I earn £93,000 a year selling charms. This way you can also raise the money
A WOMAN has revealed how she earns £93,000 a year selling charms online – and works just five hours a week.
Mei Pak, who is in charge Creative beehive YouTube channel, opened up in a video the secrets of her success.
3
3
She said: “I have made $1.6 million selling polymer clay food charms since I started doing this full-time in 2012.
“I now work an average of five hours a week on this business and it generates a six-figure annual turnover.
“So how do I make so much money just selling polymer clay charms?”
She talked about how she would focus on something different each year, with Facebook being the first year, then Instagram or TikTok or blogging.
Mei added: “I’ve tried all the things. I know firsthand what works and what doesn’t and I’ll share that with you.
“There are really only a handful of things that helped me get to six figures.”
Social media didn’t matter
Mei claimed that social media “wasn’t really important” to her business success.
Instead, she said strong media outreach did much more to bring in sales.
The businesswoman said: “I get my products on the pages of print magazines or on high-traffic blogs or websites like BuzzFeed or Huffington Post.
“It’s completely free, apart from the incidental costs of making some product samples and sending them to the magazine.
“And what was even more amazing was that it wasn’t temporary, unlike social media where I have a constant pressure to put out post after post that only lasts a few hours and then gets buried by other people’s posts. “
After switching her focus from social media to media channels, she went from making hundreds per month to regular five-figure months.
And she advised being creative in her media pitches.
Mei says: “You need your pitch and your product to stand out. And to do that, you have to pitch outside your niche.
“For example, I sell perfumed food jewelry. I could pitch to jewelry stores, but I don’t have much success with that.
“I have a smores chain, so I can hang it outside campsite magazine.”
Paid ads work well
Once she started getting steady sales, she had more money for paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
However, she did put a warning around it.
Mei said: “Only do paid advertising if you’re already generating healthy revenue organically for free, you have a consistent budget for it, and you’re willing to take the time to really learn how to do it right.
I now work an average of five hours a week on this business and it brings me six figures in annual revenue
May Pak
“Organic turnover that you received for free is just like healthy plants those have already sprouted, right?
“Paid advertising is like manure. If your garden is already growing, the fertilizer can make it bloom even more.
“But if you haven’t planted anything, no amount of fertilizer will make anything grow.”
Look beyond Etsy
While online marketplace Etsy can be a great way to get your product in front of customers, Mei highlighted the downsides for her business.
She compared an Etsy listing to renting a house, saying, “deep down you know it’s not your house.”
Mei advised, “If your landlord decides to kick you out, you can.
3
“Just like Etsy can shut down at any time and you have no control over it.
“If you want your business to one day provide you with a meaningful income, quit your job, work from home and do what you love, you need to invest in the home you buy.
“In other words: your own website.”
Paid ads are like fertilizer. If your garden is already growing, the fertilizer can make it bloom even more
May Pak
She added that selling on Etsy “often feels more like a rollercoaster,” saying: “We never know for sure when the next the sales are going to come in.
“One day you might get a lot of sales and the next day it’s completely quiet.”
Mei shared: “You’re often neck and neck with other stores that live in countries where the value of their currency is so low that they can afford to charge much lower fees than you, or they’re just hobbyists and they just aren’t. well priced.
“While you are actually trying to make a living from your business.”
She compared how she has made $114,000 (£87,000) in sales on Etsy since starting her shop, but raked in almost $1.7 million (£1.2 million) from selling my charms on her Shopify site.
Start with custom orders
Mei advised against “designing products all by yourself in a silo,” because you may not know what customers want.
She said: “People would come to my shop and see what I could do, and then they would email me or message me and ask if I could do something else instead.
“If I felt like I could make it happen I would do it and if the item turned out to be really good I would make it a permanent part of my product line and this often leads to that item becoming a best selling product becomes.
How to start your own business
Dragon’s Den star Theo Paphitis revealed his tips for aspiring entrepreneurs:
- One of the biggest obstacles aspiring business owners and entrepreneurs face is a lack of confidence. You have to believe in your idea – more than that, be the one who bores your friends to death about it.
- Never be afraid to make decisions. Once you have an idea, the confidence to make decisions is crucial to starting and maintaining a business.
- If you don’t take calculated risks, you stand still. If a decision turns out to be wrong, identify it quickly and deal with it if possible. If that doesn’t work, find someone else who can.
- It’s okay to not get it right the first time. My experience making bad decisions helped me develop my self-confidence, which made me who I am today.
- Never underestimate the power of social media, and remember that the Internet has leveled the playing field for small businesses.
- Don’t forget to dream. A machine can’t do that!
“I often see other makers spending too much time making products they want to make, which is fine and healthy if you’re just doing it for the creativity and fun. But if you want to run a business that makes money, you also have to consider what customers want.”
Now 90 to 95 percent of the products she sells are made by my small team of production assistants, which has freed up her time.
People praised her advice, with one saying: “Truly advice I don’t hear spoken about! Thank you for this.”
Another added: “Thank you so much for generously sharing things that have helped you!”
