If you are creative and enjoy making things, you may decide that you’d like to turn your hobby into a money-making venture by selling your crafts online or at fairs and events.

This has become a popular option for a lot of people, either as a side-line to a normal job or as something to do for an income while staying at home to raise a family, or in retirement.

Naturally, you need to be good at making things people want to buy to do this, but most people can find some kind of crafting they are good at if they don’t already have something they do as a hobby, and there are plenty of ideas and tutorials on the web on sites like diyformula.com to help get inspired.

However, not all of the skills you’ll need relate to actually making your products. Here are three business skills to learn before starting a handicraft venture:

Pricing

Pricing your goods can be hard, especially if they are fairly unique. On the one hand, you need to consider the cost of materials, however you also need to consider the time each product takes to make.

Some things like candles and baked goods can be made in batches, fairly quickly and with relatively cheap materials. Others, like hand knitted clothing, may use cheap materials but take a long time to complete. A piece of jewelry may take only an hour to make but use more expensive materials like gems. You then need to add on things like overheads (for instance the cost of running a stall at an event or selling on a web marketplace like Etsy), and of course shipping where applicable.

Learning how to price things so they make you a profit and are also at an appealing price point to customers is a vital skill.

Social Media Marketing

Unless you make something truly unusual, you’ll have a lot of competition, and so learning how to market your products on things like Facebook and Pinterest is often the best way to get noticed. You may also rely a lot on word of mouth at the start, and the way most people share things they have bought and loved is via social networks.

If you don’t already know, learn how the main social networks work and how to best use them to promote your small craft business.

Finance

No matter how small your business, you need to know how to manage the money coming into it and the money you need to spend on materials. While you can use a professional accountant for things like taxes, you yourself need to learn to manage cash flow and ensure you always have access to the money you need to keep producing and marketing your goods.

These are skills that you can learn using online materials and a bit of time and effort, so there is no need to let not having them yet put you off going into business for yourself!