The Building of a Blogshop: Building a Blog & Printables Shop from the ground up {Episode 1}

Today is the first post in my new series called The Building of a Blog Shop, where you get an inside look at building a blog and a printables shop from the ground up. I am literally starting from scratch with this blog and the printables shop, and I want to document the journey. My hope and prayer is that this endeavor will be blessed and divinely inspired by God.

This blog isn’t my first rodeo, but the printables shop is.

I have another blog (Indie Author Central) that I have been working on steadily for the past few years, and I have been able to gain a lot of new visitors on a daily basis. It’s now getting about 350-400 views per day, which is appx 10,500 to 12,000 views per month. It has definitely been a learning process, and everything has been 100% trial and error with it. The growth of that blog has been a slow progression, a little too slow in my opinion, and I really think the reason why is because the topic I have been writing about and focusing on is just not big enough.

For the past 2 years, my main focus on Indie Author Central was talking about how to make journals on Amazon KDP. I have been creating and selling journals and low-content books on Amazon since 2018, and I love creating and designing, so I thought I would create a blog that shows other people how to create them too. While that is a topic many people ARE talking about, I am having a hard time finding new topics to talk about that I haven’t talked about already. And I guess I am getting kind of bored with it and want to branch out.

The name of your blog kind of dictates how broad you can go with your topics. Unfortunately, when I chose the name Indie Author Central way back in 2012, I had visions of it being a blog with posts written specifically for independent authors. I had written a book, and wanted to get it self-published on Amazon, and was in the process of having it proofread and edited, and wanted to document my self-publishing journey. However, I never got around to getting it completed, so the website sat for years.

When I started publishing journals on Amazon, I wrote a few posts about it, pinned those posts on Pinterest, and again forgot about it for at least another couple years. One day, I decided to check my stats, and saw I was getting some traffic to those posts from Pinterest, and it piqued my curiosity. I wrote more articles and pinned them on Pinterest.

To my surprise, I started getting more traffic. I made a hobby out of it, wrote lots of articles, joined about a dozen affiliate programs related to my topics, and have been bringing in a couple thousand dollars a year from affiliate income and Google adsense.

What I have realized though, is I am hitting a plateau and my traffic is stuck at these numbers, and my income isn’t getting any higher. I have realized I need to branch out to different topics. The problem is, the name Indie Author Central doesn’t really allow for too many other topics outside of the author/publisher niche. And while I could spend time researching and writing articles around those topics, the truth is, that is just not where my passion lies.

It’s hard to write about a topic you are not personally invested in.

So……..I have decided to build this blog from the ground up, use my first and last name as my domain, represent my own brand, open a printables shop, and write about topics that I am passionate about. I am very excited about this! I absolutely love designing KDP interiors and covers for my low-content books, and that excitement has carried over to designing printables as well.

This blog is powered by WordPress.org , and it is hosted with Hostgator. The theme I am using is called Kadence , and it is one of their free themes from their starter theme collection. My domain was purchased through Godaddy, and I have actually had this domain for a long time, and initially used it to sell my music.

Before I installed the Kadence theme, I was using a theme called Mai Lifestyle Pro, which was a Genesis child theme. However, Mai stopped providing support and updates, and required you purchase a yearly subscription for the updated version which runs $99/year for their cheapest plan. Um…no.

As you get to know me, you will find out how bad I despise monthly and annual subscriptions. Everything now is a recurring payment. There are not many one time purchases anymore when it comes to software and any kind of internet related service. Annoying.

I decided with this blog, I wanted to sell my own product. I am not opposed to selling affiliate products or making money with ads, but unless you are promoting high ticket items, and the vendor is very generous with splitting the percentages, you have to refer a ton of readers to affiliate products before making any kind of significant money.

It can be done, don’t get me wrong, and many bloggers make a killing from affiliate income, but if your blog is only getting 12,000 visitors per month like mine is, it’s going to be hard to make a whole lot.

If I sell my own products, I can set the prices, and keep all the profit. With digital products like printables, you design once and sell as many times as you’d like. And because it’s your product, there are no restrictions.

I did a search a few weeks ago for “how to sell printables online” and came across a few really awesome success stories. Many people sell their printables on Etsy, and I have tried to sell a few things here and there on Etsy, however, what I have found is that there is so so much competition, you have to sell your products for dirt cheap or your competition will eat you up.

Unless your printable is really unique, or you want to spend money on ads, it will be an uphill battle to get views on Etsy because there are too many people making the same kind of printables and fighting for the same keywords.

I didn’t want to have to battle the competition, so I decided to create a stand alone printables shop here.

After a lot of research on what platform to use for my shop, I decided to go with a platform called PayHip. Was it a good choice? I don’t know yet. Only time will tell. So far I am really loving PayHip, it’s easy to use. And I don’t have to deal with running the shop from my own site using plugins like WooCommerce, within my WordPress dashboard. This means less clunk to my main site, and more security, which is very important to me.

WordPress sites are awesome, however, they are notorious for being hacked. In fact, that is exactly what happened to my other blog, Indie Author Central, which cost me a small fortune to get all the malware removed.

Someone had inserted some kind of malware code to create a whole section of my website I never knew existed, until I got an email (which I later found out was a phishing email) telling me I had violated some copyright law and dropped me a link to the said violation. This link brought me to a whole stand-alone section of my website that contained about a million online dating links. I was HORRIFIED to say the least.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the extent of it. When I did a search on Google for all the pages of my site, I had thousands of redirected links that looked like they came from my site, but when I clicked on them, went to sites that were, for lack of better words, VERY inappropriate.

My family and I had just taken a vacation to Florida, and I literally spent half the vacation on the phone with Hostgator (my host) and Sitelock (a malware removal company) trying to make heads or tails of what was happening and how to get it to stop.

It was a very long process, the malware kept coming back, and because I have shared hosting through Hostgator (who I thought would have been more helpful to me in remedying the situation…more on that later) and have more than one site hosted on that account, I had no idea where the malware had originated or kept regenerating from! It was a total nightmare!

I ended up deleting a few websites I had created over the years that I didn’t use anymore, and removing all of their WordPress installations and plugins from my Cpanel. Mind you, I had virtually no idea what I was doing, and I am lucky I didn’t erase Indie Author Central by accident.

Long story short, I was able to get the malware removed, and it has not come back thank God, but it was a real headache, and I shudder to imagine how awful it would have been had I had an online shop on the site with tons of products and customer information contained within. I would have probably had to scrap it all.

This is why, when I decided to create my own printables brand, I looked for an external platform to host my products.

Their were a lot to choose from, and in the end, I would have loved to go with a Shopify store, but when you are just starting out and have no revenue, paying for yet another monthly subscription didn’t seem doable.

So, I explored options that didn’t charge a monthly sub fee.

I looked at a Gumroad shop because they have built in email marketing (which was the feature that really drew me to them), however I decided against using their platform because even though they don’t charge you a monthly subscription fee, they charge 10% of each sale. If your shop doesn’t make that much money, 10% is very doable. If I sell $100 worth of items, they will only take $10, which doesn’t sound too bad. However, if I am making $100,000, they will take $10,000 of that, which is a LOT more. That number just goes up way too fast with the more you make.

I also wasn’t super thrilled with the way their site looked. It wasn’t very customizable, and I didn’t like the fact that it would look so drastically different than my website. And the third deterrent to using Gumroad for me was the fact they paid out every other week. So if I made a sale today, I wouldn’t see that money for 2 weeks. Not ideal. On my music YouTube Channel, I am used to dealing with getting paid via PayPal where I get paid instantly when someone buys my music. Waiting 2 weeks seems excessive to me.

Another platform I was tossing around using was Lemon Squeezy. They also offer a free plan, where you only pay if you make a sale (5% + .50 cents), which was better than the 10% Gumroad was charging, and they offer a free email marketing package (free for 500 subscribers), but there wasn’t enough customization.

In the end, I decided to go with PayHip. Even though they don’t offer any free email marketing packages, they do have a lot of customization options, they are easy to use, and only charge 5% of the sale in their free plan. They also have an option to pay $29/month and only get charged 2% fee per transaction, or pay $99/month and get charged 0% transaction fee. So, if you do start selling a lot, you can drive those monthly transaction fees down by paying a flat subscription fee.

I thought this was the best option to go with for me, considering it is free to start out, and the shop looks nice, which is important to me. You can see the shop here.

One thing I want to do with this site is build up my email list, a list of people who are interested in my printables or my topics, and keep in touch with them when new posts or products come out. Since PayHip doesn’t have any built in email marketing (hopefully they will add it at some point) I looked around and decided to sign up with Email Octopus.

I agonized over this too, finding the right email marketing software that was free to start and wouldn’t gouge you in price once you hit a certain amount of subs was hard. They offer a free plan for the first 2500 subs, and you can send out 10,000 emails per month. That’s not too bad considering some of the other companies I checked out.

The negative is you are limited in how many automations you can set up, but I plan on just keeping everything really simple in the beginning. When I grow (I say “when”, because I am coming into this with an expectant heart!), and if I need to start integrating more email automations, I will then have the money to invest in a paid plan.

What will my main focus of this blog be? At this time, the main focus will be on creating both free and paid printables to help people like you (and me) with home organization and every day productivity.

I also want to document the growth of this blog through the series The Building of A Blogshop so you can see exactly what it takes and what you will need to do to create your own blogshop. Whether you decide to sell printables or something else, you’ll have a bird’s eye view of what goes into it to make it successful.

I imagine this blog and my products will attract people most like me, as I will most likely be writing about things that affect my every-day life as a mom, a wife, a home-owner, a homeschooler, a woman of faith, and a musician, and my products will be created in response to problems I encounter that need a solution.

For example, I created Pantry Possibilities, a frugal meal plan template, for people looking to save money on their grocery budget because I was struggling to keep track of all the food I had on hand, and kept buying more groceries when I already had enough to make meals at home.

I also created these cute binder covers out of my own desire to make my binders look pretty and color coordinated.

I suppose as the needs arise, my store will be filled up with new items. I have plans in the making to create a home organization binder with templates for printables such as bill trackers, budget trackers, cleaning charts, chore charts, meal plans, and other templates you would use to organize your domestic life at home. I am very excited about this future project, because this is something I really need in my own life.

If you are interested in starting your own blog, and/or your own online shop, I encourage you to stick around. Pin this article on Pinterest so you can find it later.

All the best and God Bless,

April

P.S. Follow me on Pinterest so you don’t miss any episodes from my Building of A Blogshop Series where I will share the progression and journey of this blog and shop!