Perhaps you are learning to make your own kits for your own personal pleasure and use.
This can be a very satisfying hobby putting together what you have learned and designed into your own beautiful creations.
Perhaps you have created dozens of kits and you are giving them away as Freebies.
Many people will download them because they are free and why not? This is what you are offering!
Giving away your creations is great and many of your visitors are very grateful for them.
After a while, you think - well the kits are so popular, perhaps you should try selling some of them,
or collecting a small donation for them, to make creating them more worthwhile for you
........then you discover......Not so many downloads anymore.
Also the market is thoroughly saturated with free or for sale scrap kits and crapping elements - this is where you may lose heart and think - this is not for me. The sheer variety and selection is mind boggling.
However if you are determined to create and try selling your creations then you must be fully aware that The Secret might be in presentation or innovation.
Keeping your designs fresh with lots of new ideas is not easy.
Something people want is new fresh trendy and this is hard to keep up with. Suddenly everyone is making something or doing something similar to you and follow the fashions of digital scrapping trends. It is very easy to steal with your eyes and then create something similar.
Hundreds of people joined online groups to learn to create their own digital scrapping stock. Then opened blogs to show and sell and give away their digital scrapping designs and then suddenly hundreds stopped.
Real life, family and work commitments, lack of response, the difficulty in constantly coming up with new ideas and the amount of time involved trying to stay ahead are some of the reasons the hype seemed to diminish. Many blogs have not been looked at by the owners for years and many links are out of date and no longer work.
Journaling became the next buzzword and doodling and bible journaling and adult colouring books!
Presentation makes the kits more attractive. This is why so many "Shoppe's" have Creative Teams.
They need the team, to present the elements of the kit in different styled layouts, to attract your attention to the variety of ways the kit could be used.
One Kit can make a myriad of different layouts, but not everyone looking at your kit preview can see that. They need to see different parts of your kit shown in different styles and layouts. This could make one kit more popular than the next.
You only need to visit scrap boutiques, or Shoppe's, galleries to see the many different layouts created by their teams, you may see the same kits or combinations of kits being used over and over again. The possibilities are too numerous to imagine.
This is why you need to sharpen your skills with layouts.
**Practice making your own layouts.
**Do Layout Challenges
**Spend more time creating layouts
**Spend Less time creating endless Kits
**Use your Layouts to advertise your kits, whether they are free or not.
At the end of the day, you will have had much more fun creating your layouts for the world to see,
than you might have done creating yet another kit.
You might move on to being on a creative team. You might possibly sell more of your kits.
The Digital Scrapbooking world is enormous and extremely competitive, you need to really work hard to achieve any measure of success commercially (selling).
However, if this is purely your hobby and earning few extra coins on the side is just an added bonus,
you will probably still have more interest if you present your kits with previews and a variety of layouts.
xoxoxo pat/PCArt
03 February 2009
