Now an affiliate of Craftsy

I am now an official affiliate of Craftsy.  I jumped through all of the hoops and was finally approved.  Now I can offer their classes on my website and they even have a widget for yarn on sale.  I have uploaded all of the links for knitting classes.  I need to go through and do the same for crochet classes.  It would also be good if I could split them into Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced classes.  I will try even though I don’t know much about the classes themselves, I can sort of tell from the titles.  Then I get to decide which class to take myself.  As an affiliate I get to take one class free–up to 49.99!  They also offer free classes that I think I will look at and review.  I also posted my first crochet pattern ever!  I am very excited.

I am learning a lot about doing business as an affiliate.  The group that manages Craftsy offers dozens of other affiliate programs that I can sign up for as well.  I am thinking of adding shutterfly’s Christmas card ads to my site.  There are so many possibilities.  The catch is to only do a few and not clutter the site with affiliate advertising.

I have a site!

Well, it isn’t a site just yet but it will be!  I have a domain name and the name for the site.  I have a hosting service and I am working out the best way to set it up.  Now that I’m getting into it I don’t know if Weebly will work the way I think it should.  It might be better to go with WordPress which I’ve used before in maintaining a site, although I’ve never built a site before.  I like the color scheme in Weebly and I hope I can get it to work but if not it’s better to know now than later.  I spent today brainstorming a list of posts and photos that I want to put on the website to start with.  I almost think that content will be the hardest part to complete in the 2 weeks.  I have a start but it will be a lot of writing, taking photos, re-sizing photos, etc.  I am excited and a little nervous.  I think this is going to be a great experience.

Starting to get some traction

I have almost completed project 1 and have decided I want to do a blog on crafting and making cookies. I think I will call it cookies n’ crochet. I would like to use Craftsy as an affiliate to sell craft supplies and classes online. I will ask my friend, Amber if she wants to contribute here ideas once in a while. She is very crafty and she likes to write.
I think before I actually embark on an affiliate relationship with Craftsy, however, I may take a couple of their free classes and purchase some yarn and supplies from them–just to see how it goes.
I am starting to get excited. I invested in a large bag of sugar and other cookie making supplies this week. I even made my initiatory batch of Chocolate Chunk cookies today. It is slowly coming together. And I’m not freaking out anymore. Very nice!

Second Week Down

My second week of school is almost under my belt and I have yet to think of a good web business.  Oh, I’ve had several really good ideas.  My favorite is a political site that would have sample ballots and run downs of all the candidates at the local level.  But that is too big a scope for this class and all my other ideas have high competition and sky high bid rates for ads on Google.  I’m starting to get a little frustrated.

My first project isn’t getting off the ground too well, either.  Of 20 “brainstorms” I only have about 10 and am dragging to come up with anything more.  There’s not that much that I do.  I have been cut off from the world for so long that my tiny sphere just doesn’t translate well into business ideas.  Maybe I can do something with crafting.  I do a lot of “practical” crafting and could probably make some videos about it.  I will add that to my list.

Other than my lack of creativity, I seem to be understanding concepts well.  I have gotten good grades on all the work turned in so far and, like I keep telling my husband, my grades are all still green.  So I will pursuvere as my high school principal said.  (It is a combination of pursue and persevere.  He said those were the two things we should do in life but he only wanted us to have to remember one word.)  It certainly seems applicable at the moment.

In the beginning there was stress

I wasn’t too stressed about this class until I read the syllabus and watched the intro videos and realized I had to create an actual business.  Since then I’ve been pretty much freaking out.  I don’t know what to do for the business.  I don’t know if I have time to have a business.  And, of course, I can’t afford NOT to have a business because I need a good grade in the class.

The first few steps have been pretty painless so far I’m just waiting for that mythic moment when I have to make a decision.  What will this business be like?  How will it run?  Do I really have any worthwhile product or skills that I can actually sell to the public.  It would be nice if I thought I did.  Amber seems to think I should sell heating packs like the ones I made for her boys.  Joseph likes this idea best of all the ones we’ve discussed.  I just don’t know what makes my heating packs stand out.