If you’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of praise and positive oohs and ah’s over both the look and taste of your cakes then you may be wondering if you’re on to a winner. You can make money, certainly as an extra mini-income, from your cake decorating skill. However, it needs a planned and careful approach. Monetising your cake decorating skill can be done in many ways, here are a few important pointers:
- Branding: In our connected world branding isn’t just for big businesses. You are your brand when it comes to cake decorating and you need it to speak volumes. Therefore think about your strengths and how to incorporate these in to your brand character. Are you fun and whimsical in your baking? Sophisticated and stylish? Experimental and daring?
- Get Visible: Cake decorating is a visual art so your primary weapon for monetisation is to get seen. Get on social media, particularly Instagram with its intense visual focus, and get your skill noticed. Remember, with cake decorating your focus needs to be primarily local. Off the back of this, start networking.
- It’s Not Just About the Cake: It’s very tricky to simply start selling cakes. There’s a great deal of competition and unfortunately many people underestimate the time and resources needed. Therefore, consider offering baking classes, kid’s parties, baking girls’ nights in, and catering for coffee mornings. From these connections you should then start getting cake orders.
- Start Small: Grow and expand step by step. You’ll need to consider things such as insurance, hygiene (and certification) and payment terms. Don’t give up the day job just yet.
- Blog: A primary way to monetise your cake decorating skill is to blog. This will feed in to your social media strategy. Through this you can monetise by using affiliate programmes with kitchenware and bakeware retailers to advertise their products.
- Give People What They Want: Whilst retaining true to your brand feel is important, don’t lose sight of the aspirations of a brief. You need to deliver what a customer wants. This may not always be in line with your own creative juices!
Cake decorating can certainly be a hobby that pays and, if you’re lucky, turn in to something more. Just make sure you have fun and are creative along the way!
