I think this is the 4th time I've written one of these blogs now. How nostalgic! Welcome Crafties, to the blog where I share my goals for Infiniti Crafting Company for the incoming year. Each year has it's high and low points when it comes to my expectations but hey, that's life!
Before I get into this year's goals, I wanted to address/point out some changes to the site that I've made in the last few weeks.
The mobile site has been updated for a better browsing experience
A lot of the visitors of my blog are mobile users, I mean around 50% in any given month. It came to my attention that some pages of the site where either slow or very cluttered when navigating and that's no fun. So, I've made some changed that seem to have remedied the situation.
You can now leave reviews under products purchased on the site
Going forward, you'll be able to leave product reviews under products to help other people and the help me improve. Or maybe you just want to say hi. We look forward to hearing from you!
New Instagram widget on the blog page
While updating the mobile site, I discovered that the old feed was no longer visible...BOO! I've found a new add-on that better displays the IG feed. My only complaint is that it doesn't display the reels...ah well... I guess that gives you a reason to give me a follow 😉.
Menu font change
I also changed up the menu font at the top of the page from the previous script-type font. I felt like this was easier to read.
Product Review reel on the shop page
I thought it'd be a good idea to post past reviews on the site. The widget I was going to use before is gone now so, I made a slide show at the top of the shop page.
Let's dive in!
I didn't want to make a long drawn out list this year and I then realized that all my goals could fit in these 5 categories. My grand mission for this year is to build on engagement with the brand. In the last year, I saw some amazing growth on my YouTube channel, for which I am eternally grateful. In November 2020 I was just chugging along when I hit 1k at the end of the month, now I'm looking at over 6100 Crafties in my community. It's been amazing to watch how fast things are taking off and I sincerely thank you all for watching me and contributing to my small business dream here.
In the past, I've run paid ads in hopes of building more engagement with my other socials which was a pretty mixed bag of results. Over the last few months though, I've built up the gall to make reels on Instagram and a few Shorts on YouTube. By far, the reels have been the most successful so, I plan to keep making them throughout the weeks and months of this year. I'll be sure to alternate showing products and goofing off for sure. The growth and exposure that comes from doing shortform content is almost scary but, in a way, I think it's preparing me to do more live content as I become less afraid of being silly.
Yup. You read that right, I'm planning some live content, mostly on Facebook though as I finally try to grow that page. I was planning to do one in January but I want to make sure that I have enough content to discuss to justify it. So far, the first one will be mostly introductory and perhaps a Q & A type thing. More on it in the future!
Regarding this year's pattern schedule... 4 is my minimum but, I don't think it'll be like last year where I released 13 new patterns for both knit and crochet. This year I'm going to focus a little more on my paid patterns. Any revenue that comes from my paid content helps to support all of the creative content that I put out, webhosting fees for this blog, as well as household emergencies. That being the case, I want to keep making fun and/or fancy designs that I can market and sell.
It's been almost a year since I launched everything and about 90% of all interactions with my content has been from the free patterns. It's not a bad thing necessarily because I'm glad that people are over all enjoying what I put out but, I'd like to balance it a little more this year so I can keep it all going. That being said, the free library will remain but, it won't be as frequently updated this year as I shift my focus to more advanced projects.
That leads me to the next goal for 2022. It's my ambition to make $1k off my handmade goods and written patterns. Not only would that cover webhosting costs for the blog but, I could probably start upgrading the studio! It'd also be a huge boost of morale for my little maker heart. It's been a fight trying to get things off the ground since I started this in May of 2020. I made about $136 in 2020 and $68 in 2021 so you might assume that I've been working at a loss these past couple of years... and you'd be correct.
Nevertheless, I'm going to keep my head up and experiment with new marketing strategies this year to generate more traffic to my products and hopefully sales will follow. I have a good feeling about making the shortform content as it does waaaaay better than paid ads as far as reach and interaction go.
I didn't realize when I made this list how each topic flowed into the other but here we are.
This year I want to work at being consistent on YouTube again. I fell off a bit after August 2020 because of everything I had going on with transferring to university among other things. I still managed to upload videos but, I had a lot of holes in my upload schedule and it wasn't because I didn't have content ideas, I lacked motivation. Moreso, I was burned out and I felt convicted about it every step of the way. My hiatus' seemed to hit brick walls in one way or another that negatively affected my productivity. This time was different and I took an extra two weeks off to make and upload videos as to get that consistency back. I'm thoroughly looking forward to the content I have for both YouTube and Rumble.
The last and most important goal on my list is to keep God at the forefront of my business. We're all imperfect and it can be really easy to not pray about things or consult God before we jump in head first into a new venture. I know I'm guilty of that. At the end of the day, regardless to my own frustrations, I know that Infiniti Crafting Co. is a vision that the Lord, my God gave to me 7 years ago now. I want to make it my mission to continually keep Him at the helm and inquire for His guidance through this journey.
I have a few exciting things planned for this year that I can't reveal just yet, but stay tuned, thanks for being a part of my community and Happy Making!
