Black Friday can feel like pure chaos when you wait until the last minute to decide what to sell, how much to discount, and how you’re going to promote it.

In this episode of The Maker’s Money Podcast, I’m sharing the year I finally stopped panicking about Black Friday and started planning for it early instead.

We’ll talk about how choosing your products, promotions, emails, and social content ahead of time can completely change the way you experience the holiday sales season. I’ll also walk you through how the Push, Keep, or Pause method from Episode 8 can help you decide what actually deserves a spot in your Black Friday lineup.

If you sell on Etsy, Shopify, or run another product-based business, this episode will help you create a simpler Black Friday plan before Q4 gets overwhelming.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why Black Friday planning should start before the rush
• How to choose the right products to promote
• Why you don’t need to put everything on sale
• How planning your offers and marketing early can reduce last-minute stress
• How to build a Black Friday strategy around what your business can realistically handle

Because the goal isn’t just to make more sales.

It’s to go into Black Friday with a plan — instead of making decisions in panic mode.

🎧 Next episode: Before you choose your Black Friday discount, we’re going to look at whether your products can actually afford the sale.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

Not every best seller deserves a spot in your Black Friday promotion.

In this episode, I’m breaking down how handmade and product-based business owners can decide which products are actually worth promoting during Black Friday and the holiday season.

We’ll look at profit, production time, customer demand, and whether a product is really worth the extra orders. I’ll also walk you through my simple Push, Keep, or Pause framework to help you decide what deserves your marketing attention this Q4.

You’ll learn:

• Why your best seller may not be your most profitable product
• How production time affects your holiday profit
• How to choose a strong Black Friday or Q4 hero product
• Why some complicated custom products may not be worth pushing
• The question to ask before promoting anything: “If 20 orders for this came in tomorrow, would I actually be happy?”

Because Black Friday is not just about getting more orders.

It’s about getting more of the right orders.

Next episode: Can you actually afford to take 20% off your whole shop?

🎧 The Maker’s Money Podcast
Hosted by Dina Anaya, QuickBooks ProAdvisor, former embroidery business owner, and founder of Anaya Bookkeeping.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

If you know you’re undercharging but the thought of raising your prices makes you panic, this episode is for you.

I’m sharing what happened when I finally raised the prices in my own embroidery business — and why the customers I was terrified of losing mostly stayed.

We’ll talk about the fear behind raising prices, how to make the change without overexplaining or apologizing, and why fewer orders can actually mean more profit when your pricing is finally working.

You’ll also hear a simple example showing how raising your profit per order can leave you making more money with less work.

If you’ve been telling yourself, “I’ll fix my prices later,” this is your sign to start with one product and make the change.

Grab the free Profit Pricing Calculator at anayabookkeeping.com and run the numbers for yourself.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

How do you know if your handmade product is actually worth your time — not just profitable on paper?

If you sell handmade products, embroidery, custom apparel, or other products on Etsy, Shopify, or TikTok Shop, knowing your material costs isn't enough. A product can technically make a profit and still pay you far too little for the hours you're putting into it.

In Episode 6 of The Maker's Money Podcast, I'm showing you a different way to think about pricing handmade products for profit: start with the hourly income you actually want your business to produce, then work backward to determine whether each product can support that goal.

I walk you through a real example from my former embroidery and custom apparel business: a personalized Halloween hoodie I sold for $49.99. We'll break down the product cost, profit per item, production capacity, and the mistake that's easy to make when multiple embroidery machines are running but there's still only one person hooping, finishing, packing, and shipping the orders.

You'll learn how to calculate the true hourly profit of a handmade product, set a realistic take-home hourly income target, factor labor and production time into your pricing, and identify products that may be profitable but are still consuming too much of your time.

We'll also talk about how to decide which products to promote, adjust, redesign, raise the price on, or stop selling altogether.

By the end of the episode, you'll be able to look at your products differently — not just by how many orders they generate, but by how much profit they produce for the time they require.

Because more orders aren't always the answer. The goal is to build a product-based business where the products you sell actually pay you for the time it takes to make them.

FREE RESOURCE: Grab my Profit Pricing Calculator to run the numbers on one of your own products. Link in the show notes.

The Maker's Money Podcast is hosted by Dina Anaya, former embroidery and custom apparel business owner, QuickBooks ProAdvisor, and former QuickBooks Live Expert. The show helps handmade and product-based business owners understand pricing, profit, bookkeeping, and the numbers behind building a profitable business.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

In this episode of The Maker's Money Podcast, I'm sharing the moment I realized I'd been running one of my most popular products at almost no profit for years. It was a couples sweatshirt — matching, embroidered, personalized in two separate places, made-to-order for every customer. Customers loved it. I had five-star reviews. I was a Star Seller on Etsy.

And I was charging $39.99 for it — when it should have been closer to $50.

I only figured it out because I finally sat down with my profit and loss report and read it line by line, month by month, the way I should have been reading it all along. What I found underneath was a pattern I've since seen in almost every handmade shop I've looked at — a great product, loved by customers, quietly costing more to make than it was bringing in.

If you're an Etsy, Shopify, or TikTok Shop seller who feels like your best months don't match what shows up in your bank account, this episode is going to land hard. Because it's rarely a sales problem. It's a keeping-the-money problem — and that's actually good news, because it's completely fixable.

In this episode:

• Why five-star reviews and a full order queue can hide a serious pricing problem
• The four real reasons handmade sellers underprice (and why "I forgot to add labor" is only the surface one)
• Why constant sales on an underpriced product make the leak worse, not better
• The one-product exercise to find your true profit per order this week

Grab a coffee, pull up your top-selling listing, and let's figure out what your numbers are actually telling you.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

My best sales month ever couldn't pay for a family trip to Disneyland. Here's what that taught me about the difference between revenue and profit.

In this episode of The Maker's Money Podcast, I'm getting honest about one of the hardest money moments in my business — the time I'd had an incredible quarter, felt genuinely proud, and then sat down to plan a surprise family trip only to realize the money simply wasn't there.

The dashboard said one thing. My bank account said another. And the gap between those two numbers is exactly what this episode is about.

I'm walking you through the difference between gross revenue and net profit in plain English, using my real numbers and my real profit-and-loss report — the same one that finally showed me why "great sales" and "actual money in the bank" are not the same thing. If you've ever felt confused or even a little ashamed that a good month on paper didn't translate into money you could actually use, you are so not alone.

In this episode:

• Why revenue is the number that lies to you (and profit is the one that tells the truth)
• The Disneyland trip that made this lesson impossible to ignore
• What a profit-and-loss report actually shows you, without the accounting jargon
• How to start looking at your numbers so your best months actually feel like your best months

Grab a coffee, pull up your own numbers, and let's figure out what they're really telling you.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

Before you spend another dollar on ads, there's one number you need to know.

In this episode of The Maker's Money Podcast, I'm telling you something I've never told anyone — about the Facebook ads I used to quietly turn on for five days, watch drain my account, then shut off at eleven o'clock at night without mentioning it to a single person.

I wasn't running ads because I had a strategy. I was running them because I was desperate, stuck at the same revenue number every month, and convinced everyone else had figured out something I hadn't. And underneath all of it was a fear I'd never said out loud: I'd rather spend money than show my face.

We're breaking down the actual math behind paid advertising for handmade and product-based businesses — what it really costs to acquire a customer, how to know whether your profit margin can support ad spend, and why ads are a multiplier rather than a fix. If your pricing is off or you don't know your numbers, ads will just help you lose money faster and with more confidence.

In this episode:

• Why paid ads feel like a shortcut past the hard part of building an audience
• The simple math that tells you whether you can afford to run ads right now
• Ads as a multiplier, not a fix — and why that distinction matters
• The three types of sellers, and which marketing strategy actually fits where you are today

If the numbers say wait, that isn't failure. That's you finally running your business instead of guessing your way through it.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

Gross revenue, cost of goods sold, and net profit — most handmade sellers only really know one of these three numbers. Today, you're learning all three.

In this episode of The Maker's Money Podcast, I'm breaking down the three numbers every Etsy seller, handmade business owner, and creative entrepreneur needs to understand — not in confusing accounting language, but in plain English you can actually use.

I'm sharing the real story of my best Q4 ever — the one where my gross revenue looked incredible, my sister sent me a string of celebratory emojis, and I felt like I had finally figured it out. Then January came, I opened my books, and I learned the hard way that revenue and profit are not the same thing.

If you've ever looked at your Etsy or Shopify dashboard and felt confused about why a "great sales month" doesn't seem to show up in your bank account, this episode is for you. We're talking about the difference between what came in, what it actually cost you to make and ship your product, and what you genuinely kept at the end of the day — and why that last number is the only one that really tells the truth about your business.

In this episode:

• What gross revenue actually tells you (and what it hides)
• How to calculate your true cost of goods sold, including the costs most sellers forget
• Why net profit — not sales volume — is the real measure of a healthy handmade business
• The Amazon panic-buy story that taught me this lesson the hard way

Grab a coffee, pull up your own dashboard, and let's figure out what your numbers are actually telling you.

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.

I always thought marketing was my problem. Turns out, it was my numbers.

In this first episode of The Maker's Money Podcast, I'm sharing the real story behind why I started this show — and the moment I realized that no amount of Instagram posting or Etsy ads was going to fix a business that didn't understand its own profit margins.

If you're a handmade seller, Etsy shop owner, or creative entrepreneur who feels like your sales are up but your bank account tells a different story, this episode is for you. We're talking about pricing your handmade products correctly, understanding your true cost per item, and why "more marketing" is rarely the actual fix for a struggling small business.

This is a podcast for makers, crafters, and product-based business owners who want real talk about small business finance — no jargon, no shame, just honest conversations about what it actually takes to build a profitable creative business.

In this episode:

• Why I thought marketing was my biggest problem (and why I was wrong)
• The real cost of running a handmade business without knowing your numbers
• How profit margin — not just sales volume — determines whether your business survives

 If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it. 

Resources mentioned:
🔗 Free Apparel + Embroidery Pricing Calculator:  https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1453577/186951815506429523/share
🌐 Website: https://www.anayabookkeeping.com/
📱 Instagram: Instagram

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a fellow maker who needs to hear it.