There are two sides to your craft business. The first is making your crafts, which is the bit we all know and love to do. The second is selling them and it's probably the area where most crafters are less comfortable and know least about. Fortunately selling crafts online gives you the ability to reach far greater markets and can provide your craft business with a huge boost.

Setting up an online craft store is now within the range of any of us, there are even some that are free to start. The store is only half the challenge though. Unfortunately many crafts people think that you can just open a store on the internet and the customers will flood in. They get very disappointed when it doesn't happen.

But why should it? If you open a store on your local high street or in your local shopping mall, a few people will pass by - and some of them will pop in - but what about people from the next town, and the next, and the next county or state, how would they hear about you?

Well you would probably put out some fliers, get listed in yellow pages, maybe advertise in a few local papers? You certainly wouldn't expect people just to flood in through the door, would you. So how come people do with their craft business online? You still have to get the word out, of course. The good news is that there are a number of very effective ways to do this and the better news is that some are free!

Take writing craft articles, for example. You can write an article about some area of your craft and submit it to article directories who will publish it for you for nothing. That article can link back to your craft blog or website, which has a double or even triple benefit to your business. First, the search engines will record that link and improve the ranking of your site. Second, people will read that article and, if they want to know more, visit your site. Third, other website owners and bloggers will syndicate your article and steps one and two will repeat for a whole new set of potential customers.

You don't need to be a Pulitzer prize winning writer, I'm certainly not, you just need to be able to write something interesting relating to your craft business. If you're anything like me that's not much of a problem because you're fascinated about your craft and probably love to share what you know.