One of the pleasures or working for yourself is that you don’t have to “suffer fools.” If you have a few customers who are too demanding or difficult and who can raise your blood pressure 20 points just by approaching your booth, feel free to decline their business…gracefully. Simply say that you have too many other
projects or that you’re trying to phase out whatever it is that the want. (If necessary, you can be a bit more direct to drive the point home.) Instead of letting a negative buyer suck the energy and creativity right out of you, get rid of them and put your skills to work on a more gratifying project for a more appreciative customer

Large craft trade shows give you easy access to thousands of buyers. These buyers are keenly aware of what sells and what doesn’t in their stores. Talking to them gives invaluable guidance for designing and producing art and crafts products. Use trade shows to learn what trends are coming in specific market groups, like interiors or fashion. Trade shows make it easy to develop relations with store owners in a friendly, relaxed way. Some of these personal connections can last for many years. Big shows can mean big orders. Many craft exhibitors get enough business from these shows to last all year. I know of two sisters who wove clothing and displayed at the Dallas Market Center. They took over $20,000 in wholesale orders on Saturday. Feeling they had more business than they could handle, they decided not to open their booth the next day.

This is a business relationship whereby a business or merchant pays you (the affiliate or associate) for a link or links from your website, newsletter, email or blog to their site. And when a customer goes from your link to theirs and buys something ,you get a commission and that commission is automatically tracked in their software and it can go from 1% of the total sale to 50% but normally it’s 10%. This is what’s known as a PPA (pay per action) and usually no merchants want to pay anything unless something is sold!
EVERYONE MAKES MONEY WITH A GOOD AFFILIATE PROGRAM!

I mean that’s what it is really about, isn’t it? A merchant reduces their advertising budget to almost 0 and only pays if something is sold. And the associate (you) can do just a bit of low cost to no cost marketing and make a little money too! This truly is a great relationship where everyone wins, both merchant and affiliate.

Website content rule — The more targeted content your website or blog has, the more traffic you will get in this area and the more traffic you have, the more profitable your affiliate program will be.

Have a small selection of chains available for purchase in 16 inch, 18 inch and 20 inch lengths (18 is the most popular length).

If you are going to stock chains, just stay with sterling silver or gold filled. 14 Karat is far too expensive to stock. The best selling chain is the rope chain but box chains are also popular. Keep your inventory in the smaller, lower priced chains. Buying a big expensive chain is a sale all in itself and usually a customer is looking for a special gauge or design when buying an expensive chain. Remember this will be an impulse buy and they probably will not object to a $10 to $15 price range.

Target prices are $5 to $20. You will definitely need these $1 to $10 items for your booth. This is generally a rule of thumb for most flea markets; however, we have visited a few high-end flea markets in California and Florida where high priced items, including wire jewelry were selling at great prices so don’t let me discourage you about finding that perfect flea market. Everyone is looking for a bargain at a flea market so mark your items down such as $15 necklaces now reduced to $10 to attract those buyers. Be creative and make some very low-end items. Take a whole necklace of hearts, donuts, etc., cut it apart, and make small pendants with 2 inches of wire.

School Band Fund raisers. Schools always need to buy new musical instruments. When in the high school band, we always had to sell our quota of fruitcakes to raise money for new instruments. Design a little bar pin with school color beads or design a small school color bead ring and suggest to the band leader that you will contribute a percentage of the sale of each ring to the school band fund. Then let the band members sell for you.