How To Start a Sewing Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to build an audience, get your ideas out into the world, and possibly make some (or a lot) of money while doing what you love. 

Getting started and taking the first steps can feel like a huge challenge. Building a website, planning your content, and finding the right business model are just a few of the tasks you’ll need to do to succeed.

Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge and tools you need to feel confident and prepared to start your sewing blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

The fact that you are reading this means you already know what you want your blog to be about - you are going to write a sewing blog! But to stand out among the competition you will need to think a little deeper. Do you want to write a dressmaking blog? A sewing blog focused on making your own outdoor gear? A hand-sewing blog?

The more you are able to clarify what your blog is about, the easier it will be to focus your content and produce the blogs your audience is looking for.

There’s a quote that fits this situation perfectly:

"If you try to be everything for everybody, you will be nothing to no one."

Establish Your Niche

When creating a new blog, you need to find your niche. This is the corner of the market that you have the most knowledge about, the place you can establish yourself as an absolute authority. If you try to take on Sewing Beginner all at once, you will find yourself squarely outmatched and very disappointed.

You need the right sized subject, one that is not as broad as “sewing” but not as narrow as “sewing machines from 1964”. A subject that is too broad is one you cannot differentiate yourself in. One that is too narrow will leave you without enough content to write or with too small an audience. 

Some examples of niche sewing blogs are:

• Vintage Sewing Blog - Blog by Gertie
• Sewing Projects Blog - Sew She Can
• Dressmaking Blog - Tilly and the Buttons

Name Your Blog

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s a great time to start brainstorming a web domain name for your blog. You’ll want to pick a name that’s brandable and available. Use our domain name tool to check if your name is available. If it is, scoop it up before someone else gets to it first.

Brand Your Blog

The strongest and most memorable businesses are built on a solid brand. When developing your brand, think about what your business stands for. Customers and clients are looking for companies that have a compelling brand, as much as they are shopping for high-quality products and services.

Creating a logo for your business is vital for increasing brand awareness. You can design your own unique logo using our Free Logo Generator. Our free tool will help you brand your business with a unique logo to make your business stand out.

Finding Your Audience

Having a good sense of who is going to be reading your blog is one of the best ways to know what type of content to create, how to shape it, and, ultimately, how to grow your following. With a clear understanding of your niche, understanding your audience should come more naturally.

Finding your target audience - the people you want hanging out on your blog - isn’t only statistics and demographics. It requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and what they want. Your target audience is the people you’re writing to when you write your blog.

Are you writing to an audience that has never sewed or one that has plenty of sewing experience? You must consider who you will focus on when writing so that you can set the proper tone and create the kind of content that will attract that audience.

Create a Persona

One way to understand your audience is to create a persona of your perfect target audience member. This essentially means creating a mock-up of the ideal person you hope to reach with your blog.

Here is an example of a target audience persona:

Having a persona for your perfect audience member helps you to visualize and understand who you are writing for and provides important direction to your content.

Be Your Own Persona

Another popular way to find your perfect target audience is to be your own persona. Many of the best products and services come from scratching your own itch. It’s possible you’ve searched for the perfect sewing blog to read, came up short, and decided to create it yourself. This makes you the perfect audience member for your own blog.

This can be a great strategy for creating highly effective content. If you’ve noticed a meaningful omission in blog content, chances are you are not alone. By writing personally satisfying content you are likely to reach an audience in search of the same things.

Where Is Your Audience Hanging Out?

No web content exists in a vacuum. While you should strive to create uniquely entertaining content for your blog, your target audience is almost certainly already out there reading other blogs, engaging on specialized forums, and using social media. Finding the sites where your audience already mingles is a great way to discover what topics they are most interested in, what language they are using, and what valuable content you can add to that mix.

Some examples for your sewing blog may include:

• SewingBeginner.com
• Sewing4Everyone.com
• SewWhatAlicia.com
• TheSewingRoomAlameda.com

Visiting these sites is also a great way to begin engaging with your audience before your blog has even gone live. Jump into conversations on forums and in comments sections and get to know the people you’ll be writing for. This is a great, organic way to build relationships and direct people to your blog in its early days. Sharing your passion with like-minded people will make them more excited and passionate about supporting you in your blogging endeavor.

How Will You Present Your Work?

Traditionally, when most people think about a blog they picture written content on a page. However, there are several different ways to present your ideas on your blog, depending on your subject matter and target audience. Every blog will thrive with different formats, so it’s important to think carefully about how to best showcase your content before you start.

There are several effective methods of presenting the material on your sewing blog. They include:

Evergreen Articles

As the name suggests, evergreen articles are composed of content that lasts. These articles are designed to have a long shelf life and continue drawing readers to your blog over time. They are typically long-form, text-based articles that delve more deeply into a particular topic.

A sewing blog makes creating evergreen content easy because the basics of sewing remain so constant over the years. Sure, new technology can make things faster and give you more options, but the fundamentals remain the fundamentals. Write evergreen blogs that cover the fundamentals of sewing and you will have content that continues to attract new readers year in and year out. You can also write reviews of sewing equipment that people love. Your opinion is unlikely to change, which means the reviews stay evergreen.

Videos

While the video format is not new, the explosive growth of YouTube and the advent of new and innovative video-based tech like Snapchat and TikTok have shown the true power of video as an online medium. While you may think that creating video is much more difficult and expensive than writing your content, you have access to all the technology you need to make high-quality video content right on your smartphone.

While the niche you choose will definitely dictate what kind of video content you can create, there is one particular type of video that many sewing bloggers focus on - the how-to. If you write about how to perform different sewing techniques, how to make dresses, how to make blankets, and so on, you have plenty of topics for videos. You can start off with basic videos and improve your skills and production value as you go along. Begin making videos sooner rather than later so you give yourself plenty of practice.

News-type Articles

News articles or other “announcement” type content can be a great way to gather new readers. One benefit of news content is the short-term but powerful increase in search volume during an event. While this bump may be temporary, it can be a great tool for grabbing new readers who end up coming back for more.

Writing about current events or new happenings also means there will typically be less competition for readers. Other blogs and media sources are all getting the information as it develops. Since the base of knowledge available is smaller, this gives you a good opportunity to add your own flavor to the article.

The downside to news-type articles is that they tend to lose popularity much more quickly than evergreen content. While the interest for an event may be very large one day, the next day people may already be moving on to the next shiny object.

There is always news in the world of sewing, whether it’s new products being released, new trends to jump on, or issues with existing products that pop up. You can cover all of these areas with a focus on your niche and create regular news-type content for your readers. You will probably discover news topics as you go about your regular blog research. Make note of them and write news-type posts as soon as you have time because what is compelling news today will be old news tomorrow!

Image-heavy Content

While most people expect to be reading when they visit a blog, image-heavy content can be very appealing and break up your text-focused posts to keep people’s attention. Depending on the topic of your post, displaying multiple images per page on a single subject can give your audience a better sense of what you are trying to convey.

While some topics may take to images very easily, like a car blog or a celebrity gossip site, others may require some deeper thinking to make this strategy work.

A sewing blog gives you many opportunities to emphasize images in your content. You can choose from stock images of fashions you enjoy, sewing patterns, and more. You can also take your own photos of your sewing process, such as if you are creating a how-to. 

You may not feel like you have the photography skills to create the quality of photos you want on your blog, but don’t worry. Your photography will improve significantly just with practice - and even faster if you study how to take better photos. If you are interested in taking your own photos, it is better to start now so that you can improve over time. Your audience will also enjoy watching your progress!

Mix and Match

Your blog needs a variety of content delivery strategies to appeal to the widest possible audience. While some people will gravitate towards text, others will be attracted to images, videos, and so on. It is completely normal to have a preferred type of content, one you like to create more than others. Just try to motivate yourself to step outside your comfort zone periodically to try out new styles. You may discover that you love making videos, taking photos, or creating other types of content.

How To Make Money From A Sewing Blog

One of the main reasons people start blogs is to generate some sort of profit. Whether you’re looking for a few hundred dollars per month or a job-replacing income, blogging is still an excellent way to make those dreams a reality.

There are a few great ways to make money from a sewing blog:

Display Ad Networks

Display ads are the simplest way for websites to generate any sort of income. Ad networks, like Google Adsense, are fairly simple to be accepted into, and implementation onto your site is streamlined and clean. If you’re just beginning to see some traffic to your blog and want to turn this into dollars, display ads are where most people start.

There are a few downsides to display ads, however. The first is that some feel they detract from the user experience on your blog. Most people have been to a site where large ads pop up and block the content in the middle of reading. This can be distracting, frustrating, and even drive people away from your blog. While it’s possible to clean up and control the type of ads you use, it can be a constant battle to balance effective ad placement with aesthetics and readability.

The other main downside is that they don’t pay a lot. These networks generally use a pay-per-click (PPC) model which, depending on the niche, can pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.50 per click, most on the lower end.

While display ads are a great way to make your first dollars, you’ll want to make sure any negatives they bring are worth the profits they provide. Once you develop a solid following, you can consider moving on to more lucrative and effective profit-making options.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate have become much more popular over the past few years, as they take the payment model from pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This means you can refer as many users to an advertiser’s product as you want, but will only get paid when the user makes a purchase.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from an affiliate marketing setup. The advertiser pays nothing until a sale is made and the publisher enjoys much higher commissions than the pay-per-click model.

There are a variety of affiliate programs that you can use on your sewing blog. You can choose from affiliate programs specific to sewing, like SewingMachinesPlus, and more general programs, like the Amazon Affiliates program. 

SewingMachinesPlus offers a 10% commission when your audience makes purchases on their site. The commission rate is respectable, especially when you consider that the average order value is $442. They offer a 100% money-back guarantee as well, so your readers can make purchases with confidence.

The Amazon Affiliate program gives you a small commission for every sale you facilitate. Since Amazon carries so many different products, it is quite easy to link to them when you write about any type of product you might want to encourage your readers to purchase, from books to sewing supplies and more. 

When you promote products and businesses that you believe in, it is a win-win situation for you, the other business, and your readers!

Sell Digital Products

Digital products are an online entrepreneur's dream. You create the item once, then sell it as many times as you can, with little to no cost of reproduction. This means that you can scale your business to infinity.

Examples of digital products are:

• Ebooks - A piece of writing, generally in PDF format. These can contain literally anything that your audience would want. They can either be true book-length all the way down to a few pages of content. Depending on your niche, audience, and subject, these can run from $1 to $100 per sale fairly easily.
  
  
• Gated Content - This is content that is served on your website just like any other article, except that is behind a “paywall”. If you are creating content that you don’t want to be released to anyone but your true followers, you have them sign up for an account on your site and charge them a subscription fee for access. Generally, authors charge anywhere from $5 to $200 per month for access to gated content.
  
  
• Online Courses - If you can teach a skill that your audience wants to learn, you can create an online course to sell to them. These courses can be formatted in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but most nowadays are video courses. Online courses can sell from $10 to well over $10,000 per course, obviously depending on the subject matter and audience.

A good example of a digital product that a sewing blogger could create is an online course for a particular type of sewing. You could ask your audience which questions they have or areas that they need help in and then design your course based on the answers you get. Creating a course can be time-consuming, but if you produce a quality course you can sell it for an excellent price. A sewing course could sell for $100 or more.

Sell Physical Products

Selling physical products is the original money-making strategy. You gather an audience that is hungry for something, you sell it to them, and everyone wins. You don’t have to be an inventor, designer, or manufacturer to sell products. Sites like Alibaba and AliExpress import already-made items into the United States and sell them for a markup.

The two main methods for the distribution of these items are: dropshipping and self-fulfilled.

Dropshipping is a method where you advertise a product on your site that you do not own. Once you make the sale, you inform the manufacturer, who will handle the shipping and handling to the end-user. While this is simple because you don’t have to worry about storing or shipping any items yourself, you’ll find that the margins can be quite slim.

Self-fulfilled sales are much more of a hands-on approach to sales. You buy the item from the manufacturer, store it, then ship it to the end-user once you have made the sale. While there is much more work involved, you’ll find that the margins per sale are much higher.

As with most blogs, your sewing blog should start small when it comes to product sales. While you could eventually design and sell high-end sewing products, at the beginning it is best to offer affordable products that are easy sells for your audience, such as sewing notebooks, personally designed sewing patterns, branded stationery or apparel. You can buy such products for a few dollars apiece and mark them up considerably before you sell them to your readers.

While it can be very profitable when done well, selling products is not generally recommended for the beginner blogger. It’s best to secure an audience that you know will be receptive to the product before making a large investment in product development or acquisition.

Create A Service

Providing a service is another very basic money-making plan. If you can provide a service that you know your audience needs, you have a viable business on your hands.

Whether this service is delivered through one-on-one interaction with the user, through a piece of software that you develop, or by directly completing a task for the user, this is a great way to monetize your skillset and your blog.

Depending on your niche, you could offer one-on-one coaching for those that want to learn to sew like you, as well as group seminars covering similar subjects. Or, you could offer to sew items that your audience orders directly from you. It all depends on your interests, skills, and your niche. 

You can charge a premium for your time when you have a popular blog. Just keep in mind that it is easy to overcommit when you experience high demand and can charge a lot for your services. Try to remain focused on your blog, because it is your blog that drives your business. Learning to balance your services and your blog can be challenging, but eventually, you can strike a balance that satisfies your audience and your financial needs.

Next Steps To Get Your Sewing Blog Started

Now that you have the strategies in place to build and grow your own blog, check out our free course: How To Start A Blog.

This course includes all the essentials on how to get your blog out of your head and onto its own website. Starting a blog is simple and inexpensive, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t start today!

Free Course: How To Start A Blog

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