Search Helps Small Marketer Bead and Feather Her Nest

It all started back in 2000, when Stephanie White rediscovered a childhood pastime of making jewelry with beads. This, she thought, might be a good idea for an online business.

She used search engine marketing to grow SW Creations, a burgeoning enterprise that’s getting more than three million hits per month.

As with any entrepreneurial journey, her road was not always smooth.

“I hired a man to design a Web site for me but he stole my money and never built me anything,” says White, noting that she taught herself Web site design and marketing as well as online graphic design, partly by taking pictures of local flowers in her home base of Texas and creating graphics with them.

By 2003, White set up SW Creations, which sells necklaces, anklets, bracelets, earrings and other baubles online (http://www.swcreations.net). She makes the majority of the jewelry herself.

White uses keywords like “beaded jewelry” and others that sometimes get her top unpaid rankings on Yahoo and Google as well as minor words like “plumbago,” a native flower in the southwest whose color she uses in some products.

Another source of revenue comes from affiliate marketing relationships she was able to develop using Zeus, the link exchange program which automatically finds Web sites with compatible keywords through which she can have affiliate marketing arrangements.
“I used to do this myself but it took too much time and took me away from designing jewelry, she says.

SW Creations’ customers tend to be women ages 30 to 50, says White. The site also features a monthly newsletter.

White credits a lot of her success to organizations that help women in business as well as to other groups that encourage people to realize their own self-worth, remove themselves from dangerous situations, and act on their own behalf.

For 2007 and beyond, White is considering incorporating and possibly outsourcing some of her manufacturing abroad, “though I do have feelings about this,” she says.