebook so you can use them this season to market your goods, stop. Sit down a moment, and read Quick! The holidays are coming and I have to start marketing online! on Handmade Spark.

If you’ve been posting Etsy listings on Twitter and Facebook every day, definitely read How to Effectively Use Social Media to Market Your Business, over on the Etsy blog.

After that, read What message are you (unconsciously) sending out on Twitter? on Handmade Spark.

Image by NuttyIrishmanKnits, via Flickr

If you always run out of time to maintain your blog during the holiday season, bust out a calendar right now, take ten minutes, and create a Bite-Sized Marketing Plan, over on Craftzine.

Image by Sappymoosetree, via Flickr

…And if you feel like nobody’s listening to your marketing messages, take a look at Holiday Season Marketing: How to Engage Your Buyers, over on the Etsy blog.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

If you’ve been in the online creative community for any length of time, you’ve likely read or participated in a conversation about copyright – and more than likely, that discussion became either vitriol-filled or convoluted, or both. In truth, there’s a lot of misinformation and assumption around this subject out there, and our online landscape adds a healthy helping of grey area.

So, when Matt Lowe contacted me, I was immediately listening. He’s an attorney in Colorado, and he’s written an ebook, A Creative Mother’s Guide to Copyright Protection. Would I like to review it, he asked? Oh, definitely.

Image by Horia Varlan, via Flickr

First, let me say that I find the “Creative Mother’s” title a little limiting (and I’ve already shared this with Matt). It may be easy to assume from the outside that all art and craft bloggers are stay-at-home-Moms, but we know that the creative community has far more lifestyle diversity than this.

Still, don’t let the title keep you away. What we have here is a nice, plain-English guide to how copyright works, and a much-needed starting point for copyright discussions in the creative community.

Image by Leo Reynolds, via Tiwtter

Let me re-iterate that point about “plain English.” One thing I always find frustrating in copyright discussions is how dry and confusing lawyer-speak can get – words and words that don’t seem to say anything at all. Matt has done a great job of keeping the language simple and friendly.

In just 15 pages, Matt covers the following subjects: what a copyright is, what can and cannot be copyrighted, whether you need to register a copyright formally (and how to do this), how to clearly express your copyright on printed and online works, and how copyright applies to websites. Everything’s covered in brief and clear terms, with illustrations to break up the text so things don’t get dry.

I do think Matt could write a companion ebook on the subject of derivative works. These are a big issue for the online creative community. Whether we like this or not, much of what we make is derivative, because we’re always awash in images of other people’s work. In many cases, we may be making derivative works without even realizing it. It’s the derivations, and the huge difficulty of tracking where, exactly, they came from, that make copyright discussions in our community so convoluted.

Image by Horia Varlan, via Flickr

This guide doesn’t cover what to do if you feel someone has infringed on your copyright, but then again, that’s a job your your own attorney. What this ebook will give you is a solid grounding in what you can and cannot copyright, and how you express that copyright. And that’s valuable.

Matt also has a copyright guide for Etsy sellers, and guides for making a blog compliant with FTC regulations.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

“Will you please blog about my shop/product/event/contest/project?”

This is a question I get asked many times each week. And when I have a new product to market, it’s the first question I ask other bloggers. But you know what? That question is broken! And I believe the time has come for us to evolve a fresher, more effective means of doing marketing in the blogosphere. I have a modest proposal for one method we might try, and I’d love to hear your ideas for others.

(A word of warning, too… there’s a wee bit of vitriol here and there in this post. I usually edit that stuff out, but in this case, it’s an honest reflection of my own frustrations, so I left it in. I intend no offense toward anyone.)

Image by Gabriela Camerotti, via Flickr

What’s broken now…

The way we’re marketing things in the blogosphere right now looks way too much like old-school mass-media marketing:

• We have something to sell. So we contact a bunch of bloggers who have bigger audiences than we do.
• We ask them to talk about our product/event/thing.
• We hope that exposure will bring us sales.

But you know what that approach is more likely to bring? Dull blog posts, written by someone who feels obligated to make a marketing statement. Dull tweets and Facebook posts, in which someone says “Here’s a thing to go buy.”

Coverage like this gets widely ignored, because there’s so little genuine enthusiasm behind it. Why are we bothering?

Image by rustman, via Flickr

Push vs. Pull

What we’re essentially talking about here is the difference between “push marketing” and “pull marketing,” which is another way to express broadcast vs. engagement.

When the product is the whole story, and that product is thrust upon you without your invitation, that’s push marketing. Push marketing feels intrusive, I think, to most of us, and rarely gets our full attention – whether we’re reading about it or being asked to write about it.

In pull marketing, however, the product is not the main story. The product, paradoxically enough, is somewhat incidental to the story. But if the story’s good, then the product becomes intriguing. And we’re attracted precisely because we aren’t being pushed into it.

Image by Greything, via Flickr

Friends vs. Strangers

I’ve talked before about the idea of forming relationships with people as a form of sharing your product, and I still believe in that model, but I’m also not sure it’s enough of a marketing plan for most of us.

Seth Godin wrote about how much easier it is to market to “friends” than strangers, but honestly, that’s pretty easy to say when you’re Seth Godin and have millions of people already listening to you. For most of the rest of us, we have people listening, but not enough to make them the only marketing channel we use. Most of us have to find ways to reach people we don’t already know.

…But the challenge is, how to do this without sounding like mass-media marketing and therefore being mostly ignored! (Stay with me, I’m getting to that part.)

Image by tokyostories.pnn.com, via Flickr

I’m as guilty as anyone of descending into “marketing voice” every time I have something I need to market. I’ve asked other bloggers to review my ebooks or mention my classes. But honestly, these efforts rarely create enough sales to be worth the energy to set them up, because I’m essentially just push marketing.

(Some of you will be thinking at this point, “Why not do a contest or a giveaway?” I get that some marketers swear by them, but I’m going to stand right up and say: I think both tactics have been overused in the blogosphere, and I suspect that they do little to drive actual purchases. Contests and giveaways seem to attract people who want freebies. I need customers instead. But I digress.)

Image by John Wardell, via Flickr

The stakes are high for all of us here.

As a blogger, you carry a big responsibility: you’re charged with sharing stories that your readers will find consistently interesting and useful. And your audience is like a fingerprint, not a demographic – every blog draws a different group of readers. As a blogger, you know best what your readers want to read.

The minute your blog smacks of too much non-relevant marketing, your readers have only to click the Unsubscribe button. And in an era where everyone’s on the verge of information overload, we are all looking for excuses to click that Unsubscribe button. So the more overt push marketing you participate in as a blogger, the bigger the risk you run of losing readers.

As a small business owner, of course, if you can’t reach out to people you don’t already know once in a while, then you have little chance of growth.

So this marketing thing really needs to be a team effort. If we’re to effectively help each other promote our work, and keep readers interested, then we simply have to find more genuine, more interesting, more story-based ways to do it. Here’s my idea….

Image by piccalilli days, via Flickr

Storytelling Partnerships!

I think what we’re looking for is to form “storytelling partnerships” with bloggers (and podcasters, and video makers). This goes way beyond merely asking people to write about your product/event/project.

To form a storytelling partnership with a blogger, you first need to do your homework. Read a lot of posts, and suss out what stories this blogger is telling to his or her readers.

• What are the broad themes of the blog?
• What are the bloggers’ ongoing struggles and obsessions?
• What kinds of comment discussions are this blog’s readers having?

(In other words, don’t look at the home page for fifteen seconds and then email the blogger, “I love your blog.” Ahem.)

Once you have a sense of the stories this blogger is telling, then you figure out some ways you and your product can participate meaningfully in these stories. And instead of asking the blogger, “Will you write about me,” you offer them your story proposals.

Image by Carissa Marie, via Flickr

Let me give you a real-life example of this approach. Tara Swiger, about two years ago, launched a “Learn to Knit Kit”. She was looking for bloggers to blog about it so she could get the word out.

Tara contacted me, but instead of merely asking “Will you write about this,” she analyzed what was happening on my blog. She noticed that I’m not really a knitter and don’t write often about knitting. And, taking that information into account, she offered up these story ideas:

• Since I’d blogged before about my ongoing difficulties with learning the craft, she offered to be interviewed about why knitting can be challenging to learn, and how to overcome these challenges.




• Since so many beginning knitters have trouble casting on (and I’d written about my struggles with this), she offered to write a guest post about the methods her beginning students have had the best luck with.




• Since some of my readers had commented in the past about their own struggles with knitting, she offered to do a “knitting Q&A” on my blog, where my readers could submit their questions for her to answer.

Do you see what’s happening here? Tara’s Learn to Knit Kit isn’t the main story in these pitches. But any of these posts would have been interesting to my audience (and to me), and therefore would have drawn positive attention to the kit. Tara took the time to find my stories, and then she took the time to offer me some complementary stories that gently incorporated her product.

I appreciated Tara’s approach so much, I undertook to learn knitting from her kit and wrote honestly about the experience as part of a post series I was doing about indie publishing. The resulting post is (I think) more interesting than a “here’s a product, go buy it” post.

Image by ElvertBarnes, via Flickr

The key marketing skill for the 21st Century…

I’ve said this to my blogging students many times: the more ability you have to tell a compelling story about your business, the more successful your blog will be. I think the same storytelling skill applies to marketers, too – the more you can help bloggers tell their stories, the more effective you’ll be at marketing.

Yes, marketers have to do much more legwork to market on the web than they used to do through broadcast channels. But I think that the resulting coverage is way more effective than broadcast marketing, because it’s the result of friends telling stories to friends.

When you ask a blogger, “Will you write about this,” you’re not only asking for free publicity, you’re putting all the impetus on them to make your product interesting. I say no to a healthy handful of these kinds of pitches every single week. As a blogger, I’m too busy to figure out how to market your product to my readers. If you step in and help me with that part, I have a lot more reason to listen to you.

Image by Stephen Desroches, via Flickr

“Big Bloggers” aren’t the proper targets anymore.

Here’s what I think is cool about storytelling partnerships: audience size doesn’t matter. What matters is that you identify bloggers whose stories are actually aligned with your story. A lukewarm post on a “big” blog will never garner you as much response as a genuinely excited post on a smaller blog.

This means that more of us can meaningfully support our fellow crafters. It means that more of us can form mutually-beneficial alliances, so we can all more effectively promote our products and services. For pete’s sake. it means we all stand to make more sales. Exposure isn’t controlled by a handful of “cool kids” with big audiences. Exposure is controlled by how well you’re able to find story partners.

What do you think about this model? Have you tried it? Are you willing to give it a try? And what other ideas do you have for moving beyond “Will you write about this?”

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Image by HowardLake, via Flickr

As it does every year, October raced by in a blur. I realized today that I hadn’t done any Free-supporting for the month. Oops, time to play catch-up!

…So I got to wondering: of all the personal blogs I read, how many of them offer me some way to give them monetary support? Intrigued, I embarked on a wholly un-scientific poll, visiting every one of the 60 personal blogs in my RSS reader and looking all over the homepage for offerings. What I found was very encouraging:

About 2/3 of the personal blogs I read have some way I can support them, and several of them offered more than one way. I was a little surprised by how large a percentage have some kind of product/service for sale, but in retrospect, I don’t know why that should surprise me. All in all, I’m just glad to see all these opportunities!

Cash is a little on the tight side at the moment, as I’ve been traveling this month, but I did make two product purchases from favorite bloggers:

From Patricia, I ordered a couple pieces of fabric – which also gave me an opportunity to support Spoonflower a bit. I do believe there are some Patricia-designed kansazhi in my future.

…And from Christina, I bought a PDF tutorial for making her awesome fabric boxes. I can always use more organization around here, she said, knocking over a large stack of unopened mail.

Anyway. As always, I thank you for witnessing this little project. By the way, did you know that my Mom does monthly community support, too?

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Image by verbeeldingskr8, via Flickr

This post was inspired by Elizabeth, who wrote beautifully this week about how reading fewer blogs can lead crafters to make more things and find more of their own original ideas. I love her post and completely agree. You might want to read it before you dive in here. I’ll wait.

I think Elizabeth hits upon a big trend I’ve been seeing in the blogosphere – many of us are letting go of the impetus to “keep up.”

When blogs came on the scene (about seven years ago, give or take), we approached them like we would approach any media at the time – we tried to read them all, so we’d be well-read and up to date.

Image by catspyjamasnz, via Flickr

That approach worked fine for a few years, but then seemingly everyone on the planet started a blog. Before long, we all had overstuffed RSS readers with hundreds (thousands?) of unread posts. We felt naggingly guilty. Guilt is not enjoyable, so many of us simply abandoned our feed readers. That’s when social media took over. More and more of us just started looking at whatever interesting links floated through our field of view on Facebook and Twitter.

…And it turned out, this was okay. We found that we didn’t need to keep up on everything after all, and that was a relief. Now, I think we’re becoming much less likely to keep up on every post from any one blog, unless we feel we have some kind of personal connection with the blogger.

So where does this leave blogging? Is it dead?

Don’t worry. Blogging isn’t dead! But with this change in the way people read blogs comes some re-adjustment in the way we write them. That’s the bit I want to talk about.

Image by Jorge Franganillo, via Flickr

From keeping up to niche-ing down

OK, so we’re in the post-keeping-up era. What does that mean for blogs and blog readership? I think it means that more of us will take Elizabeth’s advice and weed out those overstuffed feed readers – or at least sort our feeds by priority, and focus on those we consider most important.

Those five words express a big idea: those WE consider most important. Remember, there is no blog in this world that everyone “has to” read. That’s an old mass-media idea. The most important blogs in the world now are the blogs that speak directly to you – whatever they’re about, and whoever writes them, are not important. The fact that you find them interesting and valuable is.

…And that means both good things and scary things for bloggers. On the one hand, there’s potential for every blogger now to find a core group of readers. This is an easier landscape to be an authentic blogger in, actually – with readers becoming less loyal in general, you’re free to share things that are truly meaningful to you. And as it turns out, these posts can be some of your most powerful.

On the other hand, as people let themselves off the blog-reading hook more and more, it’s true that some of us bloggers will see our readership numbers decline.

Image by antwerpenR, via Flickr

Letting go of “bigger is better”

Now, I have yet to meet a blogger who doesn’t want more readers and more comments. (The number one question I get is still “How do I get more readers?”) Of course, the whole point of sharing writing and pictures publicly is so that people will witness us. But I think many of us share an unexamined assumption that it needs to be a whole lot of people, or somehow we aren’t truly valid.

In the early days of blogging, we watched the original craft bloggers grow very large audiences, and I think that, consciously or unconsiously, many of us aspire to that model. But we need to remember that these blogs grew big with two important influences: there weren’t as many blogs to read then, and blogging was a sexy new medium.

Today, I think it’s more realistic to focus on the quality of your readership over its quantity. Would you rather have your blog read by someone who’s actually interested in you, or would you rather have it scanned for a few seconds by someone who’s only looking for visual inspiration? Are thousands of faceless subscribers more important than a handful of thoughtful, active commenters?

The answer to those questions is complex and depends entirely on your own goals for blogging. Which leads me to my next point…

Image by angetorres, via Flickr

What the heck do you want out of this, anyway?

In my blogging classes and ebooks, one of the first things I ask my students to do is come up with a short list of their goals for keeping a blog. Any answer is valid – some want to practice writing and taking pictures. Some want to market a small business. Others want to grow a large audience that will help them attract the attention of a publisher. Some want to document their lives.

I think that, in the post-keeping-up era, it’s more important than ever to be honest with yourself about what you really want to get out of blogging.

The more you understand what you want from blogging, the better you can see whether blogging is actually fulfilling for you. Not everyone is born to be a publisher. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed so many people starting personal blogs because it’s what everyone was doing, and then wondering why those blogs aren’t seeing fame and fortune.

Image by loop_oh, via Flickr

If fame and fortune is your goal, then you’ll have to produce a blog aimed at a mass audience. In the post keeping-up era, that blog probably looks very, very different from a personal rumination on the small details on your daily life. (Unless, of course, you’re a particularly poetic writer who has a knack for engaging a mass audience.) The point is, in the post keeping-up era, big audiences will happen less by chance and more by calculation.

If personal expression is your goal, then it saves you a lot of angst if you can let go of that old mythology about “big” bloggers, and trust that over time, your blog will find its own crowd of people who “get” it. Whether that’s five people or five thousand really doesn’t matter. Honestly, all that matters is that you’re enjoying making the blog only you could make.

Image by stevendepolo, via Flickr

Let yourself off the hook from reading, but not from participating.

I’m actually happy about the post-keeping-up era. I think that the more feeds we try to keep up on, the more passive we have to get as readers. And that, sadly, takes the community sport of blogging and makes it look an awful lot like mass media.

Blogging is not mass media. It’s conversation. You are a vital part of that conversation. If you find a blog post anywhere that really resonates with you, it’s never been more important for you to leave a comment and let the blogger know. If bloggers must watch their readership numbers decline in the post keeping-up era, they should know that you’re out there and you appreciate them. Elizabeth wrote beautifully about this, so I won’t go into more detail.

All I’ll say is: lurking is soooooooo 2007. You (and I, and everyone) are so incredibly lucky to live in this rich media environment, with amazing content being created every day and delivered to us at no charge. Is it so much to ask that we “pay” with a thank you?

Image by hellojenuine, via Flickr

To this day, I make a practice of commenting on at least one blog every single day – and more if I have time. I see commenting as fundamental to preserving the things that make blogging (and blog-reading) special.

I’d love to hear your thoughts: has the way you read blogs changed in recent years? If you keep a blog, has the way you write it changed? Do you feel the same way about blogging now as you did when you first started reading blogs?

And if you’d like some great tips on organizing/trimming your RSS reader from Elizabeth, read her follow-up post.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Here’s another big debate brewing in the community, and this time, it’s about Pinterest. I caught wind of it when Rachel sent me a link to an interesting discussion on Salt City Spice. The premise of that discussion is:

“Here’s the thing that’s been bothering me though – after a few months of pinning and in speaking with a variety of Etsy sellers, the same issue continues to come up: Artists, designers, & crafters are continually finding their original works tagged or categorized as “DIY” – is this wrong?”

The comment discussion is really interesting, and I can agree with elements of all sides. So I shared the link over on Google +, and even more interesting comments emerged there. (I do believe you’ll need a G+ account, and to be logged in, and be in one of my circles, to see that discussion.) Then Kim blogged about how creatives need to get over trying to control what happens to their creations. And then Katrina (the original author of the Salt City Spice post) had a second post on Oh, My Handmade.

All of these discussions bring up many of our community’s most recurring themes: original ideas, copying and protection. There are no universal answers (as usual), but the conversation brought up a few thoughts about Pinterest for me, and I thought I’d share them here.

Image by MichaelMKenny, via Flickr

Private Inspiration vs. Public Inspiration

Pinterest is an interesting (and sometimes messy) hybrid of public and private. By that I mean, it’s a tool we use to publicly do something we’ve been accustomed to doing privately.

We crafters have always saved examples of interesting projects and pictures – whether they were torn from magazines, earmarked in books, or bookmarked on the web. These archives are like bank accounts for creatives: stuff we plan to make, stuff that sparked an idea for making something different, stuff that just makes us happy to look at. When this archive is private, it can take any form that’s useful to us – a shoebox of paper clippings, a bulletin board, a series of bookmark folders. And in a purely-private archive, it’s less important to note who created what, because it’s all a kind of personal creative soup we draw from.

But when our inspiration archives are made public, as on Pinterest, we have a bigger responsibility: we need to make an effort to maintain a clean, well-attributed archive that respects original creators. (That’s a big idea; keep it in the back of your head for a moment.)

A Dangerous Sort of Boiling-Down

I should say at this point, I adore Pinterest. But the thing that I love most about it is also the thing I find troubling about it. Pinterest, as we know, boils a website page down to a single picture. When you “pin” a great blog post or tutorial or roundup or anything, you choose one image from the page to represent it. These pictures, then, can be “repinned” by other Pinterest users. And thus, the pictures change hands and change hands. If the original pinner hasn’t properly credited the original creator, then the pins have a way of becoming just pretty pictures – their original context is lost.

Throughout the summer, I would often find interesting images on Pinterest and want to share the accompanying posts on CRAFT (like the one above). But unfortunately, so many times (like, one in about five), I would follow an image through one repin after another, only to finally land on the original pin and discover that someone had pinned only the image itself without its accompanying post, or they’d pinned the homepage of the site where the image appeared on a single day six months ago. In other words, bad attribution practices on Pinterest rendered it impossible for me to find and share the original creator’s work with a larger audience.

This loss of context also contributes to what Salt City Spice pointed out: Etsy sellers are regularly seeing their products-for-sale pinned, not as reminders to buy the product but as reminders to make a DIY version. The images come to represent ideas rather than products. (For the record, I also see this happening constantly with mainstream manufactured products, but I don’t see as many people up in arms over that.)

Pinterest has recently added a Pin Etiquette page to address bad attribution. And for a really thorough step-by-step take on how to attribute, read Rachel’s post.

Image by artjunkgirl, via Flickr

The Nature of the Crafty Beast

All of that said, I still agree with Kim’s point: once we post something on the internet, we cannot control its destiny, even if everyone in the community is using stellar attribution practices (or practicing ethical pinning).

The thing is, we creatives have grown accustomed to having access to thousands of pretty images 24-7. We now expect to look at unlimited crafty goodness, and then draw on those visual ideas as we make our own things. Some of us want to then sell what we make. And some of those who sell what they make seem to want to wall off those specific images, making them off-limits in a sea of visual inspiration.

Obviously, copying is bad. Stealing is bad. But every single one of us draws on other peoples’ work for inspiration. It’s our nature, and frankly, our privilege to have access to this rich and constantly-renewing treasure trove. Once you put an original design out there, you simply have to be prepared for others to draw upon it. I think Jessica said it best in her excellent comment on the Google Plus discussion:

“At the end of the day there’s always going to be the people who make and the ones that buy.”

This brings me to…

“Online” is Not Always “Marketing”

Crafters have been asking me whether Pinterest is a good marketing tool for their businesses almost since its first day. I see plenty of Pinterest accounts with Etsy shop names, where the users pin only pictures of their stuff for sale. If you ask me, that practice is more or less like sending engraved invitations to the people who make instead of buy.

One important way craft businesses can minimize the copying of their work is to get a lot smarter about their online marketing. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself whether any website is a place where your actual customers are hanging out (not your online buddies, and yes, there is a difference). In an environment like Pinterest, where everyone’s throwing pictures around like they’re candy, how does throwing your own pictures into the melee communicate the ways your product is unique and special?

(Interestingly, Pinterest’s Pin Etiquette page addresses self-promotion, too.)

Image by blackbiscuits, via Flickr

Of course, people other than sellers pin images from Etsy, and equally sadly, no Etsy seller can control where images from his or her shop will end up. But I do see an awful lot of Etsy sellers voluntarily putting their images in front of other crafters in the name of “marketing.” I’ve said this before, but I don’t think other crafters are necessarily the best customers for many handmade products. We’re good re-interpreters and reverse engineers. And Pinterest is an environment where we like to feed those skills.

What are your thoughts on Pinterest? What steps do you take when you pin (or repin) things to make sure the original maker is credited? Do you pin as a reminder to buy, or a reminder to make?

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!