Welcome To STIW,

Are you trying to start a business online? Do you already have a online business but need more traffic? Do you need help finding legit business opportunities? Well you have come to the right place. Our goal at STIW is to help you start, grow and promote your online business. We will provide you with all the needed tools and resources to do just that. We are here to help. If you have a topic you would like discussed or you have a question please feel free to email us @ info[at]secretstointernwealth.net

To Your Success,
Heather

It All Makes Scents, Inc.
Established June, 2003

This web site was created as a dream by myself and my precious Mom, who passed away from Leukemia. We both loved candles and lotions so much we wanted to open a store to share in our passion. This store remains open in her memory, my Mom, my best friend, so that we can continue to share our love of candles and lotions with everyone.

My Mom and I always found that when we didn't feel well, we could always make ourselves feel better by lighting some candles as we sat and talked about our days. We also loved how special we felt whenever we would use a nice body wash or lotion, and how relaxed the right scent could make us.

Mom and I also knew that candles and lotions made great gifts to our friends and family for any occassion and especially when someone felt ill or was in the hospital. The one thing that I can share with you is that it is very important to take time for yourself, remember to give thoughtful gifts to the ones you love to let them know how much you care while you have them around in your life.

Starting an on-line business is so different than opening a brick and mortar store which by the way we wanted so much to have both. Now that she has passed on and I find myself just as sick with 3 auto-immune diseases there is no way I could manage both. If you do not have a mentor there is so much that you can "buy" into with all the emails wanting to sell you a product that promises to help you make thousands to millions on the internet. I have to say I did in fact try 2 different products that did absolutely nothing to help my business!

The hardest part is picking a nich such as "candles" to try to keep marketing when everyone in the free world has heard of the 2 biggest stores out there that actually has the budgeting for million dollar marketing! I do not suggest this for anyone. Please make sure your niche is not this common and competitive. I picked it from the heart; I would suggest others who want an internet business to search to no avail to make sure you will not be up against the worst competition there could possibly be.

Google has so many "FREE" tools to help check and recheck everything for your business or before you start a business. There are many "FREE" sites to help you before you start. Just type your quesion into the search box and you will see many links to "FREE TOOLS" to help out.

In the beginning for me, was the marketing budget. I researched as I am suggesting you to do and found many small business owners took out loans or credit cards up to $10,000.00 for their marketing. Spent it all and the business went no where. They had to close shop but still owed that money. There was no way I could afford that so I knew that my marketing was going to go very slow and keep it as low as possible. But I made a mistake. A costly mistake. Everyone checks out Cost Per Click and the such. I went to ShopZilla after getting responses back from a questionairre I sent out where the majority stated they used that site for comparison.

This is very expensive at $100 a month, so I thought. I did not check for I thought it was going to be a $100 charge each month. Imagine the shock I got when I found that I was being charged every time the $100 ran out they would just keep charging $100 to keep the account going. I opened my business credit card bill and about fainted! It showed nine (9) times in 1 month that ShopZilla charges $100 to keep the account going! $900 in 1 month! Whew, that is quite above what I spend for marketing. Please watch who is charging you what and keep a close eye on your accounts. When I went into my web hosting account to check on referrals (where customers are coming in from) Shopzilla was the lowest referral! Talk about being kicked while laying on the ground from the 1st round.

There are so many places to put your ad for anywhere from $7.00 to $35.00 a month. No kidding. I contacted Perez Hilton's site for ad info and found since he was becoming popular his ads were going into the thousands. But the lady I spoke with gave me the name of little known sites that don't charge much due to lower hits. I tried it for a month, seen I didn't get any hits or customers. Everything affordable is worth the try. Exposure is everything in marketing. You might have a great product but without marketing exposure to let people know your site is just going to sit there, stagnant.

Remember, sending out questionairres/surveys are great to see what people are thinking. You will be surprised just how different they think from what you are thinking.

Testimonials from customers are just as good for it lets people know others have tried your product before them and they liked it. Quash potential customer's fears of having to try and send your product back for a refund.

I'm sure that you have also heard about submitting your site to search engines is a really big deal. Did you know that you can submit your URL yourself to the 4 biggest search engines? You can and you should do this on a monthly basis. There are "FREE" sites out there that list all 1,200 search engines and you can submit to them yourself. Of course if you don't have the time then there are many products that you can pay and that software will submit your URL for you. Just know what you are paying for if you are purchasing this on line. If it sounds to good to be true adage still stands as strong to heed by.

Research all that you can and try to filter through all that is out there. You need to have a business plan and implement a new one with each new year. But if you are noticing something not working, change it immediately. The competition on the internet goes very fast and starting out is learning to keep that pace and to heed by the rules set forth by the search engines regarding keywords.

Keep the faith, keep at it and good advice I was given was, "make sure you do atleast 1 thing for your business each day so that you will be moving forward". Good advice that has always stuck with me. May you prosper without going into debt.

Lisa Budzinski
President of
It All Makes Scents
www.itallmakesscentsinc.com