Local photo business + homeschooling website not launched yet

by Judith Waite Allee
(Ohio, USA)

The 1st evening at the Cincinnati conference in Oct. 2009, I pretty much picked the brains of anyone who unwittingly sat next to me and I met the nicest bunch of generous and creative people. I had blast and learned a bunch. One of those people the 1st evening was Don Coggin. I didn't recognize the name at the time, but later I realized his "I Love SBI!" video was one I had loved and he's a guru with SBI Education, in addition to having his own successful on-line business. (Now when I re-read some of his old posts at the forums, I think, Oh, *that* Don Coggins!)

I was confused and torn about defining my niche, thinking "homeschooling" was too big but "frugal homeschooling" (which ties in with my co-authored books, "Homeschooling on a Shoestring" and "Educational Travel on a Shoestring") was too narrow. Also, there's just so little profit in selling my books from my own website, since they are not self-published.(The books are published by a division of Random House, which resulted in most of the sales coming from bookstores, which is good, but it left me with a very small margin of profit to sell books on my own.)

Don gave me my first "aha!" moment of the conference: The value of my books for my website is not necessarily for direct monetization. Rather, they are my credential--a calling card--to build trust with my website visitors. Whack! That freed up my thinking about the topics I would want to write about and the monetization possibilities.

I live very much on a shoestring, but the conference was the best money I spent all year. I came out with some terrific monetization ideas and inspiration from other SBIers. If you can, go! If you can't . . . get over it and go! That said, I haven't figured out how I'm getting there. My job is dangling by a thread and I've been burning the midnight oil to get a few hours a week to work on my website, which hasn't been launched yet. But then, that's all the more reason I need to make it work. . . and go to the conference. Hope to see you there!
Happy trails,
Judith