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Stay at Home Mom Makes it Big on the Internet for "Christmas Cards"
"I 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:
Debby Sibert, mother of three, is the founder of
http://www.DesignCrafters.com, a thriving online resource for
premium christmas cards. They specialize in personalization with
custom verses and logos for buinesses. She attributes most of
their success to trust and loyalty of past customers. They also
offer a "risk free" guarantee not heard on in their industry
which has built trust among their new customers each year.
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