Diana Blair has always been a busy woman.

Diana lives in Nuevo, California with her husband, Mike, and their children. They have chosen to live in the country (15 years now!), but that means Mike has to commute two hours each way to his job. Even with their kids, Diana has always found ways of helping out the family financially. For six years she mowed lawns and did landscaping, eventually having five employees. She ran a licensed daycare business for nearly ten years. And for the past two years she even helped a friend build a business with hopes that it would someday becoming a career for her. She worked for $5 per hour and paid her own employment taxes. But when that career opportunity never materialized, Diana quit and began to look for other options.

Diana went into business for herself. Again.

Her new business of selling Thomas Guide Books (maps) progressed very slowly until early 2003. That was when she received an invitation to a StoresOnline meeting where she would learn about doing business on the Internet. She and her husband jumped at the chance, but went just for the education. They were impressed that they could get the education before making any commitment to StoresOnline. Diana now says the workshop was "everything they said it was in the invitation."

The trainers at the workshop that day offered a wealth of information.

"We were able to fall back on a lot of the things they said. That really gave us someplace to start," Diana says. "The folder and the keywords really helped. We didn't know how important these things are. And by the time most people put up websites it is too late. If we hadn't gone to the workshop, we would have never known that. [Going to the Workshop was] very important. I don't think there was one step they showed us there that we could have bypassed and gotten to where we are today."

Diana and Mike decided to purchase StoresOnline storefronts because "it was everything we were looking for. We already had purchased URLs through Network Solutions-even bought web pages, too. We had owned them for a year and had no clue what to do with them. We had gone into [their site], and it was so complicated. And then it was going to cost more to get a shopping cart, and more to get a merchant account. StoresOnline offered the whole package. We thought, this is the answer to getting our business off the ground and able to compete right away. And sure as shootin', that's what happened when we got going with StoresOnline."

Diana took her map business, which she was running out of her home, and sold its products on her first storefront. She sells Thomas Guides, which she explains are "the bible for traveling in CA." She sells the guides for a discount and also sells wall maps. She picked the product because she had already been doing a similar business with a friend. "I knew it would be something that was successful."

Diana has promoted her storefront using the lessons she learned from her StoresOnline training and her PMI coach. She uses keyword promotion through Overture and Google.

"In the beginning it was a little bit scary," Diana says. But she experimented enough with these venues that she can now effectively reach her target audience. "I get between 160 and 220 people in my site per day. But they are all people who are looking for exactly what I am selling."

Diana also received quite a bit of traffic from the classified ads that came with her StoresOnline site. In addition, she used the free banner ads that also came with the site.

"They did an absolutely beautiful job on [my banner]. I would have never thought of doing it the way they did. I would have been very willing to pay a big company to do this for me."

Diana published her first store to the Internet in September 2003, and her work quickly began to pay off. She received her first order nine days after she published her website. And she loves the store's flexibility. She explains, "We were able to work on our website-tweak it just the way we wanted to-present it to the customers we were trying to target. It has been up since September, and it has started really jumping up in sales."

Diana continues to add products and update her stores, which helps her website become more popular.

Today, 80 percent of Diana's business sales come from her Internet storefront.

"Since September [when the first site was published], I have done $65,000 in sales. All of it has come from the fact that I have a StoresOnline storefront. We just love it. We fully, 100 percent believe in it."

The extra money has allowed Diana to be home more. In the future, she and Mike are hoping Mike will be able to retire. The two are getting ready to publish their second website.

"It would have been a thousand times more difficult if StoresOnline hadn't come along," Diana says. "We have 15 pages with Network Solutions still sitting out there that we will never use. We had already been in that struggle for a year and didn't know where to go next. With StoresOnline we were able to do the whole thing, the whole shopping cart, do our own ordering rules and set it up the way we wanted too. There are endless pages-and I am glad because 15 pages would have never been enough to do what we want to. And we would have set it up wrong, too. There is no way to know that [with other providers] unless you are familiar with e-commerce and already know that."

Coincidentally, shortly after finishing her PMI mentoring course, Diana stumbled upon an Internet site that had some derogatory things to say about StoresOnline. She read through the comments.

"These people just didn't take the time to do what they were supposed to do. They didn't take what StoresOnline offered them and utilize it. And that is why they were complaining," she says matter-of-factly. "They just wanted someone to do it for them while they sat back and collected the bucks. We buy these storefronts. We personalize them and choose the products. And we work at making them successful. That is what is going to determine if they are successful or not."

The rewards of doing business on the Internet have come quickly. Diana enthusiastically explains, "My kids are loving it. They knew what the ultimate goal was; to quit my outside jobs and work from home-and train them to get into the business."

Last month, Diana quit her last job. She now pursues her Internet business full-time. Yes, Diana Blair has always been a busy woman. But now, she has a financial future that matches her energy and enthusiasm.

Visit Diana Blair's site at www.mapbooks4u.com

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