Hello World

Welcome to the best kept secret on the web, the blog where we walk you through setting up an online based babysitting business. What you need to know is:

1. Our content will always be free
2. We will walk you through step by step
3. Our content will always be free
4. You can contact us and we will do our best to answer your questions
5. We practice what we preach (we used the same advice to create our website need-sitters-now.weebly.com)

So why would we give out this information for free? I know we should sell this stuff and make as much money as possible. You’re probably right. But for us this was our big break, and after months of spinning our wheels trying to create the perfect online business, we are so glad to get it right. We give this to you because we don’t want you to make the same mistakes, wasting hours of valuable time, to get to a place we already know how to get to.

So it is our privilege to walk you through this process step-by-step. Maybe you’re a college student who has been babysitting for years, or a stay at home mom trying to mobilize more babysitters in your community. Whoever you are, we hope you succeed, we hope you surpass us, and we wish you are the luck in the world!

Helpful Hints

Need more specific instructions feel free to email us at csmithevans@gmail.com and we promise to get back to you. We have also added a list of our favorite links to help you build your site, including links to the sites we mention in our set up instruction. Leave us comments and help us grow to better serve you.

Advertising

The last step is finding both sitters to take the jobs (unless you are working alone) and parents to pay for your services. Advertising can be done with a small paragraph telling what you are selling, your website address, and why you are better than everyone else. If you are only going to serve the local population brag about how you are connected to the community. If you’re going national, say you’re a national chain. By the way, we recommend advertising locally first then trying your hand at nationally.

How it works

• Parents come to your website and schedule themselves for the times they need a sitter. Consider this a request, not a command.
• You find a sitter through that phone list we told you to create and see who can take the job or if your all alone just look at your schedule.
• Before the parent pays you send a copy of the sitters resume and your terms and conditions to the parents. Please remember to tell the parents that they should only pay after they have received confirmation that a sitter will take the job. Also let them know that the payment must be received prior to the start of services.
• And that’s it! Please call or send an email after thanking them for using your services, it’s just professional curtsey.

Why you need order forms and a scheduler!

This is how your customers know how to reach you when they need a sitter and what times they need them. Lucky for you all of this is free through the wonderful site mentioned above.

Add content

Click on the elements tab and just drag down and drop in what you need. Very easy! Everything is pretty much drag and drop on this site so be creative and add whatever you think you need. If you need more of a guide look at our website at need-sitters-now.weebly.com. Proceed to create pages and link them together then publish and type in a web address/url that you want to use. That easy!

Creating a Background

Now you need to choose a template for you website. This determines the layout of your website and the background colors. Just scroll through their list of premade templates and click the one you want.

Naming your site

Now it’s time to name your site which should probably include the word babysitter or babysitting in the title. This will help the search engines find and list you site when people go searching for a sitter service. Please note: The name of the site is not the web address of the site so don’t bother putting .com after the name or not leaving spaces in between the words.

Registering

So you are eager to publish or place you site on the internet:

1. Open a web browser (internet window) and go to http://www.weebly.com which should take you to the homepage of this awesome site.
2. On this page it should ask you to create a username and password. Remember this should be something you can remember.
3. It should also ask for and email address. If you don’t have an email address go to a search engine and type in ‘free email provider’ a number of great option should come up.
4. After you click to agree to their terms click the sign up button.

Getting your free website

Now for a freebie. Believe it or not, there are lots of places to get free websites some of which will even help you set up the site. The site I like best is weebly.com which gives you two websites for free. But the best part of this website is that the whole thing can be set up in one day (order forms and all). Don’t believe us, check out the one we did at need-sitters-now.weebly.com and feel free to follow our format. Everything you see is free and if we may say so it looks pretty great.

As your company grows you can expand to a paid website and even have someone design it for you, but that is for another day.

Paperwork

I know it’s the worst part but you need to create a two word documents: a resume for prospective sitters to fill out, a terms and conditions document for your customers to read.

Finding your market

Who are you selling to? Who will be most interested in your services? Mothers and fathers in your own neighborhood or families across the United States. First, you need to determine how many people you currently know who can take jobs babysitting (they become you employees) or maybe you know that you are all alone. No matter how many people you have available to babysit you can benefit from publicizing yourself via using the internet. If you are going to be working with other people, gather the contact information for these people. You need to be able to reach them the moment you receive a request for a sitter from a parent. Also remember to collect a resume from your new employees including important information like CPR Training, and criminal background information.

What is babysitting? Why start and internet based babysitting company?

Babysitting is the art of childcare. You look after someone’s special little one, and they pay you a fee. Where the internet comes in, is helping you reach you clients. There are millions of people who surf the internet every day, and many of those people have children and need child care. So how do you draw them in, have a platform to reach them of course! That platform is a website.

People like us

You are not alone. So many people exist like you, some are successful entrepreneurs, some are not write their yet. But the only difference between us and them is they had people telling them, helping them, showing them, all the latest business tools. They were coached, on everything we are about to show you how to do. And it was free for them to, because a family friend or relative showed them the way. But don’t worry, now you have a coach as well who wants to show you how to:

• Get a free website
• Take credit cards on that website
• Place order forms on your website
• Get visitors to your website

And the list continues. So here’s how we will do this. We will post a series of blogs, one blog for each step in the process. So let’s get started!