The Little Black Box is a great way to get samples of your products into the hands of many potential customers interested in handmade items. It works like this: you send your samples to The Little Black Box and they put them together with samples from other vendors and sell the boxes on their website [...]

If you want to learn to take better photos, HP is offering several free online courses to help you out. One class in particular would be extremely helpful in improving your product photos:
Camera composition: Change Your Perspective
From HP - You don’t have to be a professional photographer to understand and apply good photo composition techniques. [...]

I recently joined a local Etsy Team (Lincoln Handmade) and as a group we offer a nice a variety of handmade products. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I joined and how helpful and rewarding I think it will be. Last night I attended my first team meeting. We talked about upcoming [...]

If you’ve searched for information within the maze Federal Government Web sites, you know how time consuming and frustrating it can be. Next time you need government info, start your search at Business.gov.
Managed by the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Business.gov site serves as a web portal to all other federal agencies. Important business information [...]

I know - it’s only July - but it really is the time to start planning for the end of the year. The holiday season is stressful, and the time you spend in preparation now will reduce your stress and increase your sales.
Marketing
Last month, Lisa Lam at Craft Boom wrote an excellent article called Tips [...]

A business card can and should do more than simply provide contact info. It costs very little- if anything at all- to have your cards printed on both sides. One side of the card should contain all important contact info and the other side of your card can act as a promotional item. Doing so [...]

How fun! Who wouldn’t be impressed to get a bag of M&Ms with your logo or soap pic on them? Replace that cute little face in the pic above with your soap pic, put your biz name on the back and you’ve got gold! They’re not cheap at $3.99 per party favor size bag, but [...]

It’s the first day of July and I am turning my thoughts towards December and the Holidays. I’m really into upcycling materials and with that in mind, I’ve been working on new packaging and promotional ideas for my holiday line of products. Today I’d like to share with you the gift set packaging idea I [...]

These Photo Flipbooks are super cute and would make excellent product portfolios. I’m often asked about my soaps when I meet new people and I rarely have more than a business card on me. When I saw this Photo Flipbook from SnapFish, I thought it would be the perfect solution. It is professionally done and [...]

The following video is a tutorial on how to make small chocolate boxes, but you can see how soap samples would fit inside as well. They’re adorable and can be customized to fit your tastes. While they seem a little labor intensive to create in large amounts, I think they would be perfect for giveaways, [...]