Sell crafts through your own website

If you want to sell crafts through your own website, your first order of business is creating the site. And, fortunately, that’s easy to do with intuitive web-design templates offered by many web hosting companies.

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Wix, Strikingly, and GoDaddy, for instance, promise to help you create a site for free in less than an hour. The steps are simple. To illustrate how easy it is, let’s say you decide to build a free site on Wix.

Choose a template

Wix will ask you what kind of site you’re building and what you want to include with it. Do you want to add your Instagram feed, for instance? Do you want to add forms so you can develop an email list, or offer a customer forum? Based on your answers, the site will present a number of site templates. All you have to do is then edit the template to plug in your own information and photographs.

Choose a name

You’ll want something that is intuitive and says something about what you’re selling. Best practices for search involve including (a) your product (b) your location, and (c) a description. This might lead you to choose a name like: Modern Pearl Jewelry of Pasadena. Or Los Angeles Custom Woodcraft. You’ll plug your preferred name into the site’s domain name bar and it will tell you if the name you want is available.

Publish

Hit the publish button and you’re online.

Choose a plan

To keep your site running, you’ll need to pay a monthly fee to the server — in this case, Wix. The bright side is that these fees are small. Wix’s basic ecommerce plan costs just $16 a month. And you can buy plans that have more bells and whistles, including support for less than $30 a month.

(Click here to sign up with Wix)

Notably, Wix isn’t the only server that can help you build a site. Strikingly, GoDaddy and dozens of other companies have similarly intuitive web-building tools that you can use for free. (You can find pricing for all three of these sites on SideHusl.com’s “tools” page.) Wix just happens to be a favorite among artists because of the beautiful themes it offers as part of its free web-building package.

(Click here to sign up with GoDaddy)

Market

Realize, however, that having a site isn’t enough. People have to find it. And that means, you need to market your site through Facebook, Instagram, and, perhaps, Linkedin, TikTok and other forums.

(Click here to try Strikingly)