Rena Klingenberg is a single mother of one son living in South Carolina, USA. Currently developing more websites, Rena's first site, home-jewelry-businesssuccess-tips.com, is not only in the Top 1% of websites on the Internet, it also earns enough to support her family.
Rena, tell us about your website.My first and most successful SBI! website is www.home-jewelry.com (http://www.home-jewelry-business-success-tips.com/) which I started in October 2003. I was looking for ways to earn money by publishing information. I had been exploring the possibility of writing e-books when I came across SBI!. The SBI! organization seemed different – it had integrity – and the money-back guarantee helped me feel safer in giving it a try.
I’m also working on three additional SBI! websites in different niches, which are not yet as developed as Home Jewelry Business Success Tips.What kind of education and work experience did you have before building your website?
My “working for other people” experience includes secretarial jobs, followed by several years of editing and desktop publishing. I’ve also had a jewelry business for several years, making and selling handcrafted jewelry.
What was your motivation for starting an online business?I’m a single mom with a son who has serious health issues, and it would be extremely hard to find an employer who would put up with all the work time I’d have to miss when my son is ill.
Although I had been doing well with my handcrafted jewelry business, reliable childcare was expensive and sometimes difficult to secure when I did jewelry shows.
Also, because my jewelry business involved making and selling tangible products, my income was limited by how much jewelry I was physically capable of producing and selling. The only way to earn more money in my jewelry business was to work longer hours.
But I wanted to work smarter, not harder.So I thought about adding a second stream of income by writing and publishing e-books.
And then I began to wonder if instead of e-books, I could operate a profitable Website with my jewelry marketing tips and info available for free.
How did you come up with your idea for a website?
I had been selling my handcrafted jewelry for several years and had experimented with nearly every possible way of selling my work, and evolving and tweaking the methods that worked for me to make them more profitable.
Jewelry making is one of the most popular creative activities in the world, and everyone dreams of selling what they make. However, marketing and other business matters usually don’t come easily to jewelry artists.
So I was sure there was an audience for all the jewelry business success secrets I had learned through my own hard-won experiences. I looked around the web and couldn’t find any really comprehensive resource that detailed all the unique aspects of marketing handcrafted jewelry.
I also researched all the online jewelry making forums, and from the questions and problems addressed there I saw a huge need for information on how to market one’s work successfully in the crowded jewelry art field.
On the forums, jewelry artists were asking things like how to photograph their work, how to do home jewelry parties, how to display their jewelry, how to approach shops about carrying their work, how to get their business set up legally, how to find good shows, how to sell jewelry on eBay.... These were all questions I could answer, and many of the articles I add to my site are written to address the questions that pop up frequently on jewelry making forums.
I created Home Jewelry Business Success Tips with the intention of providing the information resource I would have loved to find when I was a struggling jewelry artist.
How many hours per week do you work on your site?20 or 30, and sometimes none at all when I’m busy with other things. But it’s nice to be able to rely on a steady income from my sites, even when I totally ignore them for a week or more at a time.
How do you make money from your site?Hosting pay-per-click ads (Google/Yahoo) on my sites; affiliate programs; ebooks.
Although I don’t include any outside advertising in my newsletters, I do get a huge income boost every time I publish a newsletter issue, due to the volume of people following the article links in my newsletter (and clicking on all the latest ads and affiliate links while they’re visiting!). SBI!’s tools make getting subscribers and publishing newsletters a piece of cake.
Home Jewelry Business Success Tips brings in about 25% more than the income I earned at the highest paying “real” job I’ve ever held. My second-most successful SBI! site currently earns between $600 and $1000 per month, and I’m working on increasing traffic to that site so it will perform better. My other two SBI! sites are new and not earning anything yet.
How long was it before you found success? And please define what “success” means to you.I made my first $7 commission a few weeks after my first article went live. That was a big moment for me – when I really knew that information publishing could be a path to financial independence.
I worked really hard and less than two months after Home Jewelry Business Success Tips was online, it made SBI!’s list of sites in the top 2% of the web. And within six months of starting, the site was providing a growing fulltime income for us.
My websites have given me the time and flexibility to be the mom I need to be while I earn a wonderful living in a most enjoyable way.Building my websites never feels like work. It’s something I really love doing, and it’s a great feeling to look over the sites I’ve created and think, “Wow! I did that!” And to earn money from them is icing on the cake.
It’s very rewarding to know that the information I publish in my website and newsletter is helping my fellow jewelry artists achieve their own dreams. Being able to help people make a positive difference in their lives makes this more rewarding than any “real” job I’ve ever had.
What convinced you to purchase SBI!?The factor that tipped the scales for me was the triangle-shaped diagram showing the high percentage of SBI! sites that make it into the top 1 to 2 per cent of the web.
The comprehensive suite of tools that are all under one roof at SBI! was another factor. I didn’t want to have to cobble together a collection of software and services from different providers and fiddle with getting them to work together. I wanted to concentrate on writing useful content and getting visitors to my site.
I know I could probably do much of the technical stuff myself if I had to, but why spend my time on it? And all those fiddly separate parts would cost about as much as I spend on an all-under-one-roof SBI! site anyway – which is less than a dollar per day.
As an online entrepreneur the most profitable use of my time is to build my sites’ original content and incoming links, so I’m glad to let SBI! take on the technical stuff for me.
And I can’t think of anything I would change about SBI! – it works very well for me, and they’re constantly adding new features to make our web businesses better and better.
If you could go back, what would you do differently with your website(s)?I would start my second, third, and fourth SBI! websites sooner than I did. Once you’ve got a handle on using the SBI! tools for the basics of building good content and incoming links, it’s not at all difficult to balance multiple websites. In fact, when you come up with a great new niche, it’s nice to have different topics to write about.
Rena, how do you “do it all”?I work on my sites while my son’s at school during the day, or playing with his friends, or in the evening after he goes to bed. I don’t have set hours for working, and I love having the freedom to arrange each day to suit the other things going on in my life.
I’m a big fan of voluntary simplicity. I love the scaled-down lifestyle of working for myself at home.