You’re getting traffic from Pinterest – what do you do next? Is product creation the next step for your business? Is this a good way for you to monetize your site?
Today, I’m talking with my friend Barbara Hobart about creating your own private-label products. Barbara really demystified the product creation process for me. In this episode, she breaks it down in a way that isn’t scary or overwhelming.
If you haven’t gotten around to it yet, it’s time to download the Simple Pin Pinterest Planner. The Planner includes over 20 pages of stat tracking, monthly trends, and so much more. And it’s totally free!
You can get the planner printed off and bound at your local office supply store. If you’d be interested in purchasing an already bound copy of the planner from Simple Pin Media, leave me a comment on this blog post!
From Playwriting to Creating Switchplate Covers
Barbara started her career as a television writer and producer. She’s been a writer for many years now. Back in the ’90s, she was on a break and spending a lot of time at home. During this time, she worked on many home improvement and decorating projects.
During this time, she also started creating decorative light switch plate covers for her home. Several friends suggested that she sell them. Thinking that this might be a good idea, she hired some stay-at-home moms to make the plate covers for her so that she could sell them. At first, she didn’t make a lot of money, as she only sold them to friends and to area shops.
She was visiting friends in London and wanted to gift them with some of her plate covers. She discovered that they couldn’t accept them since, in the UK, the plate covers have the wires embedded in them (you have to have an electrician remove them). Upon this realization, Barbara set out to make a cover that didn’t require rewiring.
She launched her company, Home Plates, in England, nine months later.
After that, she started creating other products. Today she teaches brands how to create their own custom products.
The Case for Product Creation
Why Should I Create Products for my Business?
Why send your people to Amazon or another affiliate when you could be selling your own products on your own site?
For Barbara, it’s just that simple.
It takes time to figure out what your product is and how to create it, but it’s worth it. What is the foundation of our business? What do you want to do with your audience once you’ve attracted them?
Don’t send your followers away from your site once you attract them. Keep them engaged with your brand.
Bloggers spend so much time, effort, and money to create content for their sites in order to attract followers, only to send them away to someone else’s site to make a purchase. For Barbara, that seems counterintuitive.
The most overlooked way to build your business is to create a custom product that best represents your brand and is useful to your followers.
Common Myths About Product Development
These are the most common myths and objections that Barbara hears about product creation:
• It’s really expensive and takes a huge investment.
• You need a huge following.
• You have to order a huge amount of product to get started.
• You need to wait until you’re well-established in your business.
Why promote someone else’s product for 5 years if you could be promoting your own from the beginning?
3 Things About Product Creation that Might Surprise You
These are the 3 things that I heard from Barbara in our conversations about product creation that really blew my mind:
1. It’s not that complicated. Anything seems hard when you don’t know what you’re doing – SEO, Pinterest marketing, creating beautiful content, etc. But if you take someone’s course, you could learn how. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s not hard.
2. How do I create the right product? Are there fact-finding steps? Look at your brand and figure out what you are doing that solves a problem for your customers. Look at what you currently promoting on your blog and what products are you promoting from other sites. If you want to be considered the expert in your field, you want to be promoting yourself, not other brands.
3. How much money should I have to spend? Every single product costs a different amount. It varies based on what you’re creating. If you are a meal planner and you’re sending them to Amazon to buy food storage containers, then they become Amazon’s customers. Amazon also controls how much money you make through your affiliate link. If you’re creating your own products you can create your own product profit margin. You get to decide how much money you spend and make.
If you made a list of every single item that your ideal customer uses, you could put your logo on every single one of those products.
For example, if you’re a food blogger, you could be selling a cookbook (like this Simple Pin client), spices, food storage containers, recipe cards, etc.
As content creators and product sellers, we also need to be thinking about how we can also be supporting other small businesses.
Ready to Create a Product? The Next Step
Once you have your idea and the money to execute a plan, contact Barbara and she can teach you her step-by-step of product creation. It’s important to not feel afraid about creating a custom product.
Your audience is looking to you to solve their problems. Share with them the things you’re using to make your life easier. It’s really not that hard.
You don’t have to feel overwhelmed by the idea of creating a custom product. I hope this post has helped you feel like it’s something you can attain and achieve if you’re interested.
Leave us a comment and share with us any questions you might have for Barbara about product creation. We’d love to hear about your product idea as well!
—
Once You Have a Product, Check Out These Episodes:
2 Comments