How Colette Patterns Makes Money

A website dedicated to sewing!  Oh yeah, that’s right.  And wow, what a hot ass niche – crafting is one of the biggest past times in the world.

If you are a crafter, you need to be thinking long and hard about a blog, especially since your passion can drive the content creation machine.  That said, as you can imagine there are 1000s of blogs on sewing alone, so the question becomes…how did Sarai, from Colette, execute on her passive income idea to beat the competition?

Well, I checked out her interview with Corbett over at Think Traffic and I scoured Sarai’s site, and here are the big takeaways.

Create a ton of high quality content that your users are searching for; tutorials, tips, how to guides, videos etc.  Then you can sit back and let Google take it from there.  This strategy of tireless content gets Sarai something like 60,000 uniques a month to her blog and 26,000 to her store.

Create products that are missing in the market.  In this case Sarai has created stunning printed sewing patterns.  This is very different to the rest of the market, as most patterns are sold in digital format on sites likeRavelry – they’re ugly and unuser friendly since people have to print them off and then pair them up (a nightmare I’ve seen unfold far too many times!).

Obviously creating a ton of free content around or related to your core product is key.

Think about your physical product ideas…can you create 10,000-20,000 words of advice related to them?  That’s how I would ideate on physical products.

For example, take a highly related product; dress makers dummies (those things sewing people hang and fit their clothes on).  You could easily pump out 1000s of words on how to fit clothes well, sew for your body, make adjustments etc…all things highly related to the product your selling.  Beautiful.

But if you don’t think you can do this, then maybe your product idea is not a goer, eg posture braces (a previous case study we covered…I think this is a bit too narrow, compared to say posture products in general).

Getting back to Colette, a couple other things I noticed from her site; the constant links from her blog to her store (excellent), the drop deadgorgeous design (a true differentiator in any niche), and well the sheer sizeof it all.

Although this business produces passive income, to get your own business to this size, you’re going to be pretty much non-stop active for many years.  But that’s alright if you take the long term view and realize 10 years hard work now could lead to 20 years of serious life-supporting passive income.

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