Think big: promoting your micro-business with macro results.

• Author: Kinder, Peri
• Position: Special Report - Big Cartel

Susan Petersen's company, Freshly Picked, started with a bag of scrap leather she bought from a yard sale. She had a newborn son and thought it would be fun to make him a pair of moccasins. With no sewing skills, no leather-working experience and no idea if her machine would even sew through leather, Petersen experimented until she designed her first pair of soft leather moccasins.

The shoes turned out so well, she decided to make them for family and friends. With her product generating a great response, she signed up with to provide an online platform for getting her children's moccasins sold across the country. But she soon ran into problems.

"It was just too much to keep track of," Petersen says. "You had to be on top of it every day. You almost have to hire someone to keep up with Etsy and stay on top of their search engine. It's a lot of work."

Instead, Petersen hooked up with BigCartel.com, a Utah-based website that allows micro-business owners to customize a site for their products. It was the perfect match. With Big Cartel, Petersen is able to ship, track inventory, gather analytics and monitor visitors--all for one small monthly fee.

Matt Wigham, co-founder of Big Cartel, started the site as a place for musicians and artists to sell their products by setting up unique, independent stores on the site. Big Cartel has become so popular with micro-business owners that the site recently passed the 200,000 clients landmark.

Costs to operate a shop on Big Cartel range from $10-$40 per month, depending on the services desired, and Wigham says Big Cartel doesn't nickel-and-dime its clients. "We even offer a free account for people offering up to five products if they want to kick the tires a bit and try it out. It gives small brands a chance to get their stuff out and gives them a place to send customers and build their brands. Our whole mission is to help artists make a living doing what they love."

No more than 300 products can be offered on each sellers site on Big Cartel but thats just fine with Petersen, who recently added leather desk accessories to her product line.

Word of Mouth

Another resource used by Petersen is the mommy-blog community. As a well-known blogger herself on freshly-picked, com, she targeted the top mommy-bloggers in the country and sent them samples of her shoes. Petersen also sent samples to national parenting magazines and any other location where kid's products are reviewed.

"Half of my advertising budget is...