# Selling your plans



## tncraftsman (Oct 21, 2009)

Has anyone sold their woodworking plans online? If so where did you sell them and how did it work out?


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## AmericanCraftWood (Apr 10, 2013)

I have a few plans that I've made and sell on my own website. It's a little bit of work to get it set up, but the big challenge is getting traffic to your site so people can find your plans. I had considered offering my site up to other woodworkers looking to sell their own plans in the past. If you're interested let me know, but I'll be honest with you, I don't get a lot of traffic to my site yet either. I really only get a couple sales a month at this point and I give several of them away for free.

There is a site that kind of caters to what you want to do, and I think they even offer some pretty nice tools to create good looking plans. I'm not sure how much traffic they generate, but take a look at http://www.sawtoothideas.com/

What I would avoid is Ted's Woodworking Plans. I don't know this from personal experience, but some well known woodworkers have come out against Ted (if there is a Ted) claiming that he is selling a lot of stolen content from small guys/gals like us. Not cool Ted.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your plans.


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## agallant (Jul 1, 2010)

Watermark your plans if you are worried about someone stealing them.


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## AmericanCraftWood (Apr 10, 2013)

That's a great point.


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## wormil (Nov 19, 2011)

IMO unless your plans are for something relatively complex that can't be simplified, probably with some mechanical element, then it's not worth the bother.


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## tncraftsman (Oct 21, 2009)

I've seen sawtoothideas.com but wasn't sure about traffic. I've seen a couple of plans for sale on Etsy and there is always the Ebay route. Though I've read Ebay isn't a good place to sell electronic goods.

You never know what could happen by putting them out there. About 10 years ago I made a junk website with some templates and threw some adsense ads on it. Since then it's brought in about 20k over 10 years. Not much each month but every little bit helps.


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## MrRon (Jul 9, 2009)

I feel it's important to first build a sample and post a picture of the finished item. This serves to work out any "bugs" in the design, insure the dimensions are accurate and show the buyer that the design actually works. Nothing worse than someone building from a plan and having an expensive piece of wood cut too short; good way to build a negative reputation. I have many designs on the board, but haven't built them yet. I won't post them until the sample works.


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