Home Based Business > The Business of Gift Baskets
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Article rating : 0.00, 0 votes. Author : The Empress
If you’re anything like me, you’re always on the lookout for a great business idea. One of these ideas was going into gift baskets. Now it isn’t exactly a “unique” idea - but it’s one that I thought would be fun, and perhaps an avenue for me to showcase my crafting and design skills. I thought the idea of gift baskets would also be a more “inexpensive” idea as far as starting a business and the overhead involved in getting the materials to market the gift baskets and my business in general.
I broke down my research for my gift basket business into the following:
1. Research
- This is by far the most important thing you can do. Look into your competition - if you’re working out of your house, be sure to check out what you’ve got for competition locally. Check out the competition on the Internet. When I went to check out how many people were advertising their websites for the term “gift basket” on Google - I got 19,000,000 returns (November 2005). Think about it, that’s a lot of gift basket ideas on the Internet. If you’re trying to start your gift basket business - try locally first. Market your website to your location - it would probably have far less competition than 19,000,000.
2. Your Website
- You need your website to market your baskets. It’s a great way to showcase your gift basket skills - take a good photo and make a snazzy description with the price of the gift basket. Pick a domain name for your website - try to keep it simple and if possible have it pertain to gift baskets… or something “gifty”. Not always the rule - but a good guideline to follow. When deciding on a website - if you’re selling online, you want to have a website host capable of handling a shopping cart site. Many hosts out there offer free shopping cart software with their hosting plans - look around and find one you’re comfortable with, many are installed with a click of a buttion - this sort of thing saves you time when you don’t have to worry about installing a database on your own or pay someone to do it.
3. Business Licencing
- Check into your licencing/business licence information in your area - because laws are different per state/province/country. You may or may not make enough to warrant one - but you want to cover your bases. Remember you want to do things right the first time around - research, research, research. This will save both time and money in the long run.
4. Your Products
- Here’s where it gets a little more complex - money. How much money do you have to invest in your business. I’ve heard people start their gift basket business on as little as $300 and some for as much as $25,000 - before selling anything. Work out a budget - how much can you spend. Figure out what type of baskets you want to sell and find wholesale sites - where you can pick up bulk items for less, go to wholesale stores and search for great items to add to your baskets. Remember to think about the expense of shipping and handling your product - you might want to stick the lighter gift basket ideas until you’ve got a good client base and
then can expand - when the money is there to cover the costs. Or your other alternative is… being a reseller.
5. Be a Reseller
- You may just want to skip the whole finding/paying for products all together. This is what I did. I didn’t want any overhead, I didn’t want to deal with shipping and handling of the products either. What did I do? I did a little research and I found that there were many companies that would do all the work for me. Now I did have to sacrifice the fact that my own creativity wouldn’t go into the gift baskets themselves… but overall I was very happy with the fact I didn’t have to worry about the details/headaches that come with getting products, shipping/handling, customer concerns or complaints. Perhaps I took the easier route - but I found this way I could learn the ropes without sacrificing my money, and when I feel confident that I can do this on my own - then I’ll venture into doing baskets on my own. So, I went ahead with these companies and posted their gift baskets on my site - they have great images and descriptions of their products and I’m very impressed by their professionalism.
6. Marketing your Site
- don’t think for a second that once you’ve got your site up and running that people will flock to your website and buy your baskets. Marketing on the Internet takes time - your patience will be tested. Ways of marketing your site on the Internet:
- Search Engine Optimization: find keywords that you can focus on for your gift basket site - great resources: digitalpoint.com and wordtracker.com. Find those popular and perhaps niche words for your gift basket site and place them in your content, titles, and do it organically.
- Linking to other sites: Search through Google.com or another search engine and find sites that offer similar products - but perhaps aren’t direct competition with you. Ask for a link exchange. Be prepared for failure - because link sharing is a tedious task, and many webmasters do not respond well to link sharing requests. I’ve found if I place their link on my site and tell them where to find it - often they respond positively …. so take heart.
- Try Adwords through Google.com - this is a cheaper advertising route to take in promoting your website on the Internet.
- Offer banners on your site for people to download onto their servers to advertise your site.
- Write articles on Gift Baskets and distribute them to sites such as Article Directories.
- BE PATIENT: It can often take up to 6 months before you start to see the traffic roll in.
I hope that this has helped you in understanding a bit more about how to start a gift basket business. Remember there are lots of sites out there that promise you riches if you follow their gift basket plans - be wary. There is a lot of competition in this market - and I think if you do your research, take your time in understanding the business - you’ll be miles a head of the game, and in the end you’ll be saving yourself time and money.
Good luck and have fun!
The Empress writes about her experiences at BuildingmyEmpire.com in the world of online marketing and affiliate marketing.
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