Diana Blair – MapBooks4U.com

Diana Blair of Nuevo, California worked a lot: 12-16 hours a day, seven days a week. She did all sorts of jobs to make ends meet: lawn mowing, day care, car repossessions, and other jobs, some of which were not very pleasant.

No one could ever call Diana a lazy person – she worked all the time – but she wasn’t getting ahead. The jobs she worked just didn’t bring in enough money for that. She knew that in order to get ahead of the game, she needed to have something that made money even while she wasn’t working. One of the things she did to make money was to sell map books door to door when she had time between jobs. She thought if she could sell her map books on the Internet, that might give her an income that didn’t require her constant presence.

She found a company she thought could help her publish her Web site. But although she tried for about a year, she never really understood what she needed to do to get her Web site up and running. The company didn’t give her the help she needed. She was just about ready to give up altogether on having an e-commerce business. That’s when she got the invitation to an Internet conference being held by StoresOnline.

An Unexpected New Start

At first, she thought the StoresOnline preview conference was supposed to be for professional Web masters. She thought maybe she could enlist one of them to help her get her map books Web site up and running. At the conference, it quickly became obvious that it wasn’t for Web masters but for common folks who didn’t necessarily know much about the Internet. She fit that bill perfectly and was interested enough in what they said that she signed up for the all-day training workshop, too.

But when the day of the workshop came, she arrived a bit late and the workshop was full.

“They took my name and number and told me someone would call with the date and time of another workshop,” Diana said. “I’d taken the day off work and didn’t think I’d be able to make it to another one.”

Sure enough, a customer service rep from StoresOnline called and told her of an upcoming workshop. She said she’d try to be there but didn’t really think she’d make it.

“The day of that second workshop it was raining out so I couldn’t mow lawns. It just felt like that workshop was something I was supposed to go do,” Diana said.

Once at the workshop, she learned that e-commerce involves far more than just building and publishing a Web site. She learned about marketing, search engines, shopping carts, site security, and other things she didn’t know about before.

“I really enjoyed it because it was in layman’s terms,” said Diana, “words I could understand. They showed us what we needed and why we needed it.”

Taking the Plunge

She quickly realized that StoresOnline wasn’t just offering site hosting but the whole package of things she’d need to build her e-commerce business, including a content management system she could understand, a merchant account, and solid customer support. She bought the six-site package.

When she signed on with StoresOnline, Diana already knew what she wanted to sell online: the map books she’d been selling door to door. But by the time she got to the workshop, enough of her friends had advised her against it that she was a little spooked. She wondered if her idea was a viable one. After all, who needs printed maps when the Internet has all sorts of terrific map applications available for free? Besides, you can buy map books at every “big box” store in the country. Why would anyone go online to buy maps?

When the instructor showed her the reverse search tool, she knew this was the way she could tell if her map books idea had any chance of success. She also realized it was a tool that could help her market her map books in a way that would bring her potential customers to her Web site.

Building Success

Because she’d already had a little success at selling map books door to door, she knew there was a market for them. She bought them directly from a manufacturer located not far from where she lived.

During the site-building process, one of the things Diana says she liked best about StoresOnline was the customer support chat line.

“With the other company I tried, they were always closed when I tried to get support. With the 24/7 chat line at StoresOnline, they were able to give me support whenever I needed it.”

Even so, it took Diana a full six months to build her first Web site. That’s because the only time she could spend on it was between her different jobs. She only had to time to work on it a little here and a little there. Finally, after six months of on and off work, she built a sizable site offering about 200 different products for sale.

Within nine days of hitting the “publish” button, Diana got her first order.

“It made me a full-on believer. After that I went in and started implementing all the marketing techniques I could find.”

Diana reflects that one of the most important factors in her success was following directions to the letter.

“I didn’t skip any steps,” she said. “I followed it all the way through submitting to search engine directories and all the rest.”

She didn’t do paid search right away because she didn’t understand it well and didn’t have much money to work with. So she just made sure to use all the free marketing techniques she found in the StoresOnline Merchant Services section. In that way, bit by bit, she built her marketing campaign. Once she had a bit of a budget and felt comfortable with the concept of pay-per-click advertising, she added that to her marketing efforts.

“The reverse search tool was my best buddy and it still is, even now,” said Diana. “I use it to check up on the products I sell to see if I need to tweak my marketing. It helps me keep up with the way my customers search for my products. The other thing I love is the Merchant Services section. It lets me keep up with the latest Internet marketing techniques without having to search for them. The StoresOnline guys do all the searching for me. All I have to do is read the stuff they put in Merchant Services.”

Over the years, she eventually added several other suppliers to her product line. Some of them actually sought her out because she managed to keep her Web site so consistently high in search rankings.

Today, Diana has three sites live and two additional sites in the works.

“If not for StoresOnline, I would have given up on e-commerce,” Diana said. “I would have just decided I couldn’t have an online business and walked away. I’d still be mowing lawns, doing day care, and hunting for odd jobs.”