How to Start an Online Sitters Referal Business
According to the National Childcare Resource and Referral Agencies, over 12 million children under the age of six years old are in care each week. There is a great demand for reliable information on quality child-care providers. Starting an online sitters referral business is a great way to make some extra money as well as to help working parents find child care for their children.
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Instructions
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Design your sitter referral service. Will you focus on family-based care only or include child centers as well? Will you include teens offering short-term babysitting care? Will sitters be able to upload and manage their information through the website themselves? Will visitors be able to leave comments or reviews of sitting services?
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Decide what you'll charge and how you'll be paid. What will you charge sitters to be listed in the directory? Will there be different levels of membership (e.g. short vs. long profile information, customization, or length of membership)?
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Set up your business. Choose a business name, checking with domain registrars from whom you can get the domain name as well. Be sure to check with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office that the name isn't trademarked. Decide on your business structure (e.g. sole proprietorship). Get business permits and licenses as required by your county or city.
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Build your online database. Before you can let people use your service, you need a database of sitters that visitors can search. Check the newspaper classifieds and local fliers for people offering sitter services. If you'll include day care centers, contact them as well. Let them know what you're doing with the referral service and how it can help them get business. They will likely want to see your website (see next step) so you may want to have the basics, such as the home page and information about the service for them to review.
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Plan your website. Websites can very quickly get complicated and overwhelming. Before building your first web page, organize your website on paper. How will the site be organized? How will visitors be able to search and access the database? Will you provide other information such as how to interview for a good sitter.
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Hire a database developer or get a good database script to manage your sitter database. Some website hosts provide databases as part of the hosting package. The ideal referral site will allow visitors to search the database based on their needs (time, price, location, number of children, etc). Sitters will like the ability to add and manage their profile themselves. If you don't know how to set this all up, hire someone to help you.
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Build your website. Buy a domain name at one of the top registrars. Sign up for web hosting. Search for a payment processor (may web hosts offer shopping function and will let you know which payment processors they work with). You can hire a web designer to build your site and integrate your database and payment processing.
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Market your website. You're marketing will be twofold; 1) finding sitters to pay to be included in the referral database and 2) people who need sitters to use the referral service. Marketing options include advertising online and offline in local papers and magazines, writing child care articles, social networking, fliers, and word-of-mouth (ask for referrals).
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