Using Social Media For Your Business - Facebook

Hello again. if you've been following this business tips course from the beginning then by now you have learnt how to register your business name, register for tax, price your handmade goods and set up your accounts records, so now let's talk about social media.

 

These days social media is a big part of running a business and if you don't have a presence with the most popular ones then you are definitely missing a trick. There are lots of technical things to do with algorithms and post reach and many professional people that can help and explain all that, but for now we are going to concentrate on the simpler side of things. The truth is that I understand how some of it works but frankly much of it is beyond me. I do however try to keep up as much as possible with the latest news and views of the professionals. The internet is full of useful information so spending some time every now and again doing a bit of research can often mean gaining a lot of free knowledge that will help you progress and improve both your business and your efficiency. Perhaps doing just that is how you found this blog in the first place.

Facebook is by far my preferred social media platform, one reason is that I can do so much all in the one place. The down side is that it can become addictive and before you know it you've spent the whole day chatting, or is that just me? Firstly you need to set up a page for your business, you will need to have a personal profile to do that but I would imagine that you probably have one already. If not don't worry just sign up, its free. When you are logged on just click the little downwards facing triangle on the right of the top blue bar and you will see the option to create a page. Choose local business and follow the instructions, it's very straight forward but as always if you need any help just give me a shout. You can leave a comment below or find me on Facebook just look for Downland Crafts in the search bar top left.

That brings me an important point, be sure to keep your name and your branding consistent throughout all your online accounts, that way it makes it much easier for your customers to find you, interact with you and ultimately buy from you. A common mistake I see often on Facebook is people setting up personal profiles in their business name. This is not a good idea. For one it is against Facebook rules to run a business from a profile and they will shut you down when they find you, it may take some time but I have seen it happen many times to crafting friends. Another reason is because unless you make all your posts public your customers would have to 'friend' you to see what you have to say and if they decide not to send you friend request then your posts will not appear in their timeline. Now you may be thinking 'well that sounds ok, I am happy to friend my customers', but the question should be are your customers happy to become friends with you? After all they don't know you and by having to send you a friend request means they are giving you access to all their posts and personal information. Would you do that with a shop you are thinking of buying from? I think the answer is probably no. It looks much more professional to create a business page that your customers can 'like'. This gives them access to your posts without having to share any of their private information with you except their name and anything else they have made public.

On your page you can also set opening hours, add a link to your website or other selling platform such as an Etsy shop, add your contact details and other information on your business including displaying your logo and photos of your products. Facebook are constantly updating and adding features and we will go into these tools in more detail in a later post. When used correctly I believe this is a valuable extension to your business and provides an excellent online platform for your customers to engage with you.

I could talk about Facebook for ages, I have many pages and groups that I admin myself and a couple of groups that I co-admin. Groups are a great source of information too, they help me keep up with the latest trends, what the customers like and don't like, plus there are lots of selling groups as well. I hope this has helped get you started and in the next instalment we'll talk about Twitter.

 

Until next time....happy crafting

Trish

Related Topics:

Starting Your Craft Business

Pricing Your Handmade Goods

Keeping Records For Your Business



We're happy when you're happy

We've had this posh new video made for us, hope you like it!

 

Keeping Records For Your Business

Firstly I want to apologise for the delay in bringing you the next phase of our business course, unfortunately I was suffering from that really bad dose of flu that has been doing the rounds so was out of action for a while. Then something much nicer occupied my time as I went over to the UK for the CHSI Stitches Trade Show, after that I had lots to catch up on from when I was away, then it was time for our monthly Facebook sale. So as you can see it has been a very busy time lately but I am pleased to say I think I've finally caught up. Well sort of! After this blog post the website needs a desperate update so there's always something to do, but I absolutely love my life so am not complaining in the slightest. If you too are passionate about your craft business you will be happiest when you are busy. For me it's partly work and mostly fun.

Those of you who are following this online course have already learnt how to register your business name and register for tax, plus the all important how to price your handmade items. So now it's time to talk about keeping records for your business, including the paperwork you need to have and how to set up spreadsheets for the figures you'll need for your tax return.

As before I am writing these posts from the perspective of a small craft business being run on a sole trader basis. Whilst I do have experience working as an accounts clerk in 3 different accountants offices, meaning I have picked up a few helpful hints over the years, I am in no way a qualified accountant so you may wish to consult a professional for more information.

 

Basically your accounts need to show what comes in and what goes out of your business as in your sales and your expenses. The bigger the business becomes the more paperwork you may need to file but for now a simple profit and loss account will suffice and provide you the information you need to put into your tax return when the time comes.

You will need to have a Sales Book, a Purchases and Expenses Book plus a Cash Book. My advice would be to make up spreadsheets for these as it is by far the easiest way to keep your books. You may well want to keep a paper version too but that is up to you. If you do decide to do them via spreadsheets only, then make sure that you back up regularly and keep them on a memory stick or other storage device just in case your computer dies on you.

Your sales book is fairly self explanatory and shows the money coming into your business from sales to your customers. This is a sample of the type of columns you may find useful to have on your spreadsheet...

 

...as you can see you want to list the date, the source of the sale for instance you may have your own website, a physical shop, Etsy shop and do craft fairs. It's nice to keep a record of where your sales come from for your own research if not necessarily for your accounts. You will also find it useful to know how the payment was made for reconciling your PayPal and bank accounts. The type 1, type 2 etc. is something we use because we have different facets to our online shop such as paper craft supplies, jewellery making supplies, handmade greeting cards and handmade jewellery, plus we host craft & gift fairs so again it is useful to us to know which parts of our business are working better than others and which sections our customers fall into most. Our columns are therefore named accordingly so as to identify which is which. For us it has so far been a good mix, so having the different facets works for us. You on the other hand may only sell one type of product so may not need as many columns. The postage column is very useful as you can easily see then whether you are charging enough postage, too much postage, or have it just right. Sometimes, especially when you are selling from a website, you have a fixed price per order rather than if you're using a platform type shop such as Etsy where you charge per item, so keeping track of your postage takings and expenditure can be really advantageous.

 

Next is your Purchases and Expenses Book, again fairly self explanatory and shows the money going out of your business such as purchases for stock and materials, postage and packaging costs, bank charges, PayPal fees, etc. and may look something like this...

 



...again you want to list the date and the name of the person or company you are paying. The next few columns are determining which part of the business the money is paying for. This could include re-sale stock or materials for your makes, marketing materials such as business cards, flyers etc. Your own columns may look different from ours depending on your business and can even change from year to year depending on what your spending habits are. Sundries is basically anything that doesn't fit into it's own category and is generally for small amounts. It's not enough to just keep a record of your expenses you must keep the invoices themselves as well. The best way I find is to keep a file or folder with all the invoices, bank statements and other paperwork in for each business year.

 

The final one is your Cash Book and will look something like this...

 

 

...the purpose of this is to keep track of all the cash and cheque transactions that take place within your business. Use it to show what money has come in that needs banking and also what cash or cheque payments you have made, as well as what monies have been lodged and how much cash you have on hand.

 

Those are the Books that you need to keep to comply with your tax requirements, however, I also do a Profit and Loss page which gives me a summary of the Sales and Expenses at a quick glance and looks something like this...

 

All you need to do is bring the total figures from the previous sheets to show your total profit or loss for the year.

 

These days it is common to use PayPal and other similar payment providers to make sales without the need for cash to change hands and you should be able print out reports for these from your account. I certainly can from our Business PayPal Account and always print a copy annually to keep in our accounts file. These transactions will be included in the Sales Book along with all the cash sales but not included in the Cash Book.

So hopefully that all makes sense and you can work away on your own files and spreadsheets. As always if you have any questions you are very welcome to comment below and I'll do my best to answer them, if I can.

 

Until next time....happy crafting

Trish

Related Topics:

Starting Your Craft Business

Pricing Your Handmade Goods

Pricing Your Handmade Goods

How do I price my makes? This is one of the questions I see repeatedly in craft groups and social media platforms. Many people make the mistake of under charging when they start out which can make it difficult when you need to increase your prices at a later date. If you can start with a set formula from the beginning it will make your life much easier. Many crafters start their business on a small sole trader basis and with the current threshold being an annual turnover €75,000 they are often not required to register for VAT. For the purpose of this blog we will base our information on that and ignore VAT for the moment. So here’s the basic formula…

materials + overheads + time = cost price

cost price x profit = trade/wholesale price

trade price x 2 = retail/selling price

To put that into context lets say you make something using €1.00 worth of materials, that's easy enough so far, you can simply divide the materials you buy into component parts to work out how much each part costs you and how many of each you use per product.

What are your overheads? That can be lots of things including the time you spend sourcing those materials, money spent on websites and other outlets where you sell your crafts, perhaps you have an Etsy shop or do craft fairs, all these fees are costs on top of your materials. Now of course it's not easy to calculate how much to attribute to each item so an average of 10-15% would be considered normal. If we go by 15% that makes your total now €1.15 for materials and overheads.

Your time is a big factor that you can't ignore, if you were doing an office job or working in a shop you would get an hourly rate that is still important now you work for yourself. There are other people that will tell you to base it on your experience, that to me causes another problem. Yes at the moment you will hopefully be confident enough to not consider yourself to be a novice any longer so let's say an intermediate crafter, what happens when you become an expert? You would need to increase your prices across the board. €10 per hour is perfectly acceptable and you are definitely worth it. Say your piece takes 30 minutes to make, your time cost is €5.00 + €1.15 for materials and overheads makes your total now €6.15. This figure is what is has cost you to make the item, you are yet to make any profit so if you sold it for cost price you would only break even and effectively be selling it for nothing.

How much profit you make is a personal decision and I have seen everything from 10% to 100% suggested. 10% is not nearly enough to keep you afloat after all if you don't make any profit your business will fail. 100% is the minimum shops will be marking up your items should you decide to sell to them on a trade/wholesale basis, they of course have their own overheads to pay for so it's not as greedy as it sounds. You could go as low as 70% but why should you be making less than the people you are supplying? After all it's your expertise and creativeness that has produced your product. So, your cost price is €6.15 x 2 to allow for profit means your total is now €12.30 for your trade or wholesale price.

Finally take your trade/wholesale price and times it by 2 to get your retail or selling price. The final price for your item is €24.60.

There is one other price point to think of when selling to shops on a sale or return commission basis rather than on a trade basis as above but we will go into this in more detail at a later date, for now this formula will keep you on the right track.

Once you use this formula on your own makes you will see how your prices sit alongside your competitors with your target customers. Now I would be very surprised if at least one person reading this post, if not a few are thinking this woman is nuts, there is no way I can charge that! Before you dismiss the formula consider what you are trying to do and where you want your business to go in the future.

I have often seen suggestions such as take the cost of your materials and times by 3 for your selling price. This may work to self fund a hobby but will not sustain a profitable business as it doesn't take into account your time or overheads incurred while running your business. Even worse is when they ask people's opinion on 'what do you think this is worth?' or 'how much would you pay for this?' My advice would be to make friends with a spreadsheet where you can input your formula and keep your pricing structure consistent. It's also much easier to simply input the cost of your materials to get the final figures than it is to work out prices for each individual piece manually.

Sadly not every craft is suitable for turning into a business, some labour intensive products would work out far too expensive to sell competitively unless you can either reduce the price of your materials or your time spent making it. There is nothing wrong with still crafting these pieces for fun....I certainly do!

In our next instalment we will be focusing on keeping records for your business, how to set up spreadsheets and the paperwork you need to have for your accounts.

Until next time....happy crafting

Trish

Related Topics:

Starting Your Craft Business

Starting Your Craft Business

It can be a daunting time when you decide to turn your craft hobby into a business and it's often difficult to find the information you need so the idea of this business tips course is to help you find that information and gain knowledge of how business works.

Now before we start I want to make it clear that I am a crafter and in no way a business expert nor trading as a business advisor, however, Downland Crafts has now been running for over 5 years and that means myself and my husband Tom have picked up a few things over the years that I will attempt to share with you approximately once a fortnight over the next few months. You should also note that we are based in Ireland so the knowledge we'll be sharing will be in relation to businesses based in Ireland, I would imagine that a lot of countries will operate in a similar fashion but please check with your local authorities in case your requirements are slightly different from ours.

I'm involved, and indeed run, a few pages and groups on Facebook that deal with many different aspects of the crafting community from hobbyists to fully fledged businesses. This allows me to see things from lots of different angles and yet the same questions seem to pop up time and time again. That is why I decided to start this course of business tips to help answer some of those questions and clear up some of the confusion out there. I plan to talk about pricing, copyright, social media, keeping accounts, outlets for selling your makes, trade sales and more but first of all let's talk about making your business official.

As soon as you start selling your makes you are legally required to register for tax regardless of whether this will be your main income or not. You will most likely be setting up as a sole trader which is a simple enough procedure by submitting a TR1 registration form and you can then submit your tax returns under self assessment each year. Visit http://www.revenue.ie/en/business/running/registering-tax.html#section1 to register your new business for tax. We'll go into more detail regarding tax in a later post.

I would advise that you also register your business name with the CRO, this can be done online very easily. Visit http://www.cro.ie/ena/business-registration.aspx to register your business name, it costs €20 to do this electronically or €40 for a paper filing. By registering your business name you will legally be able to operate a business under that name plus you will also receive a certificate with your business number and protect it from being registered in your country by anyone else. This is a must if you want to open trade accounts down the line with suppliers as you will often be asked for your business registration number.

There is lots helpful information to be found on the Citizens Information site including how to identify your own business type and plenty of links for more detailed information http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/types_of_employment/self_employment/setting_up_a_business_in_ireland.html

Every thing I know has been learnt as we went along and yes we made a few mistakes along the way as I'm sure you will too. A lot of what you will do in the beginning will be experimenting with different materials, methods of construction, advertising strategies and more until you find what works best for your particular niche of the craft market.

Well I'm gonna keep it short and sweet for this first instalment as I don't want to overload you with too much to start with. In the next instalment we will be tackling the question that comes up the most in our Facebook groups, pricing. It can be a minefield so I'll do my best to explain it without jargon or too much waffle.

If you have any questions, or something to add you are very welcome to comment below.

Until next time...happy crafting

Trish

New Years Resolutions

 

 

So have you made any new years resolutions? And who's broken theirs already? I don't tend to make any but I do have plans for the year ahead so I suppose it's the same thing, sort of.

 

I have a massive personal stash of craft supplies and really don't need to buy any more for quite a while but will that stop me?....No! I do have an excuse though as yes I am buying stuff for my personal stash in the sales, but I am also securing fab new suppliers and stock for the website to replace the items we currently have in our own sale. If I'm going to be honest with you, then I should say the main reason it won't stop me buying new stuff is that I have zero self control when it comes to all card making and jewellery making supplies, especially stamps and beads. As you can probably guess this makes me a terrible saver too. If I had a rainy day then I would have to sell some of my craft stash....perish the thought...the stuff of nightmares!!!

 

Every year plan to be better at blogging for one but that only seems to last for a while until I get into something else. I am terrible at getting distracted and starting a new project which means that I forget the last one I was working on. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this....you are welcome to make your own confession in the comments below...lol. I do have plans for this year including making this blog better by adding projects and business tips. Half the problem was that I didn't know what to write about so only told you about our products and events but now finally I understand how this blogging thing works....I think! If you could tell me what you like and what you don't as we go along that would be really helpful for me and I'll do my best to learn what interests you and what want to see here on this blog.

 

I've been designing some new stamps which is one of my favourite things to do. It takes me a little while to do each A6 sheet as I can't abide wasting space so try to cram as much on each sheet as I possible can. Then of course I am a fiddler and keep thinking 'would if be better if I....?' so change it at least a dozen times before I am finally happy...then I come back to it the next day having had a dream about another way to tweak the design...what am I like?

 

Well I have some work to do so I best get on with it, we're opening again properly on Monday so will probably have lots of things to catch up on. Plus we have many, many, many more items to add to the clearance sale throughout January so I need to get those ready too. It takes a surprising amount of time to organise and list items for sale and if you have your own website you'll know what I mean. If you know me then you will know that I am passionate about the craft industry and would never complain about a bit of hard work. I absolutely love being a crafter, I think most of us will agree that craft is not just a hobby it's a way of life.

 

Until next time...happy crafting

Trish

 

Happy New Year

 

Wishing you all a very happy new year and may 2016 bring you happiness and lots of crafts. To help you get of to a great start our sale has just started over on our website www.downland-crafts.com so pop over and grab a bargain. We will be adding new items throughout the month so be sure to keep checking back so you don't miss a thing.

 

If you haven't done so already then sign up for our newsletter, that way you'll be kept up to date with all the news and special offers. There is also an option to join the members club for free that way you can access the members special offer page as well for even more bargains.

 

We will be opening again on the 4th January and have lots of plans for 2016 including a new range of stamps. Following the success of our first range we have been busy designing lots of new ones.

 

Thank you so much for your support and 2015 and we look forward to continuing to provide you with top class craft supplies, handcrafted items and events in 2016.