The Year of Playing with Words and Yarn
When I look at my website stats, I am consistently floored that my knitting tutorials, posts, and all things knitting-related are consistently what brings traffic to this website, despite the fact that my knitwear design business is one of the smallest parts of my income and, therefore, business focus. (But without it, I’m not sure Google would know I exist.)
Honestly, based on how badly I wanted my income-generating sources to switch to fiction- and writing-related content, this used to discourage me. I mean, I currently get around 4,000 unique visitors to this site a month, and non-knitting content ranks so low in the traffic results that it’s usually on another page in my stats.
I’ve tried tackling the problem of audience vs. income imbalance a few ways in the past, and none of them have been sustainable for me. So this year, I’m trying something new.
I’m not going to focus on making knitting income so much as finding what my knitting audience wants. Fortunately, all those analytics have told me a great deal about where to start—most of you want help with learning to knit.
Guess what? I love teaching. Teaching knitting is a huge part of the My Secret Wish Knitting brand, as each of my patterns has tutorials and links to techniques I think my customer may be less familiar with. That’s why I made all those tutorials in the first place! That’s also where all my hits are coming from.
And I also love writing. And knitting.
What I don’t particularly love is the amount of work and repetition that goes into making one of my patterns publishable in the limited amount of knitting time I have, keeping me stuck on the same project for a year or even more. (One of my more complicated designs in the works is the Lady Guinevere Socks, which was conceived seven—make that eight—years ago. Yes. I REALLY want to get that out in the world. But it’s not ready.)
So, in an effort to both recapture the joy of knitting for myself and find more and better ways to serve my massive knitting audience, I have declared this the Year of Playing with Words and Yarn for my knitting business. I have created a new formula for my knitting newsletter that focuses on play and inspiration, not so much on promoting my own knitting patterns.
Photo courtesy of Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.
I’m excited. I put out my first issue a couple of weeks ago (once the MailerLite changeover was complete). It included features about a Local Yarn Store (LYS), a pattern book review, some colour inspiration, photos of pretty yarn, a fun knitting quote graphic, and a Tales from the UFO Pile section, which is where I talk about the UnFinished Objects (UFO—get it, you non-knitters in the crowd?) that I am finally finishing and my efforts to reduce my stash by trying new things.
I have deliberately decided not to publish patterns this year, but to play with knitting and writing about knitting. And pictures. Of course there will be pictures!
However, another focus I have is to serve that vast audience of knitters that shows up on my website on a daily basis. So, once I’ve created all that lovely content for my new newsletter, I will be reposting it in sections over the following two months until my next newsletter comes out, in order to create an archive of these types of posts that knitters should find helpful.
I don’t yet know how this will address my income/audience imbalance thing. That’s part of the reason for the play—find out what you knitters want, then find out a way to offer you value that you will pay for to make this a great deal for both of us. But I’m going to just take this year and figure that out. And I intend to have fun doing it.
I bought this new sock yarn while at Quintessential Knits in December. I’m excited to see how it knits up! Of course, I took this lovely photo to share in my new newsletter. (And I look forward to posting my article about Quintessential Knits on here soon.)
What that means for you, dear blog reader/subscriber, is that there will be a post every two-to-four weeks or so that is focused exclusively on knitting. I realize that many of you are not here for those posts. And others of you have also probably been missing them since I rarely post about knitting anymore.
As always, I’m an eclectic person. I thought about creating a separate knitting blog, but this blog has always served the purpose of sharing what’s important to me personally, and knitting has always been a part of that. So I decided to continue using this blog for both audiences. And, according to my newsletter stats, a surprising majority of you are actually in both.
So, if you’re one of the folks who has no interest in knitting, when you see one of these knitting-only posts come along, just archive it and move along. There’ll be more content for you on the way, trust me.
I will continue striving to provide about two personal updates a month to this blog. In addition, I will also be reposting at least one past Books & Inspiration newsletter feature to this blog per month for the remainder of this year.
If a post was originally featured in a newsletter, I will make sure to include the original date and newsletter list in the post.
The end result is that this blog’s activity (and value to you, I hope) is about to go way up, but I’m hoping the additional strain on my time will be minimal. If I find this new plan to be unsustainable, I may have to revise it. For now, though, I invite you to stick with me as I keep moving forward in my Year of Playing with Words and Yarn.
Happy knitting! (And reading. :-D)
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Yarn Tails - MSW Knitting Newsletter, Issue 20.01
Tales from the UFO Pile
This year, I intend to tackle my accumulating stash and Unfinished Object (UFO) pile. It is extensive. (I'm sure you have no idea what that's like.)
I don't intend to limit myself to any sort of plan or structure, I'll just knit what I want. This section is where I'll share my recent adventures.
While some of these patterns may eventually become published patterns, in the spirit of Play, I'm going to leave that up to Future Me to decide.
This month, I've been hitting up my sock yarn bins. I'm on my second pair of Just Plain Socks in a month, both knit with Knit Picks' Stroll Tweed. Just Plain Socks is a great, basic pattern for utility knitting for the men in my life, and one of the few things they actually want me to make for them.
Here's the first pair, made for my second son, Noah. I'm hoping his feet have finally stopped growing so I can start getting ahead of the game for him instead of only being able to make one pair of homemade socks that fits him at one time.
Yarns used: Knit Picks Stroll Tweed in Lost Lake Heather and Oyster Heather.
Noah’s new Just Plain Socks. I’ve got another navy pair for Jason almost off the needles. (See Instagram post below.)
*I had my son Jude make me a new “Making Magic with Words and Yarn” logo which I’ll be using in the newsletter. I love it!
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Update on our family shenanigans and other transitions.