Best and Worst Business Decisions of the Year

by Crystal Paine

For those of you who enjoy a little behind-the-scenes look at our business, I am posting the following. And lest anyone think this is self-serving, please know it is not meant to be. I just want to encourage other women/families who want to start a home business with ideas and inspiration for what has/hasn't worked for us...

I'm a part of a wonderful group of Christian Self-Publishers headed up by our friends, the Bluedorns. We are always in the midst of some excellent dialogue over our small publishing businesses and how to improve, expand, grow, and, more importantly, to impact our culture to the glory of God!

This week, we were asked to share our best and worst business decisions for the year. Jesse and I had fun discussing this and I wrote up the following to share with the group. I thought I would post it here as well for those who might enjoy reading it.

Best Business Decisions:

The biggest and best decision was for us to quit our wedding supply business and just focus on what we found we enjoy doing the most -- writing, self-publishing, and selling. It's been much less stressful and the profit has been much better as well (always a good thing!).

A few of our other best business decisions:

1. Starting a blog- Definitely has completely increased our traffic and sales and customer base. It gets people to keep coming back to our website, on an almost daily base. Plus, many people have linked to it and so this has raised our website ranking because we have a lot more links coming in. It also means that search engines like our website since there is new content being added almost daily. In addition, it has opened up new doors for me from people who read my blog and then contact me with possible writing opportunities and so forth.

{Just so my blog readers know: Though this blog was started as an extension and addition to our business, and though it has brought in many sales and new customers, I long ago stopped thinking of it as a "marketing tool" and now just blog because I love to blog. Even if I never saw any money or profit from it, I wouldn't care because I enjoy blogging so much. Just getting to know all of you and learn from you has been such a tremendous blessing, worth more than anything money can buy!}

2. Starting a regular weekly newsletter- This newsletter includes an article or two from my blog entries of the week and one featured product -- takes me minutes to put together and I've gotten great response from it!

3. Doubling our inventory- We added 50% more books to our current bookstore offerings -- meaning we went from about 20 titles to around 40 titles. Yes, we're still very small, but we are also extremely particular in what we offer.

4. Producing more of our own products- We've found that by not only selling our own products, but by also selling a select number of hand-picked products from others, it provides the perfect variety for steady sales.

5. Setting up an affiliate program with two of our new eBooks- This has definitely helped to improve our traffic and sales and also our site ranking since it means that many more people are linking to us and promoting our website/products on their website.

6. Using a different marketing approach- We have spent almost $0.00 on marketing this year as our past attempts basically went nowhere. Instead, we focused on networking with others, promoting our affiliate programs, providing a lot of content through our blogs and email newsletter, and just striving to have good customer service and quality products. We have been amazed that our website traffic has at least tripled in the last six months and our profit has increased by 400 to 500% since last year (Of course, if you knew how little our profit margin was last year, those numbers wouldn't sound so impressive, but God is good! All the praise goes to Him!)

7. Signing up with Stamps.com- How did we ever live without them? I have no clue!!

8. Hiring out work/Having my husband's involvement -- Realizing what I'm good at it and focusing on doing that. I've been much more apt to pay others to do jobs for me that are things I am not good at, and/or would take me a good deal of time and trouble to do. I'm still working on finding the balance of when it is better to hire the work out and when it is easier and more cost-effective to do it myself. My husband has been taking on a much more active role in our business in the past three months and that has been a huge help to me and it is wonderful to be working together. In addition, he has some great ideas for the future expansion of our business, which we have been slowly implementing. (Stay tuned...)

9. Setting up an eBay store - This has been a very big success for us and also driven a lot of traffic to our website. It pays for itself very nicely and brings in a whole new audience of customers to our website, many of which sign up for our newsletter.

Worst Business Decisions:

1. Not using a paid email newsletter software for the first year of our business so that when we already had over 1300 on our list (which we were manually inputting and sending out to -- 50 at a time, what was I thinking??), we realized we had to switch to something more efficient. But, then, we lost many of our subscribers in the double-opt-in switch. Word to the wise: Plan to develop a large list from the beginning and just take the plunge and buy the software or program. It's worth the money.

2. Shipping larger packages via Me dia Mail- We found out the hard way that the USPS is not kind to large Me dia Mail packages and we ended up having to replace several hundred dollars worth of merchandise to customers who received it in a not-so-presentable state.

Crystal Paine is a 24-year-old homeschool graduate from Topeka, Kansas. She is the blessed wife of Jesse and joyful mother of Kathrynne. Visit her site, Biblical Womanhood, for books, articles, encouragement, and inspiration!

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