Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Some ideas for you.

How about seeing if there are a couple of business people in the congregation who would "sponsor" the newsletters, etc for a nominal fee to cover printing and other hard costs. You could then add yourself as a sponsor to remind other business people in the congregation of your services and perhaps they will put some work your way.

You might even get companies outside the congegation to do a sponsorship. You could then expand the service (and those sponsors) to other churches and while not making a lot of money on any one newsletter or other printed piece you might make enough to pay for your own marketing pieces and perhaps a little extra for yourself. Use that to expand your client base for your own company.

Try and make everything you do part of a system to take the least amount of time so you can concentrait on other things. Make templates for your newsletters, and try to create an efficient work flow to get things printed the most effectively. And don`t charge by the hour - as you get more efficient you don`t want to make less money.

I used tp estimate a job by thinking how long it should take, doubling that and adding 10 per cent. If the client is a bit of a jerk, add 25 per cent. Amazingly, this works every time. Once I got better, I`d still quote the old rate, I just made more per hour. And, the clients got the benefit of my experience rather than just my time. That expierence has been much more valuable to my clients.

As for your husband`s website - I believe the problem is that Cascading Style Sheets need to be slightly different for IE and other browsers - and FrontPage seems to be writing only for IE. On my site`s statistics between 20 and 30 per cent of visitors over time are now using other browsers so it doesn`t make business sense to conentrait on only IE. Through about 15 years of building websites, I standardized on Dreamweaver as having the least problems/ugly code of the visually based html tools. While CSS has become very good for formating sites, I still use mostly straight html as it breaks the least.


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