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Informative Articles

Baking Christmas Memories: Rolled Gingerbread Cookies
Some of my fondest childhood memories of Christmas are those of my brother, sister and me baking Christmas cookies with our mother. We'd all end up covered in flour and frosting, the kitchen would be a mess and the cookies never came close to...

Christmas Traditions in Germany
Countries all across the world celebrate the winter solstice holiday season in their own unique ways. Some such as Christmas and Hanukah are religious celebrations, while others are non-religious celebrations of nature, people and the coming spring...

Enjoy your Christmas! Backup your data files!
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Inexpensive Christmas Gifts
The holidays are quickly approaching, which means it’s time to buy gifts. If you’re a little light on funds, following are ideas for inexpensive Christmas gifts. Inexpensive Christmas Gifts If you’re low on funds heading into the holidays,...

Merry Christmas
At the risk of being "politically incorrect," I want to wish all of you a most Merry Christmas. You do not have to be Christian (I am not) to have a merry and happy Christmas season. I absolutely love this time of year. But, for those of you...

Scrapbooking Your Christmas Memories
Christmas memories are some of our fondest, most heartwarming ones. So of course we want to preserve them in our scrapbook albums. However, when the hustle and bustle of the holiday season is upon us, we may forget to take particular photos...

Sharp Christmas Gift Ideas to be Given TO the Hard-to-Please FROM the Uninspired and/or Busy Shopper
We’ve all got one or two people on our gift list that are just ‘impossible.’ You could always send a box of candy, flowers or a can of popcorn, but that shows so little thought. Here are some nice ideas, sure to please, easy to order, in...

So It's Christmas Time, Is A Payday Advance Right For You
It seams that with all the excitement of the holidays comes expectations of greatness from friends and loved ones. Quite frankly, Chirstmas is expensive. Many people flock to payday advance services to get them through the holidays. Is this...

Taking Back Christmas
John Grisham wrote a book called SKIPPING CHRISTMAS. Amazon.com reports: “John Grisham turns a satirical eye on the overblown ritual of the festive holiday season, and the result is Skipping Christmas, a modest but funny novel about the tyranny...

The Christmas Dress
(From the book: Christmas in Dairyland — True Stories from a Wisconsin Farm; August 2003; trade paperback; http://ruralroute2.com) From the time I was a very little girl, I had always loved to watch my big sister, Loretta, when she was...

 
 
 
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.