Do you run your own business?

If so, I may have something to interest you!

I used to run an internet shopping site (www.merchantsofmedway.com) that did fairly well. I managed to get high search engine rankings with it, which was nice.

Now, I've decided to turn it into a site to promote the business/service of any home educating adult or child. It will work like a shopping portal, with us encouraging the HE community to look there for their shopping needs, before looking elsewhere.

People will have a short advertorial - heading, a paragraph or so - which links to their own, existing website. People without a website for their business/service can ask me to create a stand alone page for them.

There will be a monthly subscription, which covers the hosting of the site on my business server, also the placing of the advert and general maintenance of it (making amendments as people give them to me). Also, I will market the site professionally, in order to try and drive outside, new business to us all (as opposed to just from within the community).

There will also be a webring that each business can join - again, a useful means of driving new visitors to the site. I will create a logo/banner that people can put on their own sites/blogs, and which we can make use of to advertise.

As this site needs to have plenty of businesses on it, to be suitable to "launch" it, and as I am somewhat erratic in the hours I am putting into the project (as I await birth of no 4 son within the next week), I intend to offer it to everyone at the moment FREE until the end of June.

On 1st July, all of you who respond and place an advert with the site before end of June, will be offered July at half price.

I intend for payments to be made for a month in advance (so on 1st every month you pay for that month). You can cancel within the first 6 days of that month and get a refund. After that, there is no refund for that month. Terms are monthly - you are only ever committing to a month at a time. If I don't receive someone's payment by 6th month, I just remove their advert for the remainder of the month.

Running several home businesses myself, I know how they can flux and wane - hence the decision to make it monthly and to impose no restrictions on people putting up adverts one month, taking down, putting up etc. its designed to be flexible.

Again, it is because I understand how hard it is to run any kind of business or venture, from home, especially when HEing, and that most of us start these ventures as a means of increasing our family income whilst home educating, I intend to make the subs really low.

If you think this interests you, or if you want to pass this on to someone else you know with their own business - whether its an eBay shop, their own craft business, as a reseller, a service provider, bespoke work, etc etc - then please get in contact! Most of you I'm sure have my email address from one of the lists (or the EO site!). If not, leave a message for me and I'll try and contact you.

I'm really excited about this! The site is taking shape, but won't go "live" until we have enough adverts on it to make it worth putting out there for everyone to see. I'm happy to say that I already have a number of people supporting the launch of this - but the more the merrier!