One of the most compelling stories on the web is the individual who starts out selling their wares online out of necessity. A few years ago, everyone thought they could just slap up a website and be successful - there aren't many stories about the learning curve and what it really takes to not only make and manage the creation of the products and the code and technology associated with selling those products on the web.

Karen Hatch, the owner and operator of Woopsie Baby did just that in 2003. She needed a portal to sell her personalized baby gifts and she knew she could figure out enough html to be dangerous. She has managed to also develop business to business relationships with several retailers.

What made you launch your web store?

Desperation.

When my daughter was born early on in our marriage, my husband was still completing his medical training. Both principle and logic dictated that I stay home to care for our child: my teacher's salary covered only day care, with nothing left over for living expenses. As I began to make handmade items for my baby, people began to ask where I'd bought them. The notion that the products were marketable prompted me to pursue the impossible dream - working at home.

How are you choosing your platform and shopping cart?

I chose my platform through a google search. In early 2003, while completing the preliminary research on running an online business, a friend mentioned that she'd found web hosting for $7.95 per month. I googled "web host $7.95" and found ipower.com.

At first I chose the simple Paypal cart. I was teaching myself HTML at the time and its platform was easiest for me to install. However, given the number of options that I needed to give my customers, it soon became unwieldy. As my HTML and scripting skills grew, I was able to switch to a shopping cart hosted by mals-e.com. It allowed me to write my own form, but it takes care of all the secure back-end stuff.

How did you begin marketing your business?

The first step after launching the site was to register the site in the DMOZ. I knew enough  about online shopping that search engines were the way to go, so each of my original pages had a meta tag of for keywords. Beyond that, I hoped that the google spiders would do their work.

While installing my hand-coded site on ipower.com, there was coupon available for ipower customers to use Google AdWords. It was my first foray into web marketing, and I discovered it to be largely useless unless I was targeting very, very specific keywords. For example, "baby gift" got me nowhere. But while trying to offload some unpopular rainbow ribbon, I registered an AdWord campaign for "LGBT adoption gift." My personalized rainbow-ribboned burp cloths were sold-out within two days. Given that few of the products could be marketed in such specific ways, I made the decision that AdWords were too costly for the return.

How have you managed growth? Do you plan to grow?

Growth is tricky for a one-woman show. There's only so much business I can handle while staying home to care for children. Depending on Google to do its job, I used the advice of a good friend {hi Blair!} and arranged the text on my pages to promote the search engine rankings of some very specific key word phrases. You won't find me searching for a "personalized baby gift," but you'll find me quickly if you're searching for a "personalized security blanket." It makes sense for my customers and for me: last week I had only 366 total page views, but I made 10 sales. That's a conversion rate that I can handle.

What are the best things you've done and the best learning experiences (some call them mistakes) that you feel you've made and learned from?

The best thing I've done is to take it slow. I've seen many other moms develop great home-grown products, but they lack the patience to stay in the game or fall apart while sorting out how to develop their sales platform. After taking six months to source the best materials for my products and teach myself HTML, I made $600 my first year in business. However, every year that I kept plugging away at it, my business first doubled, then tripled.  We're now into five figures, which seems like small potatoes. But for my family, while my husband worked at completing his degrees, it meant student loan payments and groceries. 

I think that understanding the "small" in small business helped keep me on track, especially when it came to SEO. Trying to achieve a high-ranking on a keyword like "baby gift" could bankrupt me, as well as bring me more business than I can handle on my own. Using organic SEO to target successful rankings on highly targeted keyword phrases brings me only customers who want what I sell.  That took patience, too. Once I understood how to best manipulate my content for better rankings, it took close to six months to see my page ranks move, but once they did, business improved dramatically.

It also made sense financially. This business operates with very little capital investment, so learning to manipulate my own code and content to suit Google took time, but paid off in the end. Learning to write and maintain my own code has sometimes been painful, but well worth the trouble. I can tweak my own meta tags, revise my own content, and de-bug my own shopping cart. Not to mention how cheap it is: I pay for my host, my raw materials, and that's it.

Undoubtedly, there are drawbacks to managing every aspect of the business myself. While producing products, revisions and updates to my site often languish. I get way behind entering sales into my Quickbooks software. I have sometimes had more business than I can handle, and my family life has suffered for it. But I wouldn't change it.

I have some serious control issues, so knowing how to do all of it suits me.