Sewing Patterns
When I was a kid my mum would make her own clothes and spend ages pinning cut-outs of what looked like greaseproof paper onto fabric on the living room floor. She used to get her patterns from magazines and from friends, which sounds like just the thing for the internet.
Many people get great pleasure from making their own clothes, and plenty of housewives have stretched their budgets by altering or making clothes for others at a price. It costs very little to get started and of course is a great source of conversation for like minded people.
Naturally sewing patterns, like books or even magazines infer rights on the copyright owners. You cannot simply buy a pattern and reproduce it for all your friends. What you buy is the right to use the pattern for yourself, and much like buying a book or a CD you can sell that right on to someone else when you are finished.
There are sites like www.sewingpatterns.com and www.kwiksew.com which will sell you patterns, provide free starter patterns etc. but they are basically a business selling a new product for each transaction. www.debsrecycledsewingpatterns.com takes the next logical step in the book analogy and sells vintage and used patterns. There are also sites that aggregate free patterns such as www.onehourcraft.com.
There is obviously an immense amount of interest in sewing as a hobby and there are literally millions of related sites. In order to make money you will need to be visible, so you will either need to promote your site heavily, or use a good SEO firm to help you reach the top of your key words. Make sure that your web designer uses the latest techniques to help the search engines understand your content; www.sewing.com is still using frames and although the meta-tags and headers are great the content is effectively invisible to search algorithms. CSS should improve this significantly.
If you decide to go down the promotion route then don’t spend a lot of money unless you are convinced of your model. It is easy to get carried away with pay per click (ppc) campaigns and expensive banner adverts but still lose money instead of generating lots of customers.
You can try the following as traffic generators: -
Network
Myspace / Squidoo
Ebay
Forums
Offline advertising
Talks/Seminars/other promotional activities
Start by telling everyone you know about your website. I still get the majority of my traffic from Taipei which is a non-English speaking environment! Tell friends, family, acquaintances, your postman, colleagues; everyone. Get some cards printed with the web address on them and hand them out like crazy. You will be amazed how many people will check out your site.
Myspace and Squidoo take the networking phenomenon online. Set up a simple page that links back to your homepage and join all the groups related to sewing. Post regular bulletins detailing new features or special offers or simply begging people to come and look at your site…they will come but you have to do the work to get them there and have a site that will interest them when they get there.
Ebay may not seem like the ideal place to promote your website, but if you are actually selling something on there then you should post ads on Ebay and link them back to your site. It gives you more credibility than casual posters and anyone interested in your product line is likely to check out who you are before they buy anything. The additional links will also help with search engine rankings.
Forums are another way of networking, I suggest you look for sewing related forums such as www.sewingforum.com where you can help people with their sewing related issues or simply shoot the breeze with like minded people. This is not about hard sell; it is about being interested, and interesting. Your signature block can have a link to your website and the more established you become as a poster the more users are likely to visit the site, bookmark it, link to it from their own sites etc.
Advertising offline is a great way to get traffic online. Think about high visibility ads like bus shelters near schools (housewives) or retirement homes where you can have big bold print and your website address. Local newspapers and the Yellow pages can also be effective offline advertising.
There are plenty of groups that you can give talks to, home economics majors, women’s institute, round tables etc. are all looking for people who will come and speak to them about their hobbies or businesses. Think about what might interest them and spend some time on it, then turn up hand out some business cards and watch your sales grow.
In order to monetarise your site you will have to choose one of more of the following options: -
Sell patterns (new or used)
Sell Books or courses on sewing
Sell Accessories for sewing
Generate advertising revenues from your site
If you are technically minded then you may be able to create your own patterns. I remember that my grandmother was a whiz at developing other people’s patterns into her own ideas. This would create a unique garment and release you from any copyright issues.
You can of course buy patterns new or used from pattern suppliers, yard sales, sewing clubs, house clearance agents and then resell them at a profit. If you happen to have the pattern that someone is looking for then there is a certain amount of elasticity in the price.
You can become an affiliate for Amazon and earn up to 10% of the value of any books that they sell through your site. This is not a bad way to start monetarising any site as there is no cost of distribution, no stock to hold, no logistics to take care of etc.
You could of course write your own manual on how to create or amend patterns, how to start sewing, how to tell which is the best sewing machine etc. and then sell them as e-books through your site and on Ebay.
Accessories such as thread, needles, bobbins etc can be easily sourced in bulk from a local wholesales or purchased from overseas using a site like www.alibaba.com
Advertising is a hard nut to crack and will follow your success in developing traffic. Google Adwords and similar programs are not the way to go in my opinion, if you have a successful site you will have no trouble selling space to companies that are related to sewing in some way, if your site is not successful then you won’t earn much money from any kind of advertisers.
Even if you are giving something away you can make money from it.
If you know how to scale patterns then you can put them in PDF documents and put them online which will save postage costs.