Claire Kolarova is a British national, currently living in Bulgaria with her husband and seven year old son. With one successful site and two more in the works, Claire finds that working online offers her that flexibility a family living abroad needs.
Tell us about your websites, Claire.My first was www.littlekidsgamesonline.com, in September 2004. Since then, I’ve started up www.how-to-choose-baby-names.com, (http://www.how-tochoose-baby-names.com/) and www.first-birthday-parties.com (http://www.firstbirthday-parties.com/)
What kind of education and work experience did you have before building your website?Degree in French, post graduate teaching qualification. Foreign languages teacher in the UK, teacher of English as a Foreign Language abroad.
What was your motivation for starting an online business?
Most of the WAHM opportunities I knew about seemed to involve door-to-door selling, which did not appeal to me at all. I love using the Internet – it’s an unbeatable way of going to work! Once I saw that it was possible to work online and use my skills there, there was no question – that was what I was going to do.
How did you come up with your idea for a website?The kids’ games site seemed an obvious choice - once I thought of it! I did go round in circles a lot with other themes. Then it suddenly occurred to me - Claire, you know about online games for small children and kids’ games from school and so on - so there it was!
The baby names site is a work in progress! I love words and meanings, and first names are a fascinating subject. It was a theme I’d considered for my first site, but I thought it would be too much work... and maybe I was right! Experience from my first site told me that I had to angle it and write content that nobody else offered. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
The site for first birthdays is new. I wrote two pages for the kids' games site about first birthday parties and realized that I could probably write a site about this one subject. It's a bit of an experiment - so we'll see what happens with it.
How many hours per week do you work on your site?Very difficult to say as there are days or even weeks when I do very little due to our move abroad to a house that is still being built. Maybe around 20 hours a week.
How do you make money from your site?Only (contextual advertising) so far, but I’m about to implement affiliate programs.
What is your average monthly income?
$200 and increasing.
How long was it before you found success? And please define what “success” means to you.
I’ll talk about the kids’ games site. It took two months before I had any traffic at all. It took seven months before I was getting a regular 100 visitors or more a day. Since then traffic has steadily grown to around three to four hundred-plus visitors a day, including around ten percent returning visitors.
I started monetizing a year after I began using SBI! and began earning immediately. This is success for me; I don’t know when that success could be said to have started, but now I am in profit and things are taking on a momentum of their own.
I think that now, having established the site, I can say that I do in fact know what I am doing - which makes things easier! - and so I feel more confident about what I do. What I mean to say here is that it’s not just the site that gets established your position as a mother at home running her own small business also starts to establish itself. That certainly gives you a feeling of accomplishment. However, I hope my success so far is only the beginning - the sites are still all relatively young. There’s a lot more to do!
What convinced you to purchase SBI!?The sample sites featured on the SBI! pages inspired me; I knew I could “build a site like that.” I could see that there was enough information, real meat, for me to learn what I needed to know and do it.
How did you convince your significant other that an online business was a smart move?When I decided to build my first site, we had just decided to sell our house and move abroad. I was teaching a little as well as being an almost-stay-at-homemum and organizing the move. I had no plans to work once we had moved, and saw my SBI! site as a long-term project and interest that would keep me busy during the months of chaos ahead! I didn’t feel that for me it was a situation that needed anybody to be convinced about anything - I just went ahead and did it!
If you could go back, what would you do differently with your website(s)?My kids’ games site has too broad a theme; I could have done a site just about online games or only party games, for example.
Claire, how do you “do it all”?
I do most of my work when my son is at school; we have been living out of suitcases for eight months now and everything’s pretty basic at the moment, so I don’t have a big house to clean, nor do I bother much with ironing or cooking cordon bleu meals! I currently don’t need to do it all, and we live in a fairly quiet coastal town where we walk to school and there are no huge shopping centers to distract me! Things will change over the next couple of months, so we’ll see.
Do you have more pearls of wisdom to share with other mothers?The great thing for me working online is that it doesn’t matter where I am. We’ve lived in four different houses over the last year and so long as I have a connection to the Internet I can carry on building my sites. For most of that time, I’ve worked on a coffee table in the lounge with all the activity of the household going on around me. Nor does it matter which country I’m in - my sites, at least, remain where they are, and have become my homes in cyberspace!