30: Creating a Craft Cash Flow: Turn Your Passion Into Profit with Brandi Mahon

Brandi Mahon is the creative owner of Stamp Me Some Love, host of the highly successful 4 day Card Maker Success Summit, and the course creator of Craft Biz in a Box.  Card making is her hobby, but her passion is bringing creators together and helping them build their creative businesses. She loves throwing parties and is a master networker.  Hailing from Kentucky, she lives with her wife and 3 fur babies.

Creative entrepreneur Brandi Mahon takes you behind the scenes of crafting for a living. She shares her step-by-step blueprint for monetizing a craft, from creating a healthy email subscriber list to offering valuable digital products. Brandi reveals her own struggles and successes in her journey, as well as her favorite strategies for growing an engaged audience. Whether you’re a hobbyist looking to make a few extra bucks or a professional crafter looking to build a successful business, this podcast will provide you with all the resources you need to monetize your craft. Tune in and learn how to turn your hobby into a money-making machine!

In this episode we cover:

• How to monetize a craft hobby

• How to create a successful email list, offer useful freebies, creating digital products, and hosting classes

• The beauty of making money while doing something you love

Summary:

Brandi Mahon, the creative owner of Stamp Me Some Love, the host of the highly successful card maker Success Summit, and the course creator of Craft Biz in a Box, recently appeared on the HobbyScool podcast to discuss how to monetize a craft.

Drawing from her years of entrepreneurial experience, Brandi offered a wealth of advice for anyone looking to make money from their passion. She suggested that the first step should always be to create a healthy and growing email subscriber list by offering freebies. Content in various forms, such as blog posts, podcasts, and videos, should then be created to engage with the audience and build relationships.

Once an email list of 1,000 people or more is established, Brandi recommends creating a small digital product, such as a class or pre-recorded video, in the price range of $19 to $49. Her signature course is a low ticket item that incorporates a lot of different people and products.

It’s clear that Brandi is passionate about helping others monetize their craft in a sustainable way. As she put it, “just because you love to do crafts does not mean it’s going to be an easy thing to do in terms of developing a business.” It’s clear that with the right guidance, though, anyone can monetize their craft and make money doing what they love.

Mentioned In This Episode

• Where you can find Brandi: Website

• Don't forget to join our wait list for the next HobbyScool online learning summit. Our summits are free to attend and you can be the first to know when the next summit launches by getting on the wait list here.

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Transcript:

[0:00:02] Dr. Destini Copp: And my special guest today is Brandi Mahon. Brandi is the creative owner of Stamp Me Some Love, host of the highly successful card maker Success Summit and the course creator of Craft Biz in a Box. Craft making is her hobby, but her passion is bringing together creators and helping them build their creative business businesses. She loves throwing parties and is a master networker hailing from Kentucky. She lives with her wife and her three fur babies. And Brandy. I have a ton of questions for you today. I'm so excited to jump into this topic, but before we begin, all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience a little bit more about you and how you help people? And I want to know a little bit more about your three Fur babies.

[0:00:54] Brandi Mahon: Well, thank you, Destini. Thank you so much for having me on. This is an honor, trust me. I love everything that you guys are doing over there, and I'm so excited to be here.

[0:01:06] Dr. Destini Copp: So tell us a little bit more about you and how you got started and kind of your journey there.

[0:01:11] Brandi Mahon: Sure, absolutely. I am a lifelong entrepreneur. I've been my own boss since the early 90s when I was just a young baby, and I had an interpreting business, which I still have. I'm a licensed sign language interpreter for the deaf, so I've always kind of been in that entrepreneur type business atmosphere. But I started to get into different crafts actually since childhood, but got really serious about it in the late 20, 17, 16 ish. And I decided I wanted to learn how to make cards, just kind of a random hobby. And so I found a local Stamping Up Demonstrator and went to one of her classes and kind of got the bug as far as creating paper crafts and creating cards and that sort of thing. And Stamping Up actually is like a multi level marketing type business. And if you join as a Demonstrator, then you get discounts on products and stuff like that. And then if you're successful in building a team and getting lots of customers and of course, you can make money doing it. Well, I did that for about a year and a half. And although I love the company, they do have a non compete clause. And I wasn't finding that team building in a multi level marketing type atmosphere was really kind of my vibe. So I decided to step down from that, and I started blogging. And at the moment, it was just sort of blogging and using affiliate links.

[0:02:53] Brandi Mahon: I wasn't really making a ton of money, but I really enjoyed the process of creating content and sharing my love of crafting with anyone who really wanted to follow me. It wasn't until about 2020, before COVID hit that I decided that I was going to take my crafting skills online and started teaching through Live Zoom classes. And of course, I thought I was going to be the next big thing because nobody was doing it at that time. And then come March, then COVID hit and then everybody's starting to scramble, so folks are all popping up all over the place teaching online. And so I had to do another Pivot in my business and I decided that I was going to host a summit. And as you and I are both in Summit in a Box, that course kind of changed my business. It was a life changing event for me, I will say. And since then, I have developed a business that allows me to work full time on it and am able to more adequately contribute to my family's household bills and that sort of thing. So it's been a life changing event and I am so excited that I love teaching other people how to do this because I think that if you love what you love, your work, it's not like work, it's just something that you can do and be creative. And so that's kind of been a side business that's kind of come out of this where I am now teaching other crafters how to create businesses they love, surrounding their hobbies.

[0:04:42] Dr. Destini Copp: And I love that. And I love what you said about if you love what you do, like your passion, it doesn't feel like work.

[0:04:50] Brandi Mahon: Absolutely.

[0:04:51] Dr. Destini Copp: I think that is so powerful. And truly, I feel like I go to work every day and it doesn't feel like work because I do love what I do. So walk me through a little bit more in terms of basically what you do. You started doing these crafts and you loved what you were doing, decided to start teaching online, teach other people how to do it. And I remember back in 2020 when kind of the world changed, right?

[0:05:23] Brandi Mahon: Yes, online.

[0:05:24] Dr. Destini Copp: The online teaching people previously were like, how do you do that? Like, I've been teaching online back in the Dark Ages, back in 2005, as a university marketing professor, people would come up to me like, are you really a real teacher? Can people even really learn online? And we know now that it is one of the most powerful ways to learn and you can just do it out of the comfort of your home. And kids nowadays, even small children can learn that way. So walk me through a little bit more how you would recommend somebody if they have this craft passion, what are the first steps that you would recommend that they would follow to start making money from what they love doing?

[0:06:18] Brandi Mahon: Well, that's an excellent question. And I look back at what it took for me to get where I'm at today and I would say the number one thing that any online business owner needs to have is a healthy and growing and thriving email subscriber list. And so that's one of the first things that I teach my students, is that before you have a website, before you start spending all your time on social media, you need to develop something that will attract your ideal audience and get them to give you their email list. And what we call that in our niche is freebies, basically. And so learning how to create the freebie, how to set it up so that someone can go to a web page, doesn't have to be a full blown website, but just a web page with an opt in form. And the delivery method in which you can give that freebie to your audience member, I think hands down, is probably the most important thing any crafter can do. And that is why I have decided that I am going to host a bootcamp in March. I don't know when this is going to be aired, but we're going to be hosting a boot camp called Craft Biz Boot Camp. And the main focus is going to be on creating that first freebie, learning how to set it up on the internet and how to collect those email addresses. So then now you've got somebody to network with and to engage with. We all know that the social media algorithms out there are not designed to help small business owners. And in fact, there was a time last year or the year before where both Facebook and Instagram went down for almost a day and a half and my business did not suffer because I had a nice, healthy, growing email list, and I was able to reach out to my audience members via email and maintain the same rate of sales regardless of whether or not social media was up.

[0:08:39] Dr. Destini Copp: And I have to say, Brandy, I completely agree with you. That is the number one thing new business owners should focus on. Don't worry about social media. You can set up your accounts if you want, but don't spend a lot of time on social media. And I think that's the first place that a lot of people go is, oh, I got to do my social media accounts. No, you got to start with the email list. Let's assume that somebody has their free gift set up, they have their landing page for somebody to go sign up for their free gift, and they have their email welcome sequence, the emails that are sent out after somebody signs up for their list. What would you recommend that they do next?

[0:09:22] Brandi Mahon: I would recommend that they start creating content. And this can come in various different forms, just a simple blog post or if you want to spend the time creating that content for your favorite social media channel. But the main thing is that once you have that content that you are actually reaching out to your audience members via email on a weekly basis to derive them back to those platforms where you have this free content for them to consume. I think that this develops over time, the like know and trust that folks develop as they get to know you and get to know your personality and your style. The other caveat I would say that with that is that video is king right now. Or queen, if we want to call it in that terms. And not only showing your craft, but showing your face and developing a relationship with the camera, I think is very important in terms of developing those relationships with your audience members.

[0:10:34] Dr. Destini Copp: I think that's a great next step. Start creating that content, whether it's a blog post, maybe even podcast. Podcasting is my thing. I prefer that or doing it on social media or a combination of both. So let's say that we have set that up, we're regularly blogging or maybe doing podcasting. What would you recommend that we do next? When can we actually start earning money from our new craft business?

[0:11:04] Brandi Mahon: Sure. So a lot of bloggers out there, not bloggers, but people who teach blogging, I should say, suggest that you have about 1000 people on your list before you start to develop your own products. And while you're doing that, just thinking backwards, is that when you're creating your content either on your blog post or your social media, is that using affiliate links is a good way to kind of get your foot in the door to develop relationships with brands? But that's not really going to earn you a lot of money. But it is going to be something coming in, at least something that you can measure, engage to determine how well your content is being seen. But once you have about 1000 people on your email list or you're about to, I would consider creating a small product. And for me, what has been very effective is creating Live Zoom craft alongs or classes. And I think that will get you ready to when you're starting to kind of grow and scale. My big product, I guess, if you will, is our Summits, and we have VIP all access passes attached to the Summit. So that is kind of like my signature course, if you will. Although it's a low ticket item, it incorporates a lot of different people and a lot of different products in that. But before you get to that stage, I would say creating a small product, maybe something in the price range of $19 to $49, could be a class. It could be a pre recorded.

[0:13:03] Dr. Destini Copp: Video.

[0:13:03] Brandi Mahon: On a technique or something like that. But getting your feet wet with starting to sell your own digital product, I think is an important next step.

[0:13:14] Dr. Destini Copp: And I love that. I love that you suggested starting small, not starting with this huge signature program or group coaching program, but starting small with a small digital product, whether that's a Live Zoom class or just something where you're teaching on video, maybe even like a mini course. So I love that. Brandy. What last minute tips before we hang up here do you have for somebody who is a passionate crafter? And they are definitely interested in monetizing that craft and turning into a business?

[0:13:56] Brandi Mahon: Well, I think getting clear on why you want to do this is very important. Because just because you love to do crafts does not mean it's going to be an easy thing to do in terms of developing a business. You have to take it seriously, and you have to kind of know where you're going. I quickly decided that summits were the thing for me and have kind of honed in on that. I do do smaller one off live zoom classes just to kind of keep my audience engaged with my own craft skills. But being very clear about what you want and developing a game plan early on in your business career I think is important. And that's what I would suggest.

[0:14:50] Dr. Destini Copp: I love that. And Brandy, can you let folks know, number one, where they can find you if they want to take this a step further? And also, I believe you have a free gift for them.

[0:15:01] Brandi Mahon: Absolutely. So my website is stamp mesumlove.com. We have a blog. We also have a small craft store on there, as well as our academy, where we host all of our classes. I have a free gift to share with everyone. And that is a craft room organization checklist. And this is going to help get you started on how to organize that craft room, which I'm sure probably looks much like mine at the moment, and get your stuff organized so that you can create with less stress and more joy.

[0:15:42] Dr. Destini Copp: And thank you, Brandy, for joining us today and walking us through how we can basically take our craft, hobby and turning into a money making business.

[0:15:53] Brandi Mahon: Awesome. One thing I would like to add, Destini, is that I will share with you once I get the link set up for our craft biz boot camp, which again will take place march 3 through the fifth. I'm really excited about that. And to help our crafters out there develop their first freebie and start collecting and engaging with their email subscribers.

[0:16:18] Dr. Destini Copp: Thank you so much.

[0:16:19] Brandi Mahon: All right.

[0:16:20] Dr. Destini Copp: Take care.