I have had thoughts stirring in my mind for several days now about revamping My Very Own Mail. I actually began pondering it several weeks ago, but, then I received my newest copy of Revenue Magazine in the mail. And that is when things went haywire (in a good way)! I began to completely rethink my business model. The new ideas brewing in my mind were very exciting!

It almost feels like this is the direction my sweet little, fledgling business should have gone in the first place! And now, this morning, reading Seth Godin’s blog post about Vestiges, I am more convinced than ever that I need to make these changes. I hope that I have the strength and the courage to blindly jump off that cliff, and rework my business. There are things I’ve been doing and ideas I’ve been holding strongly to for five years, since I began sending mail to kids.

I think I will have to truly shed some of those old ideas to make the new ones really flourish. It could be wonderfully exciting if I will just ‘Go for it!’

I truly agree, that we are ‘living in a YouTube world’ (an idea I pulled out of Seth’s post) and I think that is where he really got me! I’ve got to do this - I’ve got to let go of any My Very Own Mail vestiges that hinder my progress forward into the ‘YouTube future’!!

Ok, now I’m really getting excited! Thank you, Revenue Mag!! And thank you, Seth Godin!!

Click this darned cute bookworm to keep up with my progress:

One of my very favorite parts of running My Very Own Mail, my personalized letters for children business, is shopping for the crafts! I just totally and completely love that part! One of my favorite crafts I picked out for the kids last year was animal jewelry. It was so cute! It was a little pouch necklace and it was in the shape of an animal’s head. I think there were three or four different animals. I wanted to get a picture of Sammie’s for you (she and I always do the crafts I order) but, the little monster hasn’t put that craft together yet! It would even make a cute button graphic for the side of the blog! I will have to get her to hurry up and finish!

I have been a webmaster, or webmistress, if you will, for a number of years now. I started my personalized letters for children website, My Very Own Mail, back in 2003. Online advertising and traffic generation can be overwhelming responsibilities for webmasters, but, with all of these new consumer-generated advertising networks popping up, things are getting just a bit easier. See, I can purchase some advertising through one of these networks, and then some nice people, who are hopefully awesome bloggers, will get paid to blog about my website. And then I should gain some more traffic and maybe even a few sales from having my name out there more. And even if I don’t make sales from it right away, it’s still good, because, I’m building a name for myself on the web, and gaining some backlinks to my site.

GO READ A BOOK!

I buy all of the stuff for My Very Own Mail from Oriental Trading Company, and once you get on their mailing list, they send you lots of catalogs. The kids and I love looking through them! We even got a Christmas one the other day - in July! Two of my kids were begging me for a jar of old-fashioned peppermint sticks they saw in the catalog - silly kids! And yesterday, I got one full of promotional items for businesses. I love looking at that catalog, too, and I always pick out a million different doodads that I can have ‘My Very Own Mail’ printed on! There are frisbees, backpacks, stress squeeze balls, and all kinds of things. And one thing that I really want, is some more imprinted pens. I bought some a few years ago, and I really loved them and I’ve wanted to buy some more for a while now, and I just haven’t done it yet. I am leafing through that book, though, and thinking of getting some soon! It’s neat and kind of funny, that I can buy promo items for my business from the same place where I get the craft projects and goodies for the children’s letters. Now if only they sold business cards and printing materials, that would really make it a one-stop-shop for me!
GO READ A BOOK!

I’ve utilized quite a few different methods to spread the word about ‘My Very Own Mail’. One of those methods, which I didn’t feel was very successful, but, that I really liked, was promotional pens. They were so cute! I have one left, and I keep it on my desk in my George Strait ‘pen cup’. The funny thing was, for promoting personalized letters for children, I didn’t often feel the opportunity presented itself to hand them out, and also, explain what they were promoting. I would sometimes put them in the packages for the children, but, that made me nervous, as some of the children were probably too young to be wandering about the house with pens. That is a relative call, though, as we all handle that with our kids differently - even differently amongst our own children. (Yes, my daughter -third child- ate french fries before she was even one! Heehee!) So, although I personally liked it, I don’t think it was a method that was very helpful.

GO READ A BOOK!

I was part of an online community once that was all about helping women with their small businesses. It was a really cool community, and I got a very neat suggestion there once. A girl had seen an ad on Amazon for toy mailboxes and she thought that would be a great addition to ‘My Very Own Mail’! Isn’t that a cute idea? And a perfect combination - for me to sell personalized letters and toy mailboxes? I thought it was just adorable - and I couldn’t believe it was so simple, and I had never thought of it! And then I never got around to it. Maybe one day I will. It sure would be neat if the mailboxes had my ‘My Very Own Mail’ logo on them, wouldn’t it? I guess that might be asking for too much, though!
GO READ A BOOK!

My Very Own Mail is a business that is run out of my home, in my makeshift office, that is really supposed to be the formal dining room. I have a lot of plans for it, too. I know some of the things that I need to more easily run the business, and I know some of the things that I want, but, I can’t quite get a picture of it in my mind. I know that I need some special shelving. I need those little paper shelves like teachers have in their classrooms, because I use so much assorted color paper. And I need a table or desk that stays empty on top, for assembling the packages. I do already have drawers for all of the crafts and goodies and my business paperwork, but, I think I need a few more of those to really keep it organized. And the thing I really want to do is paint at least one wall, if not more, purple! Yes - purple! It is my room, office - and I know for a fact I won’t be able to win anyone over on a purple wall anywhere else in the house! And for just this little tiny room, the painting costs won’t be bad at all!

GO READ A BOOK!