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.

Debby Sibert

R.O.S.E. Christmas | Christmas for Everyone