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Topics: Business, Expanding to Full-Time

Q.
I am fairly new in the jewelry making business (two years) and my business started on a small capital. I have great designs and I sell very well at home parties and at booths but I need to market my business a lot more to be able to increase sales enough to make the business a full time sustenance for me. Please advise how to market effectively on a low budget ($200-300). I have a website but shut down the shopping cart as I had to cut costs and there were no sales through the site. Please help me make this a SUCCESS!!
- Malvika
A.
I admire your desire to earn a full-time living from selling your jewelry. To start, consider supplementing your own jewelry selling with doing repair work for local jewelry or department stores, teaching and other part-time opportunities so you will have multiple sources of revenue.

I'm not sure if the budget you cited above is for one month or one year, and that makes a big difference. The best resource for marketing on a "shoestring" budget is Jay Conrad Levinson's now-classic book Guerilla Marketing.

Although there are many great marketing techniques that don't cost a thing, keeping a small budget may be a waste of money rather than a savings. Consumers rightly associate the quality of marketing materials with the quality of the jewelry represented by those materials. For example, if you print an invitation to a trunk show on thin paper and do it on your own printer instead of having it professionally printed, prospects touching that inexpensive paper and seeing that tell-tale "home-printed" ink quality may assume that the quality of your jewelry is low-budget too.

If you view marketing as an investment, instead of an expense, you may find your results improve as you invest more.

Good luck!

- Dr. David Weiman
Dr. David Weiman is a respected expert in the field of marketing and selling handcrafted jewelry and a well-read contributor to Fire Mountain Gems and Beads "Ask the Experts". He is the author of Introduction to Marketing and Selling Jewelry, The Jewelry Selling Answer Book and The 5 Keys to Selling Handcrafted Jewelry. A free newsletter on selling handmade jewelry is available at his website: www.marketingjewelry.com.

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