Mark Choon

Been a while since I last blogged, no thanks to all the travelling between two countries and work. Anyway Mama Duck from http://www.lilduckduck.com/ has kindly answered the questions that I emailed her on her online business. I will be posting it in two parts. (She took a very long time to answer and I took a very long time to post *chuckles*).

 And now…here’s part one!

 It actually began in May 2006 as I was looking for legitimate money making opportunities online, where I came across Steve Pavlina’s blog – http://stevepavlina.com/ – and Problogger – http://problogger.net/ . After doing quite a bit of research, I decided to start my own blog with Wordpress on my own domain. I’d been so frustrated with needing to stay home with the little one and not being able to find something legitimate to make money – I did a lot of surveys and review panels, some contract work, but nothing that would really do much to contribute to the family income.

2)  Tell us more about the products and services that you provide.

I started with doing birth announcement templates for photographers, then branched into birth announcements - http://lilduckduck.com/baby-birth-announcements.html - for clients. Now I do custom design for many special events, from engagement cards to wedding thank you cards, birth announcements, christenings, birthday invitations, holiday cards, graduation cards, etc. I do a lot of custom work as well as existing designs for the galleries – people contact me with their custom ideas & I work with them to create their dream card for their occasion.

3) Tell us more on how it began and what you did to get it up and running.

It took a lot of initial time investment – learning Wordpress, researching how best to do things, optimizing, tweaking, setting up ads, designing the templates, etc. I started with the blog, then decided to move the business (which was just templates and logo work at the time) over to the lilduckduck.com site. Since most of my blog readers are parents, they are some of my best customers & referrers. I’ve done a lot of marketing for it, submitting the site to hundreds of directories, printing out and putting up flyers locally, sending business cards to all my contacts nationwide to hand out to their clients & friends, making local contacts, etc. I have several photographer friends who allow me to use their photos in exchange for doing examples for their sites, so I do a lot of things in partnership like that. I also sponsored some contests online (photo contests, blog contests, etc) and gave away a free custom .jpg design, which is just a time investment for me, then the winner has the design to print out themselves or have printed at their local printer as they wish. I didn’t do a lot of paid advertising, but I put a lot of time into marketing & still do, although now my clients are great at spreading the word & I don’t need to market as heavily as I did when I started, of course.

4) How long have you been running this business?

Since May 2006, so almost a year now, wow!

5) What did you do prior to this and have you had any prior business experience?

I have done a lot of website design & other contract work online, other graphic design, but before I had the little one I was a professional musician & did some side work as a concierge/travel agent of sorts. Since the little one was born, I had been staying at home with him though, I quit my other job at that time.

6) What are the challenges that you face in running your business?

Time, really. The little one needs attention, of course, the house needs to be cleaned, things like that which most people who actually go to work don’t necessarily have to deal with, it’s just a different set of distractions. I find I continue to get better about managing my time and get more done than I did before, so it’s good for personal development as well.

Stay tuned for part two!