How Sweater Babe Makes Money
By Richard
I think I mention knitting a lot on this site. It’s just such a good example of a tasty niche, since avid knitters are always trying new things and spend weekends locked down in their own lil mini sweat shops (aka they’re homes!)…translation, they eat yarn for breakfast and buy a lot of everything!
I’ve studied the knitting niche a bit for inspiration purposes, and I’ve found that the big money makers are obviously information products(particularly video courses since they are the best way to communicate how to knit), knitting supplies, and most importantly, for this case study at least, knitting patterns (the diagrams knitters use to make clothes).
Let’s focus on the patterns for a minute.
Patterns can be drawn by pretty much any knitter with some experience and some time. They’re also super easy to sell, since you just turn them into a PDF file and sell it just like an ebook.
This by the way is a good example of barriers to entry that are high enough to keep out too many sellers, but not so high that you can’t climb them yourself and launch your own business in your spare time.
The knitting community must have some money, because these patternssell for about $4-$14 each. Not bad for a digital product you can put together in a day or two.
Knitting patterns are indeed the main monetization strategy going on over at SweaterBabe. And although Katherine sells them on her own site, I would expect she also sells them over at a community site like Ravelry.
This brings up a cool point.
If you create a digital product, think about what market places you can also sell it on? Amazon Kindle, Click Bank, Envato, Code Canyon etc.
Market places may take a cut from your sale, but think about the audiences they attract!
Ravelry for example has an audience of 2 million knitters, who are searching for patterns every day – this built in audience is delivered on a silver platter to those designers who also list their patterns for sale on their site.
All Ravelry takes for their part is a dollar or two commission fee.
Now obviously, not every market place is so generous, eg iTunes which takes 30% cut. But even if the cut is big, ask yourself; would that person have found my product and bought it, if it wasn’t for the market place?
Visit Sweater Babe or check out Steps to Passive Income where case study originally spotted