I get asked this a lot from many greeting card designers and my answer is always…it depends on what medium you want to build your greeting card business in. Starting a greeting card business today is a costly venture if you plan to open a bricks and mortar shop but it can be a lot cheaper if you start in on the Internet.

Now days with the increase in business being done on the Internet it is a no-brainer for me to tell you to start your greeting card business online. It is so much cheaper and less risk and especially affordable if you have a low budget.

You can start a blog right now that won’t cost you a cent. WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr just to name a few. I always suggest registering your own website name (Domain Name) and hosting your own blog on your own server rather than using the free option and having your blog hosted on the free server.

This is a screen shot of Kate Harper’s blog. Kate has bee designing greeting cards for years and is quite an authority on the subject and operates a successful greeting card business of her own.

The free services will give you a web site address like: www.[your-name].wordpress.com. Now while this will suffice it is not a long term strategy as your files and traffic and any backlinks you get will all point to the services site. With your own website name (Domain Name) i.e: www.[your-business-name].com any traffic and backlinks and content on the blog is all yours.

A company I use and strongly recommend for registering your own domain name with is NameCheap.com. For hosting I use Hostgator they are cheap and give you heaps of space, bandwidth and excellent customer service and support which is so important if you are just starting out building your greeting card business online.

Of all the bloging services i mentioned above I use WordPress. It is by far the best platform to use to build your greeting card business on. It not only is search engine friendly it also has heaps of free plug-ins available to increase the functionality of your blog.

It costs you nothing to use the WordPress blogging platform on your own website hosting server. Hostgator has an easy way of installing the WordPress blog in its control panel. All you need to do is press a few buttons and its all done. REALLY! it is that simple.

You will have to pay for the hosting which starts from $4.95 a month and you will also need to pay for registering your website name (Domain Name) which starts from only $2.99.

So all in all it is actually quite cheap starting a greeting card business online and is by far the best place to start rather than opening a greeting card shop offline.