Where does the time go when you’re having fun crocheting? Another year has come and gone, so it’s time to reflect on what I accomplished in 2013 and to establish some goals and objectives for 2014.

What I Said I would Do in 2013

At the beginning of 2013, I participated in Sara Duggan’s 31 Days of Crochet Business Blogging, during which I published a set of goals and objectives for my crochet business for the year. Here’s what I said I would do:

2013 Goals

• Blog on a regular basis
• Double my blog’s traffic.
• Do a better job monetizing and marketing my blog.
• Teach more classes.
• Publish more patterns.

Objectives for implementing those goals

• Publish a blog post once a week at a minimum.
• Establish a mailing list of blog readers and publish a newsletter once a month.
• Accept and publish posts from guest bloggers.
• Find effective ways to monetize and market my blog (no details on how to do this yet).
• Complete Crochet by Numbers certification by the end of March 2013 or sooner.
• Begin teaching Crochet By Numbers at Ben Franklin Crafts by the end of April 2013 or sooner.
• Find effective ways to market the crochet classes I teach at YarnStory so that I’m teaching a minimum of one class a month (no details on how to do this yet).
• Publish a book of crochet patterns by December 31, 2013 or sooner.

**Note:  Sara is running her blog challenge  this year, so it’s not too late to participate.

Eyes Bigger Than My Stomach?

I can honestly say that I probably bit off more than I could chew, so I had to cut back a bit. For example, publishing a blog post once a week turned out to be too much for me. After several months it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to keep that schedule. So I decided to scale back to twice a month.

The main reason once a week doesn’t work for me is that my posts typically run to 1,000+ words, and a once-a-week publishing schedule was starting to wear on me. Cutting back to twice a month was a lot more manageable. And I achieved my goal of accepting several guest bloggers on my site. The guest post by Lorrene Eppolite on designing custom crocheted hats  was particularly successful.

Teaching Pays Off

My biggest money maker in 2013, to my surprise, was teaching, both online and off. Giving private crochet lessons at various locations around Oahu, including my home, turned out to be a very successful undertaking. I have Kim Langley of YarnStory to thank for that success as she referred all crochet lesson inquiries that came through her store to me. So while I didn’t teach classes at the yarn store, it was a great source of students. Funny how things don’t always turn out the way you expect them to, but you still accomplish your goal.

I also completed my Crochet By Numbers (CBN) instructor certification early in the year and had my CBN course proposal accepted by Ben Franklin Crafts, the big box craft s tore on Oahu. While I made some pretty decent money teaching Crochet By Numbers online, my attempt to teach it at the craft store yielded zero students.

On the other hand, I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with the price of the CBN patterns and training (which I had no control over), so I decided to learn how to create my own crochet photo patterns in order to offer the patterns and training at more reasonable prices. I not only successfully tested my pattern making process, I beefed up my blog to support patterns at a variety of price points and have started making some sales.

Blog Traffic Explosion

I only have stats for seven months of 2012, but during that time, I averaged 1,724 visits a month. During January 2013, I had 827 visits. For the month of December 2013, I had a total of 2,956 visits. This goal was an absolute success as I did in fact double the traffic to my blog, despite the awful problems I had in December with my web host provider (which prompted me to migrate to a new hosting service at the end of  the year). My big months were March (3,947 visits) and October (4,763 visits). For the year, I averaged 3,430 visits a month.

Perhaps this jump in  traffic was due in part to starting a Facebook fan page associated with my blog. Clearly I’m doing something right, and I need to get a better handle on what that is.

What Didn’t Get Done

The objectives I wasn’t able to accomplish in 2013 were to create a mailing list and newsletter and publish a book of crochet patterns, although I did publish several crochet photo patterns on my blog, at Craftsy,

What I plan to do in 2014

Hopefully I’ve learned not to take on more goals than I can handle, which means I’m going to be a bit more conservative this year. Here’s what I plan to do:

• Continue building my crochet photo pattern business, including creating an online course, more pieces for my portfolio, and more patterns. I’m even thinking about establishing a group on Facebook devoted to this endeavor. This also means discontinuing teaching Crochet By Numbers.
• Continue teaching. In addition to continuing the private crochet lessons, I’m going to create an online course for my crochet photo patterns which will include videos to better demonstrate how to do them.
• Blog twice a month. And I’m going to try to get a few guest blog posts published on other sites this year.
• Create an “infrastructure” for my business which includes getting and using project management and accounting software, getting a business license, and getting business cards. Can you believe I still don’t have business cards? Instead of waiting to create a logo for my business (which has been slow going), I’m going to get some simple cards made so I can give to Kim for her to give to customers interested in crochet lessons. I’ll also need them for any marketing and networking I do around the island.
• Take a closer look at my blog stats in Google Analytics. With that big increase in traffic, it makes sense to determine what’s popular and where it’s coming from to better target my blog posts.

I could keep going (like starting a mailing list and newsletter), but I’ll stop here. This gives me a lot to tackle in 2014 but not so much that I feel overwhelmed. If I can accomplish these goals, then I’m sure to see an increase in blog traffic as well as income. Wish me luck!