How to Make Money from Craft Tutorials

Last week I shared some tips on how to make paper quilling tutorials (the tips work for any craft tutorials really). Today I’m going to address another question:

Is it possible to make money from craft tutorials? The short answer is yes, but there are various ways to do so, and of course various amounts of money you could make. Here are a few possibilities:

Ads

One of the easiest way to make money from tutorials is to share them for free, while making money on ads. If you publish your video tutorials on YouTube, for example, you have the opportunity to turn on ads. You do have to have 10,000 views on your channel before turning on ads, though. This helps YouTube weed out fishy channels. If you have a blog, you publish your tutorials for free on your blog, but make money by having ads on the sidebar or even within the article. If you get a lot of visitors to your blog, this can be a good amount of money.  Both of these options do take time! You need time for your followers to grow and for your posts/videos to be high enough to show up on google searches.  So this is definitely a long term investment of your time. If you have high quality and/or entertaining information/tutorials, you’ll eventually see a good payout for this option. If you just have a few things you want to share once in awhile then you won’t see many results from this.

Affiliate Links

When you publish your tutorials on your blog, you might have the opportunity to add affiliate links to your posts. You will have to apply to do this. One main affiliate link source is Amazon, so if there is an Amazon based in your home country you can go that route. There are others as well. Shareasale is one affiliate network where you can find different sites that sell the supplies you use, and create affiliate links to them. You’ll have to apply to be accepted into Shareasale. Some individual online stores have their own affiliate programs as well. Just check out their websites or email them to ask.  Again, you’ll see the most payout from this option if you post regularly and as time goes on. When you first start your blog and you have less than 50 posts, there are not that many links. But as you keep adding posts, you get more and more links on your blog which will increase the chance of people clicking through them. It took about a year for me to see decent affiliate sales from Amazon. (I don’t make nearly enough on my blog to live on, but it pays for my blog upkeep and helps a bit with household necessities).

Paid Tutorials 

The above two options are for if you are posting for free. They are a good way to get started because who doesn’t love a free tutorial! There is another option of selling the tutorials themselves. There are two VERY important rules if you go this route, and they are:

1. Make sure it is quality worth paying for!!
2. Make sure it is your original work!!

Of course anything you post on your blog should be your original work as well, but this is super important if you are actually selling the tutorials. And of course your tutorials should always be quality work, but make sure people are getting what they pay for!

Here are some tips on what you need to know to sell your tutorials:

Format 

The most common format for downloadable tutorials are PDF files. What I do is create my tutorial in Microsoft Word, and then save it as a PDF file. Note that when you save a file as a PDF you can choose security options to prevent people from copying and pasting your work elsewhere!

Where to Sell

There are many places where you can sell your PDF tutorials. You can sell them from your own blog/website if you have a self-hosted website and you download one of the plugins for selling things. You can also sell them in an online marketplace. The nice thing about selling PDF files is that you can sell them from many different online marketplaces without worrying about keeping up with each one in terms of instock inventory. Stay tuned next week for a post listing the best places online to sell your tutorials!

How to Choose

So you want to make money from craft tutorials, but how do you choose whether to offer it for free (making money from ads and affiliate links) or to sell it? The choice is ultimately yours, but here are some questions to consider:

1. Do you plan on making a lot of simple tutorials to share on a blog and/or YouTube channel? If yes, free tutorials are a great choice!
2. Did you put hours and hours of work into your detailed unique tutorial? Sounds like it’s worth paying for! (Next week I’ll be sharing the best places to do this!)

I hope you found this post on how to make money from craft tutorials helpful. If you have any questions about this topic, let me know and I’ll add the answers to the following posts! Stick around, there is lots to see on the blog!

• For more business and blogging posts, click here!
• Click here to view free paper quilling tutorials!
  For paper quilling tips!
• To view a list of places to buy quilling supplies around the world, click here!

*This post contains some affiliate links, and some non affiliate links. If you purchase products through the affiliate links I get a small percentage (at no extra cost to you!). I only link to products that I believe in and/or love to use myself. Thank you for supporting my blog!