How to Put Your Craft Store Online
and Make It Profitable

You love making and selling things? Have you thought of having your own craft store online to maximize your potential profits?

Think about what the ideal craft show is ... hundreds - or in some cases thousands of people coming through the doors at an outdoor festival or under a roof at a fairgrounds, all with cash and ready to spend it.

But put your craft store online with a website? Now you're talking millions of people coming through your website doors, all with cash and ready to spend it!

You'll also increase your overall profits at local craft shows if you can put a website address on your business cards. A lot of traffic comes through the doors at craft fairs and while some people do come with the intention of spending money that day, a good many others are simply browsing with the idea of buying online later.

Building a Profitable Craft Store Online

Building a solid and profitable craft store online does take some time and effort, and there is a slight learning curve, but it is well worth the time you put into it, especially since you could be doubling, if not tripling, your sales by having an online presence.

But you don't want to rush and just stick up any website just to have a website. I watched a friend do this and I thought "What IS she doing?" She and her husband make beautiful crafts and the potential was there for sales to go through the roof - with the right online craft shop.

I knew she'd recently bought some type of program that was supposed to be really good with search engine optimization (that’s getting your website to the top of Google, Yahoo and Bing), but I kind of doubted that this program was doing what it claimed to be doing, just by looking at her website.

Without getting into the technical details here, because after all, we're crafters, not techies or web designers, she was putting all of this time and effort into putting a craft store online that would never get found by people looking for her specific crafts. It was like she was building a store out in the middle of nowhere - with no signs or advertising to tell people she was there!

I felt so bad for her! I really want her business to succeed because she's put so much time and effort into it. And it's her passion! But I had to be honest with her. The so-called "professional SEO" package she bought into wasn't even coming close to being worth what she was paying for it.

It seemed like this program wasn't teaching her that there are actually certain website layouts that work really well with the search engines, and it all has to do with putting things in the right order so the search engines know where to find it and put it in their indexes. That way when people search for your type of crafts, your website will come in close to the top of the searches.

But she was using a free website template that her low-budget web host provides its members. And basically, it just sucked.

The Down Side to Most Free Website Templates…

They look and feel just like a "free" website template would. No warmth or passion, you can't really personalize them and the style selections are usually very, very limited.

On top of it being plain and uninteresting to look at, it turned out that every time she did anything in the template, the website host was adding all kinds of unnecessary code to the site that literally would confuse anyone or anything, especially search engine spiders and bots. It was a horrible mess! No wonder no one was finding her site!

And unfortunately, this is a problem with a lot of "free" templates with the "cheap" web hosts out there. If you don't know HTML and CSS, then you're pretty much stuck with having to use a free template that's not going to get you found online.

So as I'm showing her things and rebuilding her site for her, she says, "Where did you learn all this stuff? In school?" I was like, "No. I actually learned all of this before I went back to school. This is all the stuff I've been learning for the last two years with SBI!" She was like, "Really?"

I Got My "Master's Degree" in Online Business with SBI!

"Yeah - SBI! is like an online business "Master's Degree!" Not only do they teach you everything you need to know to build a craft store online - or any other type of website -they don't screw up your website code either.

SBI! WANTS your online craft shop to be found online; they WANT you to be successful. Their templates are clean and search engine friendly and comply with Google, Yahoo and Bing's spiders.

If you don't know much about computers or building websites but you really want to build your craft store online, I would seriously suggest that you use SBI! first, before trying any of the low-cost or even free stuff and cheap web hosts.

Get it right the first time and you'll never look back!

Building an online craft shop is no different than building any other type of business. If you're going to put in the time and effort to build it, you want it to:

1. Look nice and inviting. This is especially true with online craft shops just because of the nature of the crafts industry on the whole. You put time and effort into making your products, most of them one-of-a-kind, so you want an online store to show them off, not drive prospective customers away.


2. You want a wide selection of customizable templates to choose from, even if you know absolutely nothing about building a website in the first place. SBI! walks you through every step.


3. You want help because if this is your first attempt at building a website, you're probably a little nervous about doing this so you're going to need some support along the way. SBI! has all the support you need - and not just from their customer service. They have an entire forum full of thousands of people, many of whom are just starting out themselves, that will help you get from point A to point B easily.


4. You want a website that WORKS and will be successful. That's why you're taking the time build it right?


5. You want to make sure it gets traffic so you make sales. So does SBI! And their step by step marketing and advertising techniques are more than any other web host can provide.

Seriously, if you really know little to nothing about online marketing, let alone know little to no HTML to build a website, then you shouldn't just get SBI! - you NEED SBI! to get it done right.

So what do you get with SBI! that
you don't get with other web hosts?

THE BEST information anywhere to help you get it right from day one:

• How to do keyword searches so the pages you build will definitely make sure your craft store online will be found before your competitors


• Professionally designed website templates that WORK the way they're supposed to


• And how to do link building and not link exchanges, to help get more targeted traffic to your shop

Behind-the-scene services and tools that you absolutely will not find anywhere else:

• Built-in Blog and RSS feed


• Unlimited online forms


• Unlimited support from their private forums

I've been building websites for some years and I even have a degree in business management, but I'll tell you - I learned things about small business, online marketing and building websites that I never learned in college! I learned things about marketing online that I hadn't learned in the more than 15 years I've been online!

Honestly, even if you decide to try SBI! and learn enough to do it on your own, it's an investment in your life and your business, plus it's a business expense tax write-off for your craft store online website.

Maybe you're getting close to retirement and your know your employer isn't going to do much for you there as far as a pension. SBI! is also an investment in your retirement because you can build a craft store online that will be profitable enough to sell later on and use some of that cash to retire with easily.

There's just nothing like it anywhere else, no matter what anyone else tells you.

Do you have to use SBI! to have a successful website?

No. If you're already pretty experienced with HTML and CSS and online marketing, you can download SBI!'s free ebooks to learn everything you need for finding keywords and building websites, and if you're a good designer and already know enough about business and marketing online, you can do an excellent job without them.

But -- why take the risk if you can afford to have the best, right? If your business - or even you personally - can afford the investment, and since you can get SBI! for only $29.95 per month with a 90-day guarantee, there's no better investment to make, in my personal opinion.

Even if you decide to move your website to another host later on, for whatever reasons, you'll never regret and you'll never forget what you learned by starting out with SBI! to begin with. It's just that good!

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