Why Your Crochet Business Needs Recurring Revenue

Hello and welcome to the Crochet Business School Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Thomas, and let's talk about recurring revenue and how it's gonna be the savior of your crochet business. And I don't mean that in a joking way, very seriously. Recurring revenue is what gives you the freedom to be flexible with your hours and not have to crochet every minute of your day.

So one of the biggest issues with having a crochet business that relies on saying what you make is that if you are not crocheting, you are not earning. If you can't make enough sales to cover what you need to live off. You are not gonna be able to have a full-time crochet business. It can be great as, um, a hobby business where you're just trying to get money for your next, um, project to, you know, buy the yarn or if you want to just bump up your household finances a bit.

But if you want to make a living from your crochet, then you have to make enough money day in, day out to make a living from. To be able to pay your bills, to be able to lead the lifestyle that you want. And when you are just selling what you make, this becomes really, really difficult because there's only so many hours in a day that you can crochet. If you want to take time off, you are not gonna get paid because you are not crocheting.

You are literally selling your time for money. The answer around this is recurring revenue. So what this means is you do the work once. And you sell the product over and over again.

So typically this is digital products, online services, crochet patterns are the most well known example. They are recurring revenue. You create the pattern, you do the work once, and then you sell the file that you created over and over again on repeat. The only work that goes into it after that is promoting the pattern to your audience to.

And new people so that that pattern keeps on selling. But that's how recurring revenue works. You do the work once and then profit from that one piece of work over and over again for years to come. There are whole different ways of, you know, making money this way.

And it's not just crochet patterns. You can make them from memberships. I did a podcast episode about that a few weeks ago. Um.

Online courses and classes, you can prerecord them and sell the files, um, ads. So you could create, um, YouTube videos, get them monetized, qualify for YouTube monetization program, and those videos can earn you ad income. Same from blogs. You can have ads on blogs.

As frustrating as they can be for those was reading it. This is how Sykes make their money. You can make money from blog ads. There are lots of other different ways as well, but these are some of the most well known ones.

And at first these things, they sound really scary. If you've never done anything like it before, it's a whole new world and a whole bunch of fears can come up to with it. Whether you are able to cope with the content for videos and blogs. Whether you're, you are creative enough to write a crochet pattern, whether you are techie enough to actually make these things work, but these are self-contained fears.

They're very rarely based in reality, and you've already learned a ton in discovering how to sell your crochet, considering that you probably didn't have any business experience when you started. You've learned how to create social media pages, how to create newsletters, how to write posts that sell, how to write descriptions, how to list your crochet on a site for sale. You've learned a ton of stuff already, and it's not actually that big of a leap to go from all that to then creating these, um, recurring revenue streams.

Technology these days is made so much simpler than it was even five, 10 years ago. You don't have to code. Most of the programs use drug and drop editors, which means they are really, really simple to use. Fears that you're not capable.

They're all appear and has nothing to do with the reality of the situation to put it, frankly, it's all in your head. And that's phrase, it sounds really condescending, but it it is actually true. The fear we have. It is all about our fear of something new.

It's fear of being judged. It's fear of being visible because these things, they're not things that a lot of people we know do. You might be the only person in your circle of friends within your family who is looking into this sort of thing, and it can leave us feeling like we're going to make ourselves an outsider. Like, we're gonna make ourselves different.

People like me don't do this sort of thing, and that's exactly what I thought. It didn't even occur to me for a long time that I could do crochet patterns, like who am I to do that? It's like surely there's some sort of qualification or something, and it almost feels like you're waiting for permission, but really the permission comes from yourself because there are no qualifications. It's just do it.

And as long as you put the effort into learning what it is that you need to know and the best way forward, and all that stuff, which is freely available on the internet for you to go search for, it's all there waiting for you to learn is long as you do the learning. There is absolutely no reason why you can't. The tech isn't that complicated. If you know how to edit your pictures to sell your crochet on social media or on sites like Etsy, then you know how to edit your photos for your crochet patterns or to sell your courses or for your membership.

Whichever route you are taking, you can do that part. You know how to create a social media page to promote yourself. That part you already know. You already know how to do Newsletters.

At least I hope you do, because to sell effectively email is really is one of the best ways to do it. But again, if you haven't had an email account before, drag and drop builders, the software is really simple to use and very easy to set up. If you can set up a social media page, you can set up an email account to send newsletters, editing videos, drag and drop builders. I am recording this podcast as a video.

And I'm recording all in one go. I'm using a drag and drop editor called Descrip, and I will be able to just take out the bits that I want and add a, um, beginning screen and end screen Very, very simply. I get my graphics from Canva, which is a drag and drop editor. Really simple to use.

It's all really tech friendly. I'm not the techiest person in the world. I don't, I, these things kind of drop bogle the mind, but I managed to do it and I've managed to do fairly simply. I have never coded, ever.

I've had my website for six, seven years now. Never coded all drag and drop builders. All really simply done. I look for the simplest solution possible because if it's complicated, I'm not gonna make it happen.

And yet I've managed to build websites. I've got newsletters, social media, I've got YouTube going on. It's all there, and I can get it all done with no complicated tech, all drag and drop builders, which means it runs as simply as possible. It does not take me long to edit these podcasts.

I can do it in 30 minutes flat because it's made simple and my setup is simple. As with anything, you can make these things as simple or as complicated as you want to make it, and if you are determined for it to be complicated, you will make it complicated, but it doesn't need to be that way. Recurring revenue is what stops your crochet from taking over your life, because what is the point of that? You may as well go work for a corporate nine to five.

You'd probably make more money doing it that way and get more time off because you've got. Days off planned into your contract. What you want is a business that works for you, not you working for this complicated monster machine that eats up your hours every week and you end up working all the time that you need and you don't get the time for the family that you wanted. You probably started your crochet business because you wanted more flexibility for family time.

To spend it with the kids, to be able to have more time for yourself to get control over your life, not work the nine to five, take time off when you need it. If you are just selling what you make, that's not going to happen. It's very, very difficult to do, especially when you make it your career and how you earn a living recurring revenue and incorporating that into your business. Is how you get that flexibility, how you take that time off without losing money.

I can wake up every morning to sales from my Etsy and my rivalry, and it's just notification sitting on my phone today. The sun is shining outside. I took a few hours off to go and walk my dogs in the sunshine. I'm not worried about losing money.

I'm not worried about if I don't do the work, the money won't come in. And it's because I've got a business built around recurring income. Now. It has been my choice that I'm not going to sell what I make anymore.

That doesn't have to be your choice. You can still do that if you really want to. But having a form of recurring revenue, like the patterns, like memberships, like YouTube channels, that gives you the freedom to stop crocheting if you want to, to take time off with the kids if you want to, and still have money coming in. This is about setting up a system that allows you the flexibility that you started this for in the first place.

And although it sounds scary, it is going to be what makes your crochet business sustainable over the long term. It's something that needs to be done to be able to make your crochet, your career to make a living from it. Without having to work 60 hour weeks without having to sacrifice time off with the kids, without having to lose out on those opportunities to make those memories and live life. This isn't about changing your plan.

It's not about failing. It's about taking the next step up and realizing that there are just more opportunities in front of you than you first realize. Because many of us who start saying what we make, we don't realize what the possibilities are. We just think crocheting all day sounds fantastic.

I'd love to do that. Let's make it happen. And you start it without knowing what's really involved, what the finances are really gonna work out to be. And it takes time to come to that realization.

But when you are ready to start thinking about that, that's what Crochet Business School is here for. I want to show you how you can make a living from your crochet using these different ways of recurring revenue or so many different ideas available. And if you do want to know more about that, then. Download my 12 different ways to make money from your Crochet.

It's A PDF that's free to download, free to access right now, and it will show you all the different ways that are available. And the vast majority of them are recurring revenue. So you can find that link in the show notes or go to crochet business school.com and it is on the front page.

So I would love to know your thoughts on this. Have you ever thought about. Adding recurring revenue to your crochet business. I ever thought, well, that's going to be, or have you started and tried?

I'm not sure where to go next. Let me know in the comments. I would love to hear, because this is what I created crochet business school for, to take away that frustration, to take away those long working weeks and so that you can take the time off when you need and still keep your crochet business running and the money coming in without having massive to-do list when you get back. So any questions, please do let me know in the comments or you can get hold of me at hello@crochetbusinessschool.

com. I would love to hear what you think. So thank you for listening and I shall see you next time for next episode. Bye for now.