How To Start A Greeting Card Business Successfully – Part 1
By David Dutton
When helping people who are looking at starting a greeting card business, I share many of the tips that you are about to learn. This will be a series of articles on various tips that you should know before you start a greeting card business.
Starting a greeting card business can be
| difficult if you do not have a mentor to guide you through the process. By following the tips listed below, you will find that you will be well on your way to a great beginning to your own greeting card business. |
The tips are in no certain order. They are all important to your business.
1. When you start a greeting card business, you want to be sure to evaluate yourself. This will tell you where your strengths and weaknesses lie. This is where you’ll take a good look at yourself and see what areas you are proficient in and what areas you need to work on.
Some may disagree but I focus 99% of my time on my strengths and far out my weaknesses. By doing so, I enjoy my business more and life is much easier. If you read many self-help books, they teach you the same principle.
I have hired freelance people in the past just to do certain tasks for me since that particular task doesn’t fit in with my strengths.
2. You want to take a look how well you are in the marketing of your business. Having a mentor that is strong in marketing is a
| huge plus. You may love greeting cards but if nobody ever hears about your greeting card business then you will have no business. The more you know about marketing |
the easier clients will be attracted to you.
3. Know which time is best for you to work. Some people prefer to do all the work at night or others perform better during the day. If you’re doing your home based greeting card business online like I do, then you can pick and choose what time of the day you’re working your business.
The other night I woke up wide awake at three o’clock in the morning. I ended up working for two hours and went back to bed. Although it wouldn’t be cool to do that every night, I have so much fun working whenever I feel like it.
4. It is important to constantly educate yourself so you can stay on top of the game with your greeting card business plan. When I coach a person to start their own greeting card business, I give them a ninety day action plan to help them reach their goals quicker.
Having a plan also helps you think outside the box because you have goals you must meet and you have to figure out how to get there in the time that you set. Always be learning and always continue to educate yourself.
You can rest assured your competitors are doing so.
5. Do not be afraid of making mistakes. Many new greeting card business owners find that they fail due to their fear of failure. They are so afraid of making mistakes and ruining their business that they overlook things and make mistakes on purpose.
Just relax and have fun. Mistakes are apart of life. We all make them! Just get up and start again. Take action on what you know.
This concludes part one of our series of articles on starting a greeting card business.
How To Start A Greeting Card Business Successfully – Part 2
This is part two of a six part series for people starting a greeting card business and want to get tips to grow their business quickly.
1. You want to spot what the trends are in your greeting card business and the industry for that matter. What greeting cards are your clients buying the most of? When you know that, start designing more greetings card like that.
For instance, with my greeting card business opportunity, I can send greeting cards with people’s pictures on them for about $1.34 right from my computer. People love these cards because it has a picture of them on the cover of the card. I would say 90% of the cards I send now are cards with pictures on the cover. My business owner clients love them.
2. Once you compile your list of popular cards, you want to make up a list of your potential consumers for your target market. What is cool is you have heard the term “birds of a feather flock together”. That is a true statement. If you find you have a certain person that is buying your cards over and over, then that means he or she probably knows people just like themselves.
There are tons of places to find people online and build a relationship with them. Just about most of my business comes from meeting people online. That is what is so cool about owning a home based greeting card business.
3. You need to make it easy for potential customers to buy from you. In other words you need to make yourself accessible. You need to let your potential customers now why they should go with you. This would be called marketing yourself. You want to let your potential customers know what makes you special and stand out above the rest of the companies in the industry.
I could write a who series just on this one topic. One of the things that I do is gather testimonials of other people making money with my greeting card business opportunity as well as people using the greeting cards in their business. This doesn’t cost me a thing and I can show people proof that I know what I am talking about when it comes to making money with greeting cards.
4.Get the word out about your business. There are so many ways to do this. For my team, I use the Internet to drive traffic to my greeting card business website and people contact me when they are ready to buy. This is what I teach people to do. Be the hunted and not the hunter as my friend Mike Dillard says to me.
Another tip I share with my award winning team is to pick three to five reaching out methods to market yourself and you will be fine. Become an expert at them so you don’t spread yourself too thin.
5. Give your customers a reason to return. There are only three ways to grow a greeting card business.
a. get new clients
b. get your client to come back more often
c. get your clients to spend more at the time of purchase
If you focus on those three ways then you will be fine. As the tip mentions, always give your clients a reason to return. It is one of the fastest ways to grow a business.
This concludes part two of our six part series for starting a greeting card business successfully.
How To Start A Greeting Card Business Successfully – Part 3
This is part three of a six part series for people starting a greeting card business and want to get tips to grow their greeting card business quickly.
1. Make sure you keep a database of all your customers as well as potential customers and any customers that have been referred to you by other customers. This way you have a mailing list for any of your promotional materials for future use.
2. Find your niche in the market. It can help to have a certain type of audience to target such as animal lovers. You can then make your cards about all sorts of animals and then target this market and consumers with your product.
3. Hold an open house. You can include in this potential customers as well as local small business owners. You want to include the community so that you can make it known that you are now a part of the business community.
When you just start out you want to have some type of offer about your business and products that you can provide. This will be good to hand out at open house as well as to any businesses that may be inquiring about your services.
4. You can offer discounts to businesses if they’re buying bulk items such as Christmas cards or cards for a special event, personalized for their company.
5. What you give away you get to keep. This is taught by my buddy Joe Schroeder. Learn to let people experience your product. Give some of it away and people will come back.
When I show people my greeting card business opportunity I don’t tell them about it. I let them send cards out to their friends and wait to hear the reaction from the cards.
That is how I grow my business through giving people free accounts called gift accounts. It is my secret.
This concludes part three of our six part series for starting a greeting card business successfully. You can take a free ecourse on starting a greeting card business below.
David Dutton offers a free ecourse on how to grow a successful greeting card business If you are thinking about starting a greeting card business then you should take his free ecourse to learn insider tips.
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