January 22, 2007
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Work at Home on a Shoestring

Many professionals design expensive web sites for large businesses.and that leaves a lot of room for the small work at home entrepreneur. The basics of this small work at home enterprise are as follows:

1. Contact and convince a few small merchants with repeat customers that you can build a simple website to advertise their weekly specials or coupons. Start with one! Offer a one to three month free trial and keep your prices low. You’ll have to do some research to find out the prices that the professionals charge. That’s easily done by visiting their web pages.
2. You can save yourself time by scanning the advertising in local daily and weekly papers. If a business is advertising and does not include a website, you have a prospect. The first thing any merchant will do is advertise his website.
3. Convince the merchant to obtain email addresses from each of his customers
4. Convince the merchant to hand out a small ad directing them to his website.
5. Build mailing lists from his customer base for an additional cost.
6. Offer to send out a newsletter to his customers for an additional cost per submission.

Your beginning costs for this enterprise are basically shoe leather and some printing of advertising materials. You’ll need business cards, rate cards and contract sheets outlining your services. You can use free web hosting, free banners, free graphics, and free templates to build your websites. There are many available. I use NVU, a free program to build websites. Your website doesn’t have to fancy, it could consist of only one or two pages. An example for a drycleaner might be a main page with a banner with the business name, a secondary table (box) with store location, phone number and etc. The next table could be a listing of all his services and rates. Then at the bottom or on second page a coupon or the weekly special. The reason for using tables for each segment of your page is that they are easy to edit. Once your simple site is up, you can easily change the specials or coupons without much work.

If he has a picture of his store, logo or letterhead, you can scan them and use on the website.

Eventually, you will need an email responder service, or design your own system. You may explain to the merchant that you can use free domain hosting and free domain names, but it always looks more professional for a business to have its own domain name and .com is the most recognized. However, one of the others might have a name more appropriate to the business. The costs for acquiring a domain are usually less than $10 with free hosting for a small site.

These options should be outlined and explained to the merchant so that he understands the scope of the service you offer. For example, you should have a contract sheet with the cost of designing a one or two page site, costs for weekly or monthly changes to rates specials or coupons, costs for maintenance of customer email lists and costs for preparing newsletters or sending out emailed newsletters or coupons.

The merchant would be asked to pay for obtaining a domain name or web hosting as well as an email responder service if he wants one. The responder service is good because the customer is asked to opt into the service and is given the ability to opt out. I don’t think it’s a good idea to get involved in printing paper newsletters or using snail mail, it’s expensive and not that effective for the small merchant.

Every time I head off to nearest city to shop, I visit the grocery and green grocers websites to see the weekly specials and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I have usually obtained the website from a local weekly paper ad or from a web search. I think this is super idea for a home business. As you do have to meet with local merchants, it’s necessary to dress appropriately and be business oriented. Not that you have to wear suits or fancy cloths, just stay away from very casual cloths and be well groomed.

Of course, I have to get a plug is for the Nice Offers program offered by SFI. It offers merchants free online coupon advertising. I go over that option in detail on my Nov. 6, 2006 Blog. Again, the start up costs are low. SFI maintains the website and bills the merchants for the agreed upon fees and pays you a commission. Click Here to visit the Nice Offers site and find out more information regarding their program

Also, Top Online Profits will guide through the process of setting up a professional website. Their program very nearly forces you to learn what's necessary to become a successful internet marketer and webmaster. Their costs are low, about $60 a year for the program. Click Here for more information.

The number one ranked web hosting service is iPowerweb for about $100 a year for their basic service. It's what I use and I'm very happy with their service. Click Here for more info.





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