Digital Scrapbooking Now

Home Based Business Ideas – Digital Scrapbooking

Many talented digital scrapbooking fanatics are wanting to work from home and get paid with their hobby. It is a good time to consider starting a business in which you can work from home in the digital scrapbooking field, due to the growth taking place in this industry.Starting a digital scrapbooking business may not be as hard as you think.

For those who don’t feel they are expert enough yet, keep on studying the online tutorials and lessons that are available. You’ll get better as you keep working on your skills. The main thing anyone needs to start a business is a passion – the skills can be gained, but passion is not something that can be learned.

Also, for any home business, there are things to learn about running a business, keeping track of financial accounts and budgeting. You also would need to be sure you have an up-to-date computer (PC or MAC is fine), and a high speed internet connection.

Next on the list of things to do to prepare for a home business as a scrapbook designer would be to decide if you will try to work for individuals you know or if you would like to try to find customers through the internet. For marketing yourself, you could look for clients locally, through schools, churches and other people you know. Making flyers, having a business card and coming up with a name for your business would be some of the first steps to take.

With the lower cost of internet websites and hosting, many digital scrapbook artists have websites. If you aren’t knowledgeable about creating a website, you can find many graphic designers and web designers who can help you get a website started – and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

The newest trend in websites is with the use of content management platforms, such as Wordpress. What is so great about these blog formats is that anyone can post information in them (no dependency on a web developer is needed). Again, you may need a web designer to help get your blog set up with customized banner artwork that uses your company logo. After a blog (such as a Wordpress blog) is created, the tools that are built in to write posts and upload or insert pictures is very easy to learn.

So, consider starting your own business – what can it hurt? If you want to buy a domain name, these days it only costs about 9 dollars a year. Hosting can cost as little as 5 dollars a month. Other options are to join some of the sites that offer a website where you can sell your products, such as digital scrapbook kits. Some of the sites I have seen for this are Etsy or Plumbdrop. These sites are growing quickly and many people who used to use Ebay to sell their products have branched out to other selling sites like these.

Basically, just don’t limit yourself. If you have a dream, pursue it! You really can do so much today with very little monetary investment. Mostly your time and interest will be what is needed to get started, keep going and to eventually make a digital scrapbooking business.

This is printable and downloadable graph paper maker is cool! And it is free (gotta love that). Have you ever wanted to make your digital scrapbook look like graph paper? I found a place to download digital graph paper as a PDF that you can print or use in your photo editing software for your layouts. You can download some pre-made graph paper or set up the type of grid you want to make custom papers.

You can create other geometric patterns such as dots or hex graphs to download, too. There is even an option for trapezoid paper. What is so cool about this is: you can even do custom page sizes (such as 12 x12), which is great for scrapbooking. These would be interesting to use in a scrapbook with a school theme. I don’t know if anyone has ever made an engineering or architecture scrapbook, but if you were going to, graph paper backgrounds would be a nice touch.

So, when you try to make your paper, you can change the line colors or dot colors to red, blue, black, gray, green or use a custom color.

So go play with this tool: graph paper and see what you can come up with for your digital scrapbooks. Or, use this for school projects or to use a drawing and sketching paper. Whatever you do, go be creative!

A question that comes up a lot is this: “Now that i have made a digital scrapbook, how do I print it and put it in a binder?”

That is a really good question! Of course there is no ONE correct answer – which is what I love about creativity! Many people buy their scrapbook album or binder before they design their pages. It gets kind of tricky if you are using a 12 x 12 album because not many home ink jet printers will print paper that large. If you have a printer that prints 11 x 17 (or tabloid size) you can print on that size paper and crop down the pages to 11 x 11 or 11 x 12 to insert into a 12 x 12 binder. (In europe, the closest paper size is A3 which is 11.69 x 16.54 inches.)

If you don’t have a printer with the larger sized paper capapbilities, you can go to a print shop or Kinkos and get your pages printed on 11 x 17 paper. (You’ll still have to crop the pages down because there will be extra white areas on the page.)

If you are lucky enough to have a photo printer that prints 13″ x 19″ photo enlargements, you would get some good results for digital layouts. (The photo printers that print that size are: Epson Stylus Photo 1400 or Epson Stylus Photo R1900, HP Photo Smart, Canon PIXMA Pro9000 and PIXMA Pro9500 (and probably some others).

Many scrapbookers design their layouts for 8.5 x 11 pages (or “letter” size in the U.S.) which are comparable to A4 paper in europe (which measures 8.27 x 11.69 inches). I can’t even imagine what european scrapbookers do to get pages to fit 8.5 x 11 albums! I’ve read that many people print to this size love the borderless printers which allow your print area to go to the edge of the paper (so you don’t have to trim off excess paper after printing).

Of course, if you are making layouts for a smaller album, say at 8 x 8 inches, any printer will be able to output pages that allow for that size, but cropping the final pages will be necessary. Tip: if you DO have 11 x 17 or 13 x 19 printing capabilities, you can “gang up” two 8 x 8 pages and print them on one page, then cut them apart.

So there are some ideas for printing your digital scrapbooks. Maybe you got a new printer and can test it out soon!

Oh yeah, it’s 2009, can you believe it!  Happy New Year scrappers!!