Discover insider secrets to all your business start-up questions.  Fast-track your business without hiring tons of (expensive) professionals and get on with making money. For Making Your Own  Merchandise or Promo Stuff CafePress is a very cool place where you can print so many promotional products for your business.  You would end up paying a lot per item, compared to the $1-6 of other promo products BUT you can order one at a time.  So, make and buy a shirt to wear to the gym with your business logo and domain name on it.  Make a clock. Make an apron, a bag, a Christmas ornament! There's lots to choose from! OR, if you have a great idea for a t-shirt design, you can create a store through cafepress and sell your design on any of their items.  People go to your store, order an item, Cafepress prints it and sends you some money, keeping a cut for themselves for making and shipping the item.  Simple.  Brilliant. Zazzle is like Cafepress except that it's WAY easier to make products (fun, even) and has a better selection of clothing.  It's tres hip but you don't make as much money off of the products that you've made.  So great for making promotional products for yourself, though.  It only took me 2 minutes to make a t-shirt, using a ready image.

Lulu is similar to CafePress in that you can create something and put it out there for people to buy and not have to put up any costs.  Lulu creates the product and ships it out per order and they send you 80% of the cost of the item.  YOU set the price though.  What can you make with Lulu?  A variety of books, eBooks, calendars, and more.  You can even have your book be added to their bookstore.  So maybe, just maybe, someone from far off will find your book and buy it!

For Email Newsletters

• iContact is the best place to go for email newsletters, for most average folk.  We cannot see any reason why someone would not want to use iContact.  It has an easy html sign-up code you can just paste into your home page to start collecting email addresses from people who want to sign up for your promotions.  It tracks your email results and it's extremely easy to use and navigate.  Intuitive.  If you need help, you can be on the phone with someone from customer services in less than 5 minutes.
  
  We used to recommend Constant Contact and Vertical Response but iContact is cheaper and easier, if not better altogether.

For Promo Products

• Looking for really snazzy marketing give-aways??  You will love Clik Clak.  How could you not?  The women behind the fabulous company used to design for Old Navy and other great companies, as far as we can recall (they've since changed their About Us page) and you won't believe the brandable products and super yummy confections they have for you to choose from.  Of course, it's quite costly if you're just starting out.  If that's the case, just bookmark the site for the future. 

For Product Packaging

• If you need cute packaging in smallish quantities, check out Dunwoody Booth.  They've got gorgeous packaging products and they're very competitively priced.  A professional company with experience.  
  
  There's also Clear Bags, who offer more than just bags.
  
  
• Need labels or hang tags for fabric products?  One good and reasonably priced source located in the US is Clothing Labels 4 U.  Lisa says she is 40% less than if you go to a large plant to have them made.  Another source, Canadian this time, is Luscious Labels.  Carmen does small quantities and has lots of experience.  See her gallery for all the examples of popular companies for which she's made labels.  Be sure to click on "information" if you are going for woven labels.
  
  
• One place to go for low quantity product labels (like stickers) is Lightning Labels.  They are in the US, have reasonable prices and you can get an instant price quote on their website.
  
  
  
• For retail packaging and store fixtures, check out Eddie's.  They are Canadian.  If anyone knows of an American source, please let us know! 

For Search Engine Optimization

THE place for information on how to properly keep your website optimized for the search engines is Planet Ocean.  You need to get their eBook on the subject, titled The Unfair Advantage on Winning the Search Engine Wars because it's pretty easy to follow (you may have to read some unfamiliar topics a few times but it's not because the book is poorly written, it's because the topic is so foreign) and it is updated every month because the search engines are always changing their rules.   If you hire someone to optimize your site for you, are you going to be able to pay them on a regular basis every time there's a major change with the rules?  You better learn some things yourself.  If you don't think this book was worth the purchase, you will get a no-questions-asked guarantee.  You also get access to their Search Engine News site.

To optimize your website, you need to have keywords put into the html of your pages.  These are words that the search engine "bots" or robots read and index but visitors can't see them. But you also need to write those search words into your page.  In order to know what are the best search words to target in your page content, or to know which words would be most profittable to bid on in Pay-per-click ads, you NEED Wordtracker.  Wordtracker can be used free or you can pay to use it for a week, a year, etc.  It's a very cool tool.

For Helpful Business/Office Supplies

Wouldn't it be great to get your faxes sent directly to your email?  The key to our hearts is through our email.  CallWave can do this for ya and you can try it for free for 30 days. 

Are your kids being exposed to pornography on your computer?  Are you sure?  It's something that we am very concerned about these days as our children are becoming very Internet savvy.  ContentWatch provides solutions for this and other internet security problems.  They recently acquired Net Nanny, too!

For eCommerce Solutions

Write It Once sounds like a lifesaver.  It automatically converts banking info into Quickbooks for you.  It works with various shippers and shopping carts.  Instead of transfering information from one program to another, you simply "write it once"!

For Website Design

Jen from JenTekk Web Solutions  is our tech gal.  She can build you a website, a forum, or just help you with graphic files-- all that website techie stuff.  I'll be honest: she's a little bit more expensive than what we was used to paying with other WAHM designers but she is WORTH IT!  Fast, professional, encouraging and she gives a detailed description of what she did while working on your project.  If your project calls for hourly billing, she gives detailed minutes.  She's actually over-quoted me on projects and then charged me less.