{Day 1} 31 Days of Craft Show Preparation

Join me in the 31 Days of Craft Show Preparation by Blogger Molly of http://mollyeleen.wordpress.com. Molly was inspired to do the 31 days challenge when her friends took on the challenge that The Nester hosts each year. (based on the 31 Days to build a better blog by ProBlogger)

As you may already know I love challenges. They keep me focused and challenge me beyond what I think I can do. I thought that this would be a great challenge for this blog as many of you sell crochet. Some sell at craft shows and others are contemplating selling at craft fairs.

Inez, who is in the Crochet Business Bloggers group on Facebook will be doing a show in March so this is perfect timing for her.

How You Can Participate

1. Visit Molly’s Blog post which has all 31 posts in the series
2. Blog about it. You can do one post for the entire week or one post per day. I’ll be doing one post a day. (31)
3. Chat about it either on the Crochet Business fanpage or in either the CBB Google+ community or CBB Fb group.

Day 1: Hindsight to Meltdown

Today Molly talks about her sewing machine breaking down right before preparing for her big craft show. Can you imagine? Luckily you have a hook and yarn to use so no big worries there. If you ever did lose your yarn and hook like in a ‘my cat loves my yarn‘ disaster, you can always replace it by going to your local craft store.

What do you do to prepare for the unexpected things?

For those of you just joining me on the Crochet Business Blog journey you probably missed my whole ‘deleted blog’ fiasco. For some reason Google’s spam bots tagged my blog as spam. This would mean that I had jibberish, no useful content, and a link farm. (blogging solely for links out to spam sites or selling stuff). This was not the case. In fact everything on this blog was on that blogger blog.

I went through  the process of asking for a restore on the forums, they did a manual review of the site, gave it back and then 5 days later it was tagged as spam again. I won’t be bothering with it anymore. Before they took it down the second time I took down everything affiliate related (my book, links to craftsy, amazon and even google ads) so that was not the problem as all that was left was content I wrote.

Imagine waking up one day and everything you worked for was gone? How would you handle that? Here’s what I did.

• Set up a regular backup schedule – I think I would have been more upset if this step was not taken
• Pre-wrote posts for the 31 day challenge I was hosting at the time
• Newsletter – since blog challenge participants were also newsletter subscribers I just sent them a quick email stating what happened and directed them to the new blog
• Social network updates – I told my fans and followers what was going on so they knew why when they visited it said ‘blog deleted’.
• Talked to people about it. Believe me, being able to just vent or whine (more like whining) to other people in my mastermind group and on a couple of business focused FB groups helped me through this. Support is KEY to running a business.

I think, like Molly, I needed this jolt or as she put it,

 It’s almost like I needed to melt down completely to realize I can do this..

Having this happen to me during the challenge emphasized the point that as a business owner and as someone who is giving advice to those who want to run a crochet centered business I needed my own site. A site that I control. I needed to make a stand and say YES, I am a business owner and YES, I am going to do this.

Are you planning for success? How? Share one way you plan for the unexpected below in the comments.