Search Engine of Independent Retailers and Small Business Resources

As many entrepreneurial spirits, we brainstorm brilliant idea after brilliant idea. Every one of them we hope is the golden key to riches and Internet fame. We’re no exception to these dreams and one of our earliest endeavors was a fantasticly brilliant idea to give children’s books a virtual 3-dimensional presence at Ebooks4Tots.com. We sought out talented authors and illustrators and created an internal network by which authors could submit their stories and we would match them with an illustrator of a suitable style to the story. The ebooks were published in a virtual, on screen, 3-D format that would pop up on the viewers screen and each page would be clickable to go forward or backward. I still believe it is an excellent idea in the hands of someone with more passion, time, and patience.

We published about a dozen quality ebooks and listed them at below $10 for personal download. They were free to preview the first few pages and then were prompted to pay if the user wanted to continue. We sold a few. But unfortunately, a few is not enough to maintain the ongoing costs of keeping a website hosted.

Considering the number of endeavors that we have devoted time and resources to, we’re finding that although our resources appear to be endless, our time is not. For a long time, we’ve made the conscious decision to simply keep the site in place and do nothing with it… until we could get to it. After months and months, it was appearing more likely that we would not likely ever “get to it.” So the last resort has presented itself and we’ve come to a decision to simply shut it down and reallocate the webspace and bandwidth to the sites that are currently performing best. After shutting down several of our endeavors to date, we are continuing to keep this site, IndieRetailer.com, as well as our latest and most profitable endeavor, Dollar Card Marketing, alive. If you haven’t read our release from previous posts, Dollar Card Marketing is where we customize realistic looking dollar bills for the use as a business card, drop card, or sizzle card to promote any business product or promotion.

As for the authors and illustrators of Ebooks4Tots.com, they are all hereby released from all contractual obligations regarding publishing, copyrights, and rights to sell their publications, stories, and/or illustrations. Any of the authors and illustrators are welcome to contact me and ask for an unencumberred electronic publication of their ebook without the integrated payment gateway.

Well, if we’ve learned anything over our ten years of owning and operating a brick and mortar store, it’s that it requires YOUR time and dedication. In our efforts to keep thriving as a land based gift retailer, we lost ground in our inability to juggle all of life’s demands including other full time careers, children, and family life. For that ten years, we seemed to handle it, but it wasn’t easy and quite less than ideal. We had employees to manage the day to day operations, but as efficient as they were and as much as we cherished them as family, they’re not going to have the same motivation and vision that you will as a business owner.

We considered and tried to go to ecommerce only with our gift wares and essentially ran into the same issues. We still had to rely on our employees to carry out our vision and do what we could to inspire them to be innovative while at the same time dedicating our own time to coaching and nurturing them as well as our business. Of course, that’s aside from keeping up with retail gift trends, attending trade shows, selecting and purchasing inventory, maintaining stocked shelves, etc….

So alas, we are going through the process of liquidating the tangibles and shutting down our brick and mortar store. As we started this blog resource for independent retailers, I outlined several small business models including brick and mortar, click and mortar, and strictly ecommerce. Within the ecommerce realm, there are yet more options. You can still market, promote, and sell tangible items, OR you can work with intangible items such as software and/or ebooks. These are the directions we’re moving toward.

Ideally, I thought the best business model (and I still dont’ argue that it’s not) is a high demand, easy to ship, consumable product that could be sold over the Internet. I like this even more than downloadable software and ebooks because consumable products bring you the same repeat business at fairly regular intervals. Software and ebooks have their advantage also (mainly being best suited for complete automation).

So, what we’ve decided to do was essentially both. We’re of course keeping IndieRetailer alive and will be expanding it to showcase some of the tools and resources that we’ll be using to market and promote our consumable, tangible, easy to ship, semi-automated product based business.

Dollar Card Marketing will be our tangible product based business. At Dollar Card Marketing, we customize $5, $10, $20, and $100 dollar bill drop cards and sizzle cards for any business to use. As effective as they are at simply being sizzle cards and drop cards, they’ve also been used with a great deal of success as eye grabbing business cards.

So still being in the arena of being an independent retailer, that will be our primary retail/ebusiness and IndieRetailer.com will be our business journal, so to speak. Here, we’ll not only focus on our tangible consumable product, but because we’ll have freed up some time by not working the brick and mortar store, we’ll also be pursuing other online interests including promoting other people’s Internet products and services.

I hope you’ll look forward to witnessing and participating in this new evolution as we will enjoy making it happen!

I had heard of this marketing and advertising tool in the past, but hadn’t paid much attention to it… until we started creating our dollar bill business cards at Dollar Card Marketing. Because this is such an important project for us (mostly because it’s been our most popular and profitable as of late), we’re looking into all avenues of website promotion including posting to forums, writing and sumbitting articles to article directories, website submission directories (including our own), and now pay per post.

As I like to think I’m a fairly decent writer myself, it made sense for me to join as a blogger as well. The reason behind this is that if I can start writing and creating blog posts on our site for other businesses that will pay us, I can then use those funds to pay other bloggers to post to their blogs and create reviews and important link backs to our sites.

Not only does this seem to be a fantastic way to make money for something you’re already doing as a blogger, but it also appears to be a good way of getting quality traffic back to your site either for free (if you budget your entire balance for advertising) or you can actually make a pretty good profit simply by blogging. From what I’ve seen so far, the payout can be anywhere from $10 - $1000 JUST FOR POSTING A BLOG!

Indie Retailer is proud to announce our latest project, Dollar Card Marketing. Dollar Card Marketing produces $5, $10, $20, and $100 dollar bill drop cards for lead generation, busines marketing, and website promotion.

If you’re not familiar with what a drop card or sizzle card, here it is in a nutshell. Drop cards, sometimes known as “sizzle cards” are kinda like business cards. Whereas business cards have as much contact information you can put on it along with perhaps a slogan, a drop card typically has only enough information to elicit curiosity and a call to action for more information. An example of what might be on a drop card could be, “This card could be worth $2,000 per month. Visit www.DollarCardMarketing.com for more info” or “I can save you hundreds on your mortgage payment! Call Marty’s Mortgage at 555-1212 for info.”

Business cards are intended to be handed off to perspective customers personally, generally during or immediately following a related conversation. Drop cards are mostly intended to be left behind somewhere for someone to notice and pick up. Usually, people will leave them on coffee shop tables, tape them to public phones, insert them into related books at the book store or library, etc… Another difference between a business card and a drop card is that drop cards are not necessarily “cards”. Our dollar bill drop cards are actually made of custom sized and cut paper to emulate real cash.

Dollar bill drop cards have proven to be extremely effective in generating leads and increasing sales. We can guarantee that someone will reach over and pick up a $20 or $100 bill! Of course, when they pick it up and realize that it’s a fake they might be initially disapointed, but at the same time pretty amused at the clever marketing strategy. Not only do these cards capture attention, but they’re NEVER thrown away. Whether someone is interested in your business message or not, they’re going to keep that card and show it to their friends. So, even if they’re not interested, then you have another chance that someone they show it to will be interested. It’s getting a lot of mileage from your card. Can anyone say that about they’re traditional business cards?

Initially, I mentioned that drop cards are “mostly intended to be left behind” somewhere in a public area to be noticed and picked up. However, some people feel a little uneasy about leaving something on the ground or on a table and abandoning it. When I was first introduced to the concept, I thought this is kinda gray area “littering”. However, after some thought about what “littering” truly is, I reconsidered. After seeing dollar bill drop cards in action, I’ve seen them picked up and retained in less than one minute EVERY time. So, as I see it, one is merely placingtheir business card momentarily until someone picks it up. Not litter.

Now if that still doesn’t sit well with you, no worries. Drop cards can still be very useful in the traditional sense. Although the name suggests that these business cards are to be dropped, or left behind, or “momentarily placed”, they can also be personally handed from one to another just like a traditional busines card, except more clever and attractive. Imagine after just meeting and talking with someone briefly, you reach into your wallet and hand over what appears to be a $100 bill and say something like, “My name is John and I can show you how to make a $1000 a week with just a couple hours of effort. Give me a call.” Now watch the expression on their face as they quickly reach for your “business card”.

Before we started creating the dollar bill drop cards, we spent some considerable time looking for a good quality dollar bill drop card or sizzle card at a reasonable price, I coudn’t find any that fit the bill (no pun intended, okay maybe just a small one). So, I took matters into my own hands and created one myself. In researching my competitors, I’ve found that they’re either poor quality or overpriced, or both. I’ve also noticed that their selection is limited.

Having been in business in San Diego for over a decade, I’ve been able to pool some resources together to design and create good quality $5, $10, $20, AND $100 dollar bill drop cards for business marketing. The uses for the dollar bill drop cards are endless and they can be suitable for any business.

Dollar Card Marketing is also able to produce these cards cost effectively enough to be able to offer an affiliate program. So any business can offer them to their clients and get paid a generous commission on every sale referred by them.

To get more ideas on what dollar bill drop cards can do for your business and get pricing information, log on to: www.DollarCardMarketing.com

If you haven’t come across one of these virtual characters while surfing the Internet… (first, let me congratulate you on having a life) …then you probably don’t do a lot of surfing. These virtual site hosts from Oddcast.com are the most popular tool in their inventory. Oddcast touts acquiring more than 8,000 customers and being responsible for enormous clickthrough and sales increases from the several big name testimonials provided on their site.

I’ve poked around a few forums using our DesktopForumManager software and have found mixed reviews. Obviously a very unscientific study with not a whole lot of time dedicated to it. But, it appears that the larger majority seems to be in favor of the virtual site hosts if, and that’s a big ‘IF’, like any other tool, it is used appropriately. For example, a few people mentioned that they would be ideal for a children’s site of some kind. One example of note would be www.Ebooks4Tots.com.

We’ve used SitePal on a site where no matter what I printed, or how I stated it, customers just didn’t pay attention to our shipping policy. I added a SitePal character (using my own voice narrative) to explain the shipping policy and I had no further issues. I allowed controls for volume or mute and did not lose any business as a result. In fact, our orders increased.

Speaking of the voices; if someone were to use SitePal, I’d recommend using your own voice. It makes it more personal and customers are more responsive to a personal message.

However, in this day and age of YouTube (free video hosting), webcams, and inexpensive user friendly editors, it might be more effective for business owners to produce their own videos. Whether it’s a simple introduction of yourself and your business philosophy, or a complete tour of your business operations. If you want a video on your site, it’s too easy to just do it yourself. You’ll not only save the cost of SitePal hosting, but you’ll also not compromise the load time of your pages if you host your video on YouTube or Google because the video is served from their servers. Sitepal’s videos are remotely hosted as well, it just seems they take a bit longer to load. Not enough to be overly concerned. You’d have to try it yourself, and they do offer a free trial making it ideal to test on your own site.

Back in the day, it tooks lots of legwork, personal connections, and savoir-faire to find unique artisans for an indie boutique. The internet changed all that. Independent retailers need only travel to their computers to search for new talent.

Finding unique products has always been challenging for the independent boutique retailer. Shopping the labyrinth of aisles at trades shows and mazes of showrooms can make buyers feel as if you are looking at the “same old same old”. Nothing may seem appealing or fresh for your indie boutique.

Indie retailers are accustomed to digging beyond the surface to find treasures made by new artists and artisans. There are various sites that host stores for indie artisans. Many artists may want to only sell their own items directly. But if you find merchandise that catches your eye, you may e-mail the artist to see if they do wholesale work. Some won’t, and others may not have considered it all.

Your goal should be in finding unique, quality, never-seen-anything-like-this-in-any other shop pieces. Your goal should be to pay a fair price for the merchandise, but not take advantage of someone who is new to the market and may have under-priced themselves.

Under-pricing happens with with artists who have not factored in all the variables into their pricing structure. If you knowingly underpay, not only are you taking advantage of someone’s lack of savvy, but you are setting them up to fail in the long run.

Remember, most independent retailers like consider themselves having higher ethical standards in comparison to big box corporate America. Pay fair prices.

Many talented artists are using sites such as etsy and indiecollective to market their goods. Another source for talent would be the mother of all sites, eBay.

Use the web as another resource. If not for anything, take a look and see what creative and talented people are doing. It will both inspire and amuse.