How To Make Money With Your Scrapbooking Blog – Without HARD SELLING!

I am never shocked when a fellow scrapbooking business owner tells me that they don’t have a website of their own…or that perhaps they have a blog but that they don’t do much with it other than the occasional update.

Although there are THOUSANDS of fantastic scrapbooking businesses online – not all of them are really doing the BUSINESS THING – so much as they are doing the show and tell thing.

It’s a fine balance. I understand that. You don’t want to be a sales person, you don’t want to be pushy, you don’t want to alienate people from your site ….etc. etc. etc. I totally get it.

HOWEVER…you will never be able to keep your scrapbooking website or scrapbooking alive and keep sharing freely unless in some way shape or form you are earning some revenues for the time you spend on it.

Now, you do not need to earn DIRECT SALES revenues from your website/blog. (Meaning, you don’t need to direct people to a shopping cart page where you TRY to sell them something – as soon as they visit your site).

IN FACT: You don’t even need to have publicly visible pages showing that you have any products or services to sell at all. This is a choice of course…but if you are really finding it difficult to SELL and TELL on your site, this may be what you need to do.

So lets talk about the TELL not SELL option first.

If you have a list of loyal subscribers who get regular email updates from you…you can share your sales links with them and only them. There are ways to “exclude” pages from the search engines as well as regular visitors. There are ways you can simply direct the chosen traffic you want to the pages you want.

First you must determine how you need to exclude. If you have a blog type of site, chances are there is a good “exclude pages” plugin for it. Once you install yours – then you can create your new page and select the EXCLUDE PAGE from navigation feature. Then you simply copy and paste the URL of that page into an email that you are willing to share the link in – that then directs your subscribers to the sell page.

If you have another form of site, such as one that is designed from scratch using a program like Dreamweaver for example (that is not a content management system as well)…you may need to edit your ROBOTS.txt file to “dissallow” search engines from crawling that page. (If they don’t crawl it – they can’t send direct traffic to it). Here’s a page with more info on editing this file: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html.

Whichever method you choose, it should keep you out of the drivers seat when it comes to leading COLD visitors directly to sales pages.

You may never make sales from those visitors. **That’s not to say you cannot – because you can, but if you are uncomfortable with that type of relationship with new visitors – sometimes its better to get them on your email list first and then work your comfort level up to it – as they warm up to you as well.

Happy Business Planning to You!

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