Though the leaves have only just started to fall in many places you can be sure that those ads for holiday shopping will start appearing everywhere in just a few short weeks. Most retailers don’t even wait for Halloween to go by anymore before they start stocking their shelves for Christmas.
The holidays can provide great opportunities for the creative home based entrepreneur. Even in a recession most people loathe to cut back too far when it comes to holiday spending so the market really is always there at this time of year, as long as you know where to find it.
One way a home based entrepreneur with an artistic side can cash in on Christmas (and Hanukkah, Kwanza and New Years too) is by creating and selling their own greeting cards. Not the kind you make with construction paper, glue and a little glitter like you did when you were a kid, but by signing up with sites like Cafepress.com , Zazzle.com and Greetingcarduniverse.com. These sites allow artists to upload their greeting card art to their site and make money off of a portion of the sales.
The sites themselves do all the leg work, the printing and shipping and so forth, so obviously they take a cut of the profits. But a clever design (you don’t need to be Picasso) can end up be a nice little money maker, and if you have a number of them all the better.
Of course, these sites do not just limit the greetings card designs you can submit to holiday themes. Any and all occasions are acceptable. The only limitation is that of course, you cannot use copyrighted material that does not belong to you.
