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Stay at Home Mom Makes it Big on the Internet for "Christmas Cards"
By Debby Sibert
" just wanted to help put my three kids through college,"
says Debby Sibert when asked how she got into selling
Christmas cards. Knowing that Christmas is one time a year
that businesses have a budget set aside to send Christmas
cards to all their clients and customers, she figured it would
be a lucrative business and would only last a few months so
she wouldn't have to work all year long. She started selling
to local businesses by making appointments then lugging two
heavy bags, each containing three albums of sample cards to
show to the customers. She would usually come home with
three or four sales and feel good about her time. But it did
take a lot of time and wear and tear on the body carting
everything around.
Her son, a freshman in high school at the time said, "Mom,
you need to have a presence on the internet." To which she
replied, ¡°That would be great, but how do I do that?" He
said, "I'll build you a website." And that he did. They
registered a domain name, researched and found a web
hosting company that would support e-commerce, and he
began to build code into a website. Back then there were
not all the tools that are available now, so he had to do
everything from scratch. It was rather crude looking but
pretty soon www.DesignCrafters.com
was a reality. Debby said
that the best $300 she ever spent was to take advantage of
the "express submit" option to the Yahoo Directory. In three
days the site was accepted and they had their first major link
to the site making them visible enough to be found! They
even started getting a few orders. Her daughter got in the act
by helping with some of the scanning of cards and entering
data and eventually got involved doing the graphics support
in helping to prepare custom verses and logos for printing.
The younger son contributed by helping to run errands. It
became a family affair.
All that is history now that they have hit the "big time". Last
season they found themselves in the #4 position on Google
for the term "Christmas cards" which returns more than
19,000,000 responses for that phrase. Their excitement for
this search engine placement waned however, as they
'learned to appreciate the power of the Internet.' "We ended
up getting more orders than we could handle," said Debby.
At this point, son number one had graduated from college
(debt free) and her daughter was finishing up her last year at
a private, out of state college (debt free) and number two
son was finishing up his senior year of high school and
accepted to the college of his choice. They were no longer
available to help, so she had hired three friends to help get
her through the busy season. By the time she realized what
was happening, however, it was too late to hire additional
help and train. She did call on a couple of friends to retrieve
phone messages, prioritize the needs and return calls. This
season, so far they hold the #6 spot on Google for
Christmas cards, #8 on Yahoo which returns over
45,000,000 responses and #1 on MSN which returns over
20,000,000. They hold similar ranking on all the major
search engines for "Christmas cards" and related phrases.
In order to avoid a repeat dilemma this year, Debby has
hired three additional friends (totaling six now) to help. She
says, "This really is fun and a 'win-win' situation, because I'm
able to work with friends, giving them an opportunity to earn
some serious Christmas spending money. We're doing what
we love to do, and have a great time doing it. Our passion is
to serve people, doing what we do best and provide them
with hand picked cards from our favorite manufacturers.
"We are prepared this time," she said. "Bring it on!"
Check out their huge selection of over 1200 beautiful,
premium holiday cards that can be customized with logos or
pretty much whatever you may want at
www.DesignCrafters.com
About the Author
http://www.DesignCrafters has been on online resouce for Premium holiday cards for the last 8 years. They specialize in customizing cards with personal verses and logos for business. Large order discounts offered as well as an incredible guarantee.
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/13371.html
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