Hive, Business & Social Media

Thinking back about my thriving online business

As I've been back in my creative vibe lately, I've been thinking a lot about my online business again and have decided to pick up selling handmade items again. Years ago, I sold handmade children's accessories online (my own webshop mostly), and I have to admit that these years were probably the happiest years looking at my work history. I had a constant feeling of inspiration that kept me going and made me design new things constantly. Regarding starting a business, I threw myself in the deep as I had no friends that owned a business, neither did my family. After doubting for several years, I just decided to do it and register my business. My boyfriend at the time didn't support me at all, on the contrary, he rather saw me fail! While his family was filled with entrepreneurs (that believed in me). Personally, I had no knowledge about running a webshop or doing the marketing that comes with it, neither did I have any contacts for my supplies before I started. I literally started from scratch. Heck, I even started without a starting capital!

A $25 investment was all I had

What I did was something I can recommend to anyone that wants to start a business but doesn't have the capital to invest in supplies. I only used about 25 bucks to buy supplies (not from a wholesaler, so more expensive to start with), turned that into finished handmade products, and sold it with profit. This was re-invested and so on. I'm still proud of how I managed to do that all by myself, while still learning everything about running a business. I was a bit afraid about how to run the administration so I made sure to have an accountant that helped me with my quarterly taxes, just in case.

Free services vs paid services

When I started, I could not even afford to buy hosting for the webshop I was actually looking to get. The monthly fee was something that was a lot of money for me (I think it was 30 bucks a month) as I had no idea how quickly I'd find customers. So I started everything with free packages. I regret that though, I now know that the perks coming with the paid webshops/hosting offer very convenient payment methods and I've seen that this is a reason more customers find their way to the shop. On top of that, if you pay for a website with hosting and the company is ranked high in Google, this saves you some marketing to start with. Either way, I learned a lot from just doing it and not being afraid to take a risk at some point to start paying for services. It truly pays off to pay for some things. I know that now.

The best investment for my business: Canva

When I discovered Canva, I've been using the free version for a while first. After a while, I tried the free month of Canva Pro and instantly knew that this was something I needed to invest in soon to take advantage of the possibilities Canva offers when having a Pro account. Although I have not used 10% of what I'm interested in, I have made huge progress in formatting my content. I truly start to enjoy browsing through my posts more and more now that I'm finding the peace of mind to add that little extra to my content on Hive. It's $120 a year, but so worth it!

Inspiration vs. endless browsing

After I had to close the business due to personal circumstances, I slowly disappeared from social media. I truly could not find time or inspiration to engage on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Writing and engaging on Hive was already time-consuming enough and being on Hive actually gave me inspiration rather than the killing vibe I felt after browsing on Facebook.

I already said goodbye to Facebook years ago, to stay in touch with my daughter's kindergarten (and have an easy built-in translation function) I had to open an account there again. I was trying to avoid it at the time they asked me to, but now that I have it, I have to say that it makes it easier to keep up with everything. I only use it for this purpose and never spend my time browsing on there like a zombie anymore (back in the days, I used to)!

I never really understood Twitter

Years ago, when I still had an active Facebook account that I also used for business purposes, I only used Twitter to share my Facebook messages. I never got any engagement out of it, let alone customers. Facebook, on the other hand, has brought me many new customers and I totally dug using it. It all went smoothly without any struggle, while Twitter was still a huge mystery to me until at least a year ago.

Hive gave me a purpose to explore Twitter again

For the first time in my life, I gained an interest in trying to understand Twitter. Why? Because of the very active & supportive #hive community out there! Slowly I start to understand Twitter and get more engagement from it as well. I'm not checking Twitter on my phone all day like I used to do with FB in the past, but I do check it several times a day now. I now have 376 followers and most of them come from Hive or the NFT communities that I follow. Of course, this amount of followers is nothing yet, but I'm trying to work on that.

My Twitter account

My profile pic is my favorite Hive punk, Helen Wilkinson. She can promote hive just by being there as my profile picture. I'm still searching for what I can use for the banner of my profile, I haven't found inspiration yet for that banner, hoping to get that done the next week. Until then, I thought I should share my Work In Progress mandala drawing. Mainly to remind me that I should finish it soon. :)

Ever since @hiveposh was introduced by @acidyo, I've been using it to share my hive content on Twitter, trying to always use meaningful tags and, if possible, the communities I'm posting the content in. The small token of appreciation (Posh Tokens) is extra, I mainly enjoy the fact that Hive content gets shared around the web thanks to the posh initiative. You can say what you want but Hivers do a nice job of promoting hive on social media.

If you have a Twitter account and want to follow me, here's the link to my Twitter, although I don't follow everyone back, I do try to follow as many Hivers as possible. Even if we don't share the same content by the first look on the profile. Hope to see you there!

Instagram

Now let's talk about Instagram. I have to confess something. Instagram has never been on my radar before, I probably didn't even have an account until a year ago when I created one so that I could follow a few of the people that I knew were sharing updates on Instagram instead of Twitter. Just a few days ago, when I started to share my Christmas Crafts series and noticed they had Instagram potential (they feel right to share there), I decided to start sharing my hive posts there. Not all of them, but the craft tutorials.

My handle there is the same as on Twitter: "makehivethrive". As you can see, I have 5 followers and still have a long way to go to build a following. But then again, I've never shared my Instagram before as it was empty so why bother? I hope that in a few weeks from now, Instagram has found some followers that like to see all the crafting tutorials that I'm sharing there. Once this is lifting off a bit, I will start adding the content to one of my domains to start focussing on getting traffic that way. But, step by step, as I want to do it right.

I'm thankful for the supportive Hive community

Hive has inspired me to write again, seeing other people create kick-ass creative content has opened my eyes again, I'm that creative person as well and I should make the most out of it. I enjoy doing it and I enjoy creating tutorials. I have a plan for the future for these tutorials as well, but for now, I should keep doing what I love most (besides writing in general) because I've noticed that it makes me happy and gives me so much energy and new inspiration as well. I seriously have the next batch of tutorials lined up in my head already as I keep getting inspired. I have never met so many talented people on one platform. You are all inspiring in your own way!

My recent tutu tutorials are now turning into a business again

Not only will I be selling the tutus during the next month for the Christmas period as this is the best period to sell them as photo props, but I will also create matching accessories like I've done with so much love in the past. I never thought that making a tutu from partially recycled material would lead to me actually going to sell these. I won't have a webshop for them (yet) as this is too much work for now, but sell them on different platforms and people can order them in other colors as well. I used to have a webshop focussed on photo props like this only, but back then I didn't make the tutus myself. I'm super happy that I took the step to try this and we'll see if it works out with the tutus. If not, I know the other handmade items I'm going to create next week will always be desired over those that are being sold in the stores here.

Things are now truly unfolding quickly (and I love it!)

The crypto markets are doing well and other work is going great too. It's been a true blessing for me that I can now focus on these creative things I love doing again, after quite a hard month where I didn't do much of anything in general (but grieve). Maybe this traumatic event was needed for me to break the cycle of having all these plans and ideas but being held from launching as I had too much chaos in my mind to see what the actual order of execution needed to be. I honestly am not looking to sell tutus full-time, I like to have a healthy mix of those projects I have in mind so that I can create a diverse workweek for myself. With this approach, it also won't matter if one-month tutus won't sell much, as I have other income streams.

In five years from now, I see that all these things have nicely come together and I've managed to launch these businesses one by one at the right moment in time. Mark my words!

Let's Connect

If you want to connect, give me a follow on my socials linked below:

Instagram
Twitter