I stumbled across Lionsgrip traction pads in a very surprising manner --- searching for information about chicken feed.  When googling for homemade chicken feed formulas, I kept ending up on a very useful site with several recipes.  Finally, I decided to poke around and see who had compiled all of this information about chicken feed, and I discovered that the information was just a small offshoot of a microbusiness website.

Lionsgrip actually has nothing to do with chickens --- they're a small company that produces mats you slip under your tires when your car gets stuck in the mud.  But the owners decided not to stop building their site after they added all of the obvious information about their product.  They went on to build six separate "guest websites", each chock full of useful information (and with two ads on every page sending you back to their traction pads.)

Lionsgrip's website is a great example of the SEO truism --- if you create good content, people will come.  Granted, Lionsgrip probably would have gotten more specific traffic if the content they built was more closely related to their product, but any useful content will attract potential customers to their site.

For other tips on free or cheap advertising, check out our microbusiness ebook.

We do spend money advertising our chicken waterers, but whenever possible we snap up chances of getting free exposure.  As we discuss in our microbusiness ebook, probably the best method of free advertising is writing a press release for a national magazine.  Our microbusiness really took off after we were the subject of a writeup in Backyard Poultry Magazine --- nearly a year later, orders still trickle in from magazine readers who stumble across the article.

Another great option is to be interviewed for a podcast or radio show.  A friend of ours, Everett Sizemore, makes a large chunk of his income from ad revenue on his websites.  He was recently interviewed by American Freedom Radio, and the show went out over the internet and aired on 18 AM stations across the U.S.  His show is worth a listen for those of you who might want to follow in his footsteps.  Notice how he clearly went into the interview with the mission of sending folks back to his website, so he made sure that the radio personality got his URLs right and repeated them a few times.

If you're stressed out by the idea of having your voice broadcast on national radio, take a few minutes to write down your main talking points.  Then consider the kinds of questions the interviewer may ask and write up some potential answers.  Practice on your spouse or your dog so that your talking points feel natural on your tongue.  Then go for it!  The great thing about free advertising is that you have nothing to lose.

Our first atempt at starting a microbusiness was a learning opportunity.  We decided to sell some of the native plants on our 58 acre farm on Ebay, figuring that all it would cost us would be a few seller's fees and a bit of postage.  We made a bit of money --- which was much appreciated at the time --- but in retrospect, we should have run the microbusiness very differently.

The problem with Ebay from a microbusiness perspective is that buyers expect to get a really good deal, so you need to undercut all of your competitors to make a sale.  We had to drop our prices to rock bottom, meaning that we were barely making minimum wage on the time we spent packaging plants and taking them to the post office.  Added onto that was the buyers' mentality --- after spending a mere $2 on a plant, they were pissed off if it arrived wilted.

In retrospect, we should have sold our plants through our own website and spent money on advertising (and search engine optimization) to bring customers to us.  Then we should have found a way to make our products more unique in some way.  But we learned a lot from the experience, and our next microbusiness product went much better!

To read more about our experience developing our microbusiness, check out our ebook.

One great thing about ebooks is that you can sell them in a lot of different ways.  We currently sell our microbusiness ebook on our own website and have listed it on Google books for more free exposure.  Time to see whether it's worth our while to sell our ebook to an even wider audience through Amazon's Kindle Store.

Uploading our ebook to Google was quite painless, but I can't same the same for uploading the same ebook to Amazon.  At the moment, Amazon recommends that you upload your ebook in MS Word, HTML, or PRC format.  When I converted my OpenOffice file to a Word file then uploaded it, the result was wonky.  Next, I decided to give PDF a shot since Amazon allows ebooks to be uploaded in PDF format (though they warn of low conversion quality.)  My conclusion?  Amazon was right --- their conversion of PDF files is even worse.

While fighting with file formats, I decided to poke around and see what the finances of listing an ebook on Amazon look like.  Google makes their money by putting a bit of advertising on the side of your book page, but Amazon's business model involves getting money directly from the sale of your book.  And Amazon's commission is quite steep --- they take 65% of the retail price as their own profit before giving you a 35% royalty.

For the moment, I've decided to give up on listing our ebook on Amazon.  It looks like I'd need to manually reformat an html file to make our book look pretty again, which just sounds like too much work if they're taking such a big commission.  I'd be curious to hear if other folks have decided that selling ebooks through Amazon is worth their while.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some pointers for building your business with an email list.  At the same time, I sent out an email to all of our own past customers, telling them about a holiday sale.  In the business, this type of list would be known as a warm list --- clearly, all of the folks on it had bought our chicken waterers at one time, but some of them hadn't visited our website in a full year.

What were the results?  0.3% of the people asked to be removed from our list, 1% of the people had questions about use of our product, and 1.5% of the people came to our website to make another purchase.  These numbers are pretty normal for email lists, where the return rate (percentage of people who visit your site afterwards and make a purchase) is usually between 0.3% and 1%.

Although those return rates sound pretty low, keep in mind that sending out an email to your past customers costs you nothing except a bit of time.  Check out our ebook for more tips about advertising your business for free.

When we submitted Microbusiness Independence to Google Books, I was ready to wait a month or two to see my information live.  Imagine my surprise to check back a week later and see our book in place!

At the moment, our book's title is misspelled, but I have high hopes that will be fixed with a little patience.  Otherwise, I have to say that the uploading process was astonishingly easy and quick.

Of course, I'll have to wait and see whether listing our book on Google sends us more customers.  As usual, I'll keep you informed!

Meanwhile, feel free to check out our ebook for information about creating your own job.

Putting your products on sale seems like an anti-intuitive method to make more money, but it can actually work.  Our chicken waterers tend to hit a sluggish period as the weather cools, at which point we stop advertising and settle in for a restful winter.  This year, we decided to see if we could boost our winter profit with a 10% off sale combined with an email to our past customers.

The sale definitely helped increase our conversion rate.  The week before the sale began, we had a 2% conversion rate (meaning that 2% of the people who dropped by our website bought a waterer.)  The first week of our sale, our conversion rate jumped to 3% --- a 50% increase!  Of course, we made a little less money per waterer sold during the sale period, but even with that factored in our gross sales increased by 35%.

Check out our small business ebook for other hints on free and cheap methods of increasing your sales.

If you've read our ebook about starting a small business and quitting your job, you'll remember that one of my top pieces of advice is to keep your costs low.  We're just starting to apply the lessons we learned with our last microbusiness to our new ebook and are discovering that ebooks are even easier than physical products to market on the cheap, especially if you leverage Google Books.

What is Google Books?  This facet of the big search engine company allows publishers and authors to send their books to Google so that the entire book can be searchable over the internet.  You can set options so that visitors can view anywhere from 20% to 100% of your book for free online, including or excluding pictures.  I've often been searching for a bit of info, ended up in the middle of a book listed on Google Books, and become so enthralled by the book that I headed straight to the library to read the 80% that isn't freely listed online.  I assume that most folks aren't quite as cheap as I am, and instead plunk down some cash to buy books like this, especially since Google Books will link directly to the page on your website where visitors can buy your book.

Google Books amounts to free advertising, and the website is set up to make it easy for ebook publishers to list their writings.  If you don't already have a Google account, you'll need to sign up for one.  Then add in a bit of contact information and upload a pdf file of your book (or mail in a paper copy, but this will take much, much longer.)  Since you probably won't have an ISBN number, you'll have to skip over "1. Tell us about your books" and go straight to "2. Send us your books."  If the file you're uploading contains the cover and the content of the book all together, rename the file to match the title of your book and upload it as is.  Otherwise, you'll need to read Google's simple instructions about naming the cover files and content files.

Then be patient and wait for your book to show up.  This is the stage I'm at --- I'll be sure to update you on how the next steps go once I get to them.

I'll be the first to tell you that we made a slew of mistakes during our first year in business.  One of our worst was struggling with branding. 

We started selling our automatic chicken waterer from a page on our blog just because our blog was our main internet presence at the time.  Within six months, I realized my mistake.  People looking for "chicken waterer" or "Avian Aqua Miser" were much less likely to click on a search engine result that talked about homesteading than one focused solely on chickens.  We finally got our business its own domain name, but then we had to redo all of our search engine optimization to get folks to start showing up on the totally new site, which meant our sales plummeted for a month or two.

We also sent out waterers for the first few months without a label or logo anywhere on them.  We figured everyone knew we were a small mom and pop business and would appreciate us not adding fancy packaging that raised their price.  I quickly learned that Americans like fancy packaging at any price --- a couple of our customers complained about the homemade nature of our waterers.  So we came up with some fancy labels to stick on the waterers and used the same logo on our instruction sheet.  Adding the URL to the labels also helped us gain more repeat customers who might otherwise forget where they'd gone to buy their waterer.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd give my product its own website from the get-go.  I'd also make up a logo and plaster that everywhere, building brand name recognition and preventing complaints of our product looking too homemade.  It turns out that branding should be one of the first steps in selling a product, not one of the last!

Check out more lessons learned in our microbusiness ebook.

Like social networking sites, email lists are a great way to keep your customers involved in your business and to gain repeat customers.  I've run several email lists over the years and have come up with a few pointers:

• Keep your emails relatively infrequent.  Many customers will enjoy (or at least put up with) emails that come out once every two weeks, but when you start emailing more than once a week they get cranky.
• Keep your emails short, sweet, and to the point.  A great way to do this is to give tidbits of news, then include links to your website for the full story.
• Keep your emails relevant.  Resist the urge to email your customers about your birthday and your friend's new business.
• Each email should be a call to action.  At the least, you want your readers to keep you in mind and wander back to your website.  Do you also want them to take advantage of a limited time sale or vote in an online poll?
• Use the blind carbon copy (Bcc) function to hide everyone's email address so that no one can reply to the whole list or steal those emails.
• Always include a simple way to unsubscribe.
  

Check out our $4 ebook for more free ways to advertise your business.

Social networking sites (like facebook, twitter, myspace, and various blogging services) are great ways to connect with customers.  The services are likely to keep your product in previous customers' minds so that they'll come back for more or recommend you to a friend, both of which amount to free advertising.

The problem is that you could spend all day every day tweeting and posting.  How do you know when to stop?

We've had good luck choosing one platform we enjoy (blogging for us, but it could be any of the other options), then feeding those posts into as many of the other sites as possible.  That way, folks who like facebook can read our information amid their daily quota of news, but we don't have to head over to facebook and physically make a post.

Check out our $4 ebook for more free ways to advertise your business.