Home Jewelry Business Success
Articles, Tools, and Resources

Home Jewelry Business

Imagine quitting your day job to play with beads all day long in your home studio... (Ideally in the woods or by the water. Mmmm... dare to dream :o)

OK, maybe that's stretching it for some of us. Maybe you just want to make enough to support your bead habit! I bet the majority of handmade jewelry business owners started out as enthusiasts looking for extra bead budget cash. (I know I did!)

Well, unfortunately, there is a lot involved in making your home jewelry business a success. Here are some jewelry business articles and resources that should help you get started:

What You'll Find Here:

Articles about Various Aspects of Running a Home Jewelry Business
Arts and Craft Fair Information and Resources
Arts and Crafts Business Information
Free E-Courses and Newsletters
Places to Sell Your Jewelry Online
Jewelry Business Software
Website Tools, Web Hosting, and Traffic Generation

Home Jewelry Business Articles

Sell More Jewelry By Blogging!
A blog is an excellent tool for selling your jewelry online. In fact, many jewelry artists sell their work exclusively from their blogs. Read how you can sell more jewelry by blogging too.

Pricing Your Jewelry
Do you wonder how to price your handmade jewelry? Learn some common pricing formulas and how to use the power of the internet to help you decide your price point.

Pricing Jewelry and Other Business Questions
Marjorie from Washington asks some questions about starting up a home jewelry business. Read my response.

Sell Your Art or Craft at Juried Shows
If you sell your art or crafts at shows, fairs, and festivals, you can increase your profits by focusing on selling at juried shows. Home jewelry business expert Rena Klingenberg teaches you why, and how to go about it. Read this jewelry business article by Rena Klingenberg.

Arts and Craft Fair Information and Resources

Find Fairs Festivals and Craft Shows at FairsandFestivals.net - Comprehensive fair and festival calendar and resource for Craft Vendors, Art Vendors, Commerical Vendors, food Vendors and Music Vendors.

Arts and Crafts Business Information

Inspiri-art-and-craft.com At Inspiri Art and Craft, you'll find in-depth information on running a home craft business. This site includes tips about where to sell your art, how to create craft show displays and how to promote and manage your craft business.

The Home Assembly & Crafts Directory details over 250 home assembly and crafts jobs. Artisans often hire others to reproduce their design for resale in the arts and crafts market. This directory offers information about companies looking for people to make dolls, sew, put together model kits, assemble jewelry etc. Typically the company will provide you with the materials, you assemble, and you get paid per piece or per hour worked.

Free E-Courses and Newsletters

Marketing Your Jewelry - the Jewelry Seller E-Newsletter
An informative newsletter full of advice for marketing your home jewelry business. (Free newsletter by the Marketing Director of Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist Magazine)

Free Fairs and Festivals Newsletter, Tips, and Tricks
Another good free resurce. Offered by fairandfestivals.net

Where to Sell Your Jewelry Online

Ebay

Ebay is an online auction site where you can list anything from magic circles and cornflakes shaped like states (really! I've seen it - I think it was the Iowa(?) cornflake that sold for $13,000 or something crazy?) to boats, cars, and even estates.

Ebay may not be the best site for selling jewelry since many people are looking for deals, but that said, I've seen a few people who do seem to be doing well on Ebay.

For a peek at some of those doing well selling handmade jewelry, you might want to check out the following sellers:

Bracken Designs : Check out the nice, large pictures, extensive description, and clear policies.

Tracy Pettingill : A good example of higher end artisan jewelry that sells well on Ebay. Very nice, professional auction layout.

(I suggest when you list jewelry anywhere, Ebay or otherwise, you don't follow her example and add snooty comments about people stealing and copying your work. I've seen comments on forums where people seem to think it is smart marketing, but I would suggest that she sells her jewelry despite her arrogant commentary. Have a difference of opinion about my comment? Let me know :)

Ebay Jewelry Selling Resources:

Cheryl Coccaro has made a good living selling jewelry on Ebay. To learn more about her home jewelry business success tips and secrets for selling your jewelry creations on eBay click here.

Etsy

This is a third-party selling site specifically for handmade items.

Create your own online shop here quickly and easily. And cheaply too. Perfect for the home jewelry business owner.

At this increasingly popular website, you can create your own shop, list items very inexpensively ($0.20 for 4 months at time of writing) and ease into the world of the professional jewelry designer.

A few caveats though: Jewelry sellers are a dime a dozen on Etsy so you have to be distinctive and unique in order to stand out. You also need to do some outside marketing too. If your jewelry is generic, do not rely on "build it and they will come".

You can do well with jewelry there, but you need to differentiate yourself and market yourself well. (You might want to check out Social Networking - Selling Jewelry Online the New Way for some great strategies for marketing yourself online).

Other online sites:

I'm not that familiar with these sites, but you might want to check them out as well.

Mintd: Describes itself as a global collaborative space for artists, designers and musicians to sell their work and connect to new markets.

RubyLane: An online artisan jewelry and vintage collectible site. Monthly fee to run a shop on this site. Has a very traditional feel and probably attracts a more mature (and possibly more affluent) clientele.

Yessy:Offers a 14-day free trial, $59 per year thereafter+ 10% of sales. Gallery type setup.

Books

Books and printed resources that will help you jumpstart your home jewelry business: Check out my book recommendations on my jewelry business books page.

Website Tools and Resources for Online Business Owners

Domain and Webhosting:

1and1

This is where I buy domain names. They have a really easy user interface, lots of tools and free downloads, and great customer service.

SiteBuildit!

(SBI!) Web hosting and business building in one. I highly recommend them.

Why? This is how I build this website!

SiteBuildit! webhosting includes complete A-Z training (great for non-techies like me), takes you from market selection, to domain name selection, helps you choose what content to add - based on actual search engine data, and how to create pages that offer value to your customers and make them come back for more!

My story:

I've been online for about a year and a half or so. Flailing really. I wanted to figure out a way to build a jewelry related business so I could stay home with my kids. I've had a number of websites. Long story short, lots of websites, didn't really know what I was doing, and I got no traffic.

With SBI! I followed their step-by-step video tutorials and built a new website. From the date of inception here's what happened. I went from 8 visitors in my first month to 300 visitors per day in 5 months using only search engine traffic!

To learn more about SiteBuildit! Watch the SBI! Video Tour

Want to ask me about it? Ask anything and I'll personally answer any questions you have about SBI!. I love SBI!. I'm not ashamed to say it. If I could marry SBI I would.

Traffic Building Tools

30 Minute Backlinks

Learn how to get hundreds of links, quickly and easily with this tutorial series.

30 minute backlinks teaches you how to builds massive amounts of one-way links to your site.
takes about 30 minutes
you can duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate as many times as you wish to grow an army of sites linking to you.

Do you know of a great jewelry business book, tool, or web resource?

I'd love to add it here. To let me know about a jewelry business resource, click here to go to my contact page.

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