How to Price Your Scrapbook Products and Services

One thing you’ll have to figure out before you get started is how you are going to price your products or services. This is the part that many entrepreneurs dread, because they are afraid of setting the wrong price. If you set your prices too high, you will get fewer customers. If you set them too low, your profits won’t be as high, and you may have trouble covering your expenses.

The best thing you can do before setting your prices is conduct lots of research. Find products or services that are comparable to yours, and make note of the prices they are selling for. You can do a great deal of the research online, but it is also important to check prices locally. Prices for the same things do tend to vary by location.

Here are some pointers specific to the different types of products or services you could offer:

Custom scrapbooks

Do a Google search for “custom scrapbook artist” or similar terms. Make note of the prices and how they are figured for several artists. Most charge per page, according to page size, plus the cost of the album.

Once you’ve gotten a good idea of what others charge, determine how much you feel that you can charge. Keep in mind that you will need to cover the costs of your materials and make a profit. You may need to charge a little extra for certain materials that you don’t normally use. You could also elect to leave enough room to offer discounts on larger or multiple albums. This is a great way to get more business.

Scrapbooking classes

Search the web for “scrapbooking classes,” and search the local classifieds for classes in your area. Pricing will largely depend on what materials you are providing, if any, and how in-depth the class is, so your pricing may be quite different from that of others.

Books or ebooks

If you’re writing an ebook, search the web for ebooks of similar theme and length. The costs of writing an ebook are quite low, so the primary concern is charging a reasonable price for the information offered. You also do not incur extra costs with each copy, so the more ebooks you sell, the higher your profits.

Hard copy book pricing is a bit more complex. If you have a publisher, you can work out the pricing with the company. There are also self-publishing options available, in which you pay a certain price per book printed and sell them at a markup of your choice. If you go that route, you’ll need to take distribution costs into consideration when setting your prices.

Scrapbooking supplies

You’ll need to set your prices at a level that will cover the price you paid for the product itself, plus overhead costs, and still leave you with a profit. If you’re running a bricks and mortar store, it may be some time before you see a profit. If you’re selling online or through mail order, you’ll have to take into account shipping and marketing materials.

Another thing to consider is the manufacturer. Some companies won't allow you to resell their products at a certain percentage below the MSRP.(manufactured suggested retail price)

Website or blog 

When you’re getting started with a website or blog, it will probably be difficult to get top dollar for advertising because you haven’t built up any traffic yet. This is where affiliate programs come in handy. Once you get your site or blog all set up, you can sign up with them and include your affiliate links and banners in your posts or pages. When someone purchases through your link, you get paid. You could continue to use affiliate marketing only to monetize your site, offer paid advertising once you get some traffic coming in, or do some of each.

Working For Free

Yes, you’re in this to make money. If you weren’t, it would be a hobby, not a business. But in order to make a name for yourself, you might need to do a little unpaid work at first.

As a custom scrapbook artist, people will want to see some of your previous work before they pay you to do an album for them.

Sure, you could show them scrapbooks that you’ve created for yourself. But while that would give them an idea of your skill level, it wouldn’t really show how well you can take the requests of others and turn them into the finished products they want.

You don’t necessarily have to do an entire book for someone at no cost. Just a few framed pages for different people could show how you incorporate your style and their ideas to make a work of art. This could also provide a way for you to get testimonials from happy customers that you can use in your marketing materials. And those happy customers might refer their friends, family, or coworkers to you as well!

Teaching free mini-classes in scrapbooking is a great way to gain new clients whether you are a scrapbooking artist, teacher, or writer. If you are doing them locally, using simple and inexpensive materials will cut down on your costs. If you have a webcam, teaching a short free class online could generate interest in what you have to offer.

Special reports are another thing you can give away to promote your scrapbooking business online. You can make the reports available through your website, or partner with another online marketer with a complementary target market to include your report as a free bonus with her product. This will help to establish you as an authority on scrapbooking and allow you to gain traffic to your site.

back to Getting Started Scrapbooking As a Business

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