Re: Small Business Branding

You wanna talk about branding? Check out this chick. Diane and Walter, who I’m going to assume are husband and wife, run a business called Novel Website Design. That link goes to their services page. Check out the names of their packages. Get it? Emulate this. This is fucking brilliant.

Re: Seasonal Marketing

There is a bar in this city with bad food, reasonable drinks, and the best patio in the history of patios. Nobody older than 23 would actually sit on that patio most of the time because it’s chock full of students being, well, students. On their little sign out front today it says:

“110 Days Until The Students Return. Come To Our Patio While You Still Can.”

Never would have crossed my mind. Now what am I going to do tonight? I’m going to this bar. Fucking brilliant, once again.

Re: Parenting

My son Michael will be nine in a few weeks. He is getting a PlayStation Portable — like a GameBoy on steroids — for his birthday. At the time of this statement, he did not know this.

“When I told Grammy I wanted a PSP for my birthday she looked at me like I was out of my mind. She’s like, [Grammy voice] What are you going to do with it?” She always asks that. About everything. Always. [Grammy voice again.]”What are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it?” It’s a video game system. I’m going to play video games. What does she think I’m going to do with it? Use it as a hammer? Sew with it?”

He is so much like me I don’t know whether to cry or give him a high five.

Re: Akismet

If your comment does not display right away, please email me at naomi@ittybiz.com to tell me Akismet is on a shooting rampage again and I’ll go get it out of spam. Sorry, dudes.

By Naomi Dunford - May 13, 2008 in Marketing - 22 Comments

In Which Jamie Welcomes the Lurkers, and Lays the Smacketh Downeth in a Nice Way

OK, first things first. Naomi had a post a few days ago, and we saw the lurkers (and I use this term nicely, it is not meant to be derogatory) come out of the woodwork. Sometimes we get so used to seeing the same names on the comments on different posts that we forget that there are other people reading these posts whom we have never met. While it is always awesome to see our regular commentators show up and put in their two cents, it was especially awesome to see so many new names in the comment section.

So lurkers: this part is for you. We want to encourage everyone to feel like they can take part in the discussion that is IttyBiz, so take this as your official welcome to the party. Please, please, please use the comment section on this post if you have any comments or suggestions on what we can do to make it easier for first-timers to feel comfortable enough to take part.

Secondly, it was previously suggested that the time may have come for us to set up some comment rules. Since unruly behaviour tends to upset my wife and therefore ruins my day, I agreed to take on this task. Please pay attention, I don’t want to have to come find you. If you haven’t already read How To Avoid Running Your Mouth Off On-line, perhaps that is the best place to start.

The rules are pretty simple.

Please treat the IttyBiz blog the way you would treat a party to which you are invited and know some but not all of the guests.

If you come to the party only to hand out your business card to everyone in attendance and then promptly leave, you will not be invited back.

If you continually and pointlessly talk smack about the host(ess) or their guests, you will not be invited back.

If you are a bigot, racist, homophobe, or goat-lover at our party, you will not be invited back.

If you are any of these things in the privacy of your own home, that’s your business.

If you contribute to the discussion at the party, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

If you are the person who always brings more alcohol than is strictly necessary, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

If you can voice a dissenting opinion in a thoughtful way, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

If you treat others with respect and kindness, even when offering a criticism, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s our party. We are the sole arbiters of who is invited and who is not. (Case in point, we have decided that two people can be sole arbiters, and there’s nothing wrong with that.) Most transgressions will likely get a warning first, but if we’re really pissed off then maybe not.

Welcome, and please enjoy the party.

Image credit : Givepeasachance

By Jamie Dunford - May 11, 2008 in Blogging - 37 Comments

First off, thank you everyone for stopping by with your thoughts on yesterday’s No Asshole Rule post. Big supersized lilac colored thank yous to the lurkers — commenting here is not for the faint of heart, and I’m grateful. Hi, everyone. It’s nice to meet you.

Jamie is off thinking of a comment policy that is suitably funny and appropriately vulgar for this blog — we might end up using something from How To Avoid Running Your Mouth Off Online — and I am thinking. I don’t have a lot of time to think lately, so sorry about that. It tends to get ugly because I’m so out of practice.

I read a comment by Milena Thomas of Quiet The Thunder, and she points to a link on her blog about comment rage. I was not a reader of hers before but I sure as hell am now. I’m not even going to bother to try and express what she expressed because I’d be useless at it, so just read it yourself when you have some time.

Reading her post made me realize that I am angry with this commentator because they have what I want. They have the time to sit around and read blogs like the kind I want to read and participate in the conversation and subscribe to comments and do all the things I want to be doing.

I’m angry because I’ve finally achieved what I thought was success and I’m still stressed as shit. I’m angry because, compared to my old life, I have more money than I know what to do with but I don’t have the time to read the books I can finally afford to buy.

I’m pissed off because there are over 300 unread posts in my reader — and believe me, I do NOT subscribe to a lot of blogs — and I can’t even envision a time when I’ll be able to get through them. Not because I have to — I know I could just click “Mark All Read” and be done with it — but because I want to and it feels like I can’t.

And I’m angry because I feel like this person is taking the privilege of time, the privilege I’m so desperate for, and dithering it away. This person has a special, beautiful, glorious gift of time and they’re using it stupidly. (Kind of like when you have a crush on a girl and her boyfriend treats her like shit. You want to punch him in the face because he’s squandering something wonderful.)

Anyway, I realized that I’m the one being the asshole. I’m directing the anger I feel about my own situation at this commentator, which is stupid and asshole-like behavior and frankly, a waste of my time and my energy and my life.

Thank you for your input and your advice and your wisdom and your laughs. And, when dealing with all of the overwhelm that has recently taken over my life, thank the Lord for the blog that is making my life better every day. If you are not reading Dave Navarro, you are an idiot. (Dave, you are free to put that on any testimonial page ever, for the rest of your life, and thank you for everything.)

By Naomi Dunford - May 10, 2008 in Blogging, Personal - 24 Comments

Hey, y’all. IttyBiz need your help.

There is a commentator who comes to this blog a couple of times a week seemingly just to be an asshole. This individual stops by every now and again ostensibly joining the community but only has one topic to discuss: why I am dumb and they are not dumb. It seems like everything I do inspires this individual to tell me how retarded I am. If they cannot find anything to act superior about they generally remain silent.

I have seen this person on other blogs doing the same thing. I was on the phone with a particularly prominent blog consultant a while back and he told me that the pain in the ass factor of this individual made him not want to leave comments on my blog anymore. Nobody wants to come just to be argued with.

I read a book one time — shocker — something pathetic like Chicken Soup for the Soul, version 143. There was a story about a grandma who had a rule.

Let nothing pass your lips that is not true, kind, and necessary.

Now, if I only ever said things that were true, kind, and necessary I would be out of a job. But I try to follow at least two of them at any given time.

This commentator tends to err on the side of truth with a fairly casual disregard for kindness and necessity.

Here’s the thing. I don’t mind general assholes. Remember Tomato Guy? He follows me on Twitter and stops by every now and again to let me know how much he hates me, which is cool. I’m down with that. He doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a hater and I respect him for his honesty.

But this commentator is pretending to be a part of the community here and on other blogs and it’s really fucking pissing me off.

So I want your thoughts on what I should do. I’ve thought of a few options:

1. Email the commentator politely but firmly. Something along the lines of “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

2. Email the commentator with “Get out of my fucking shop”.

3. Call the commentator out on the blog and we can all beat them up. (Did you see what happened to Oscar?)

4. Delete the comments on an ad hoc basis.

5. Do nothing.

As you can tell from the content of this website I don’t dig censorship, but I also don’t want readers making other readers uncomfortable. It’s my party and I don’t want everybody to leave.

So what’s your vote? I would especially like to hear from you lurkers who don’t normally comment. What do you think?

By Naomi Dunford - May 9, 2008 in Blogging - 70 Comments

“Do you really think this is a good idea? I told my husband and he seemed really lukewarm.”

I hate to get all cliché on your ass but if I had a dollar for every time I heard something like this I sure as shit wouldn’t be living in Canada’s Snow Belt when there are perfectly good beaches in Bali I could inhabit.

In the time I’ve been hanging out in the aforementioned Snow Belt doing marketing consulting, I have heard one bad idea. (If you’re reading this, it wasn’t yours. I’ll tell you right now that the creator of the idea in question does not read this blog.) Sure, there are lots of bad ideas in the world, but intelligent people reject them before they hit the discuss-it-with-your-loved-ones phase and the lame idea never sees the light of day.

So if there are so many Not Too Bad At All ideas kicking around out there, why are the husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and sisters and best friends trashing them? Why all the hate?

They don’t want you to get hurt.

By far the nicest reason your peeps aren’t rooting for you is because they don’t want to see you hurting. If they shit on your idea now and because of that you quit, then Big Mean Strangers can’t shit on your idea later when it’s hanging out for the world to see.

The concept here is that you will avoid pain and suffering. The reality is that you will not because you won’t be being true to yourself and you’ll always wonder “What if?” Wondering “What if?” sucks far more than being shit on by strangers ever will.

They don’t want you to succeed.

On the other hand, we have the people who don’t want you to succeed. This is totally selfish and totally normal. Everybody feels this way sometimes, we just don’t happen to like it when other people feel it about us. They might not want you to succeed because they’re pricks or they might not want you to succeed because they’re insecure and afraid or maybe because they tried and failed and don’t want to look like the loser.

In any case, too bad for them. If they’re pricks, cut the bastards out of your life. If they’re insecure and afraid, use some of your newfound riches to buy them some therapy for Bonus Karma Points.

They don’t want you to change.

Along the lines of not digging success we have not digging change. Similar beast, but not quite the same. Imagine this: you’ve been humming along being a stay-at-home mom or dad. You have been ostensibly happy packing peanut-free snacks in the kidlets’ lunches and driving Grandma to Bingo for years.

Now you want to start a custom bowling ball painting company. This will undoubtedly take up a bunch of your time. Your elderly mother and your distracted spouse and your codependent sister are terrified this means that they will not get the you they signed up for.

Most people suck at change. Unfortunately for them, change is both inevitable and necessary for growth. Sucks to be them. There is nothing you can do about this attitude other than hope to God it goes away. You might get them with boatloads of reassurance but frankly, it’s probably a waste of time. You have a business to run.

They don’t want to get involved.

This is probably the easiest problem to fix. A lot of people, when they hear you’re about to embark on something new and possibly big, freak out because they think you’re going to want them to get on the bandwagon. This can be a practical bandwagon — they have no interest in stuffing envelopes with you until three in the morning — or an emotional one — they don’t care if you fail and get disappointed, they just don’t want to be disappointed themselves.

Easy peasy. Don’t involve them. Find other help or sources of support. There are plenty of people out there ready to roll up their sleeves or tell you that you kick ass. Don’t waste your life begging from people who won’t give you what you need.

They don’t want to adjust their life view.

This is probably the most common issue. In my case, people really, really want to think of me as the high school dropout or the pregnant teenager or the ex-Mormon. People I went to school with viewed me as my brother’s sister or my mother’s daughter. Maybe you’ve always been conservative and it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to contemplate you tying yourself to a tree named Luna to save the geckos.

Canadians are famous for this. We have no interest in our own artists, writers, or athletes until they’ve succeeded in the rest of the world. Canadians believe that Canadians suck. Then when they win the Nobel Prize we act like we’ve been their biggest fans all along.

This one’s pretty easy to deal with, too. Do what you’re going to do. Succeed. They will either come around, in which case you’ll feel vindicated, or they won’t, and you’ll be so successful and fulfilled that you won’t care. Yay!

Click here to subscribe. “Ittybiz: Small business tips for the above-average.” (Today’s stupid tagline brought to you by AmyL.)

By Naomi Dunford - May 7, 2008 in Entrepreneurship - 42 Comments

There are no words to explain how Not Safe For Work (NSFW) the following video is. It is not safe for kids, it is not safe for church, it is just generally unsafe.

I present my esteemed professional colleagues having a friendly chat at our favorite blogging conference.

Must See SOBCon08 Video.

(The handsome man on the left is one of my clients, Clay Collins, who writes a pretty darn cool blog about meaningful productivity and anti-hacks. (I have to say it’s cool because I do his PR.) The beautiful young lady on the right is Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communications, the only blog in the world that will make you well and truly believe that marketing people aren’t all shysters. And the final gentleman in the picture is Michael Martine of Remarkablogger who needs no description.)

You: But Naomi, I thought you weren’t at SOBCon!

Me: Funny, that. Watch the damn video.

By Naomi Dunford - May 7, 2008 in Blogging - 18 Comments

So I’m in the tattoo parlour — another favorite Tuesday morning activity, and I overhear this comment from the most badass looking tattooist I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a few) to a girl who is no more 18 than Jack is:

“You want me to put a heart and a maple leaf and a rainbow inside a shamrock behind your ear? Get out of my fucking shop.”

It’s nice that tattoo artists get to say these kinds of things. I have a feeling I’m in the wrong job.

Willy Franzen, a friend of mine who runs One Day One Job, a site profiling entry-level jobs for Ivy League graduates, sent me this email the other day:

“I was just thinking, and I realized that you have a really hard job.

As a consultant you have to tell people what they don’t want to hear, or you’re doing them no good.”

Willy, in addition to having a pretty damned fantastic idea for a website, has a very good point. It’s particularly true in the creative professions.

Press Releases

Out loud: “Perhaps we can look at some other angles.”

In head: “Yes, I’m sure thousands of Associated Press journalists are holding their breath waiting to read about the biggest spring sale Duluth has ever seen. That is the dumbest idea for a press release I’ve ever heard. Get out of my fucking shop.”

Web Design

Out loud: “Maybe we should go for something cleaner.”

In head: “There is no fucking way I’m putting this shit in my portfolio. Get out of my fucking shop.”

Web Content

Out loud: “I’m sure we can work something out with the right balance of keyword density and readability.”

In head: “Yes. Of course we can put “student credit cards business credit cards first time credit cards bad credit credit cards reward credit card mileage credit card” verbatim 8 times in 250 words and still have it make the homepage of De.licio.us. Get out of my fucking shop.”

I raise my glass to that tattoo artist. Rock on, dude.

Click here to subscribe to IttyBiz or get out of my fucking shop. (Today’s stupid tagline brought to you by Alisha Navarro.)

Image credit: pedrosimoes7

By Naomi Dunford - May 6, 2008 in Entrepreneurship - 39 Comments

I’m in email retrieval hell right now since GoDaddy is trying to kill me. If you’ve sent email and haven’t heard back, you don’t have to resend — they seem to be all there, but in a totally random order and there are millions of them. I will get back to you as soon as humanly possible, but now I’m going to bed and collapsing.

Do you think I can still do internet marketing without actually using a computer?

By Naomi Dunford - May 6, 2008 in Personal - 6 Comments

Last week I wrote a post called Let’s Play A Game: What’s Your Small Business? Here’s a quick recap:

I received an email from a regular reader of my blog asking me what I do for a living. Since I would have thought that was obvious I realized that if people who don’t know what I do, they probably don’t know what you do either.

I made a little list of questions that people could answer on their own blogs, basically interviewing them so their own readers could figure out what they do. (Let’s face it, they’re the ones who already know and like you. You could tell my readers what you do but they don’t know you from a hole in the ground.)

Vindication is a Luscious, Luscious Fruit

I posted that on April 22nd. As of today, 10 days later, three four people have emailed me to let me know they’ve gotten brand spanking new clients because of that interview, totalling $1750 $2250 so far. Unless these three four readers totally suck, the odds are pretty good that some of those customers will be repeat customers, and more money will come down the road.

Another little interesting tidbit is that I made $800 from that post. Four people came and bought retainer packages. Since most of my clients tend to end up buying between two and six months of services, that number will likely triple, not including any referrals they’ll send. Since referrals are tied for my number one source of business — the other being totally random strangers who have secretly been reading this blog for months — the odds are pretty good that I’ll eventually score about five grand worth of work from that post.

So why did this happen? What was it about that post that made people hire me?

When people sat down to write their own answers to these questions — or maybe they just started thinking about them in their head — they realized they didn’t know. They didn’t know what their USP was and they didn’t know what their target demographic was. They’d probably been going along happily thinking they knew, but when it came time to put pen to paper, they came up blank.

Anyway, I promised I’d answer the questions myself, both to prove I’m game and to eliminate the chance of future ‘What DO you do?’ emails. Here goes:

What’s your game? What do you do?

I do two things that are somewhat related. One, I am a micro-business marketing coach. I help businesses with fewer than 5 employees create dynamic marketing campaigns on the cheap. (Yes, I totally just quoted my own About page.)

What does this mean? It means I create marketing campaigns for businesses that are either new or very, very small. Or both. Generally the strategies I work out with my clients are free, although some people start Pay Per Click campaigns or pay for premium press release placement.

I help navigate the insanity that is social media and social networking. I help with search engine optimization. I help you identify your target market and your unique selling proposition, meaning you don’t have to compete with everybody in your industry. We create a micro-industry just for you.

The other thing I do is copywriting. I do advertising copy, sales pages, sales emails, Etsy pages, press releases, the whole shebang. Sometimes people want this as part of a marketing package and sometimes they want it by itself. The by-itself folks usually do this because they know what needs to be done, they just can’t write or sell their way out of a wet paper bag.

Why do you do it? Do you love it, or do you just have one of those creepy knacks?

Both of the above. I absolutely adore the sales process. I love the psychology of why people buy. I love the emotions that go on behind the scenes when someone’s considering buying what you have to sell.

It seems I have the creepy knack for predicting this psychological process. I can tell you why Joe from Toledo won’t touch your product no matter what you do and why Annie from Tallahassee will buy it even if you quadruple your price.

Who are your customers? What kind of people would need or want what you offer?

My customers are very small business owners and freelancers. I’m going to repeat that just in case it isn’t clear. VERY small business owners and freelancers. Not medium sized business owners who like my prices. One guy and his wife, one chick and her cat, that kind of thing. That’s it.

Yes, I could work for bigger businesses, and I have. I happen to hate it.

Generally speaking the business owners I work with do most of their business online, but that’s not a requirement or even deliberate. It just happens to be how the business world is going.

What’s your marketing USP? Why should I buy from you instead of the other losers?

Jamie and I run a small business and we know that it’s scary as shit. We know that you don’t have a lot of money but that everyone and their mother is telling you that you need to spend money to make money. You get that there are a lot of things you need, but you also know there’s a lot you don’t need. That’s where we come in.

Bigger marketing firms have very specialized processes in place to meet the needs of the widest possible audience. Many offer a package that will guarantee you a 10-page report on, well, whatever. But you might not want a 10-page report. You might just want to know how to hit the Digg front page. You might just want some sales copy written. You might just want someone to bounce ideas off of. You might need someone to explain to you why your idea doesn’t suck, or even why it does.

Also, we are comparatively very cheap.

We’ve gotten a lot of flak for that and I understand why. If you get ten marketing quotes, even from firms that specialize in small business, we’ll be the cheapest by at least half, probably more. Normally I would recommend you not trust someone like that any further than you could throw them. What are they undercutting to give you that kind of a price?

In our case, we have zero overhead. Not low overhead — zero. There is no expense that this business requires that we wouldn’t be paying for anyway. We work from our home on an internet connection we had already, from laptops we already own. We don’t have a car at all, let alone a company car. We don’t even pay for childcare.

It absolutely crushes me that there are so many amazing people out there working their asses off to run amazing businesses and having to quit because they didn’t do their marketing right and couldn’t afford one of the big guys to do it for them. Really nice and really deserving people are trying so fucking hard to get their ittybiz off the ground so they can finally stay home with their kids or stop commuting three hours a day and they’re failing because they can’t afford decent help.

It makes me violently angry so I figured I’d do something about it.

What’s next for you? What’s the big plan?

We’re doing a small biz guide that we’re going to launch when blog readers reach a certain critical mass. And I’m starting another blog. And I’m probably going to write a trashy romance novel because I’ve always wanted to. Oh, and we’re thinking of moving to England. Any advice anybody has on that would be very helpful. If you’re advice is ‘don’t move to England’ I’d rather not hear it.

By Naomi Dunford - May 2, 2008 in Marketing - 30 Comments

When you’re first starting out on your work from home journey, you’re generally a.) excited, b.) scared shitless, or c.) both. The fear generally comes from the fact that you have no clients and no money and the possibility of sleeping in a cardboard box seems quite likely.

Business growth traditionally comes verrrrrrrrrrry, verrrrrrrrrrry slowly and then at some tipping point explodes to the point of ridiculousness. (Just ask the charming gentlemen who hang out at Men With Pens.) If you’re in the beginning phases, though, it seems like the tipping point is either so far into the future that you can’t see it or completely impossible.

This growth explosion usually comes by word of mouth. Word of mouth is awesome, but you have to have a few mouths going before you can benefit from it. There are a bunch of ways you can do this, but today we’ll tackle barter.

(EDITED: After I wrote this but before I posted it, the lovely Tei wrote on bartering at Barter: It’s What’s For Dinner. When I saw this in my feedreader I told myself I really should go back and read it before posting this piece. Then I forgot and now I look like Miss Copy Pants. Sorry, Tei. I suck.)

What is bartering?

Bartering is trading services or products for other services or products, bypassing filthy lucre altogether. I “sell” you marketing in exchange for unlimited access to your porn collection, for example.

Why bartering is cool for your micro-business

People, especially broke ones, are much happier to trade services than pay you money that could be used for exciting things like groceries and electricity. You show them your stuff and get on their radar and they can whore you out to all their — hopefully less broke — friends.

It works the other way as well. If you are dirt ass poor but need a website, you might be able to swindle someone into doing your website in exchange for your services instead of your money. You both get stuff you want but nobody pays a dime.

How do I get the barter party started?

There are two main types of bartering:

Interpersonal bartering is when two people or businesses trade products or services, generally services. You do graphics, I do copywriting, we trade. Easy peasy.

Network bartering is a much more formalized process. Somebody somewhere starts a network of businesses and they create a fake cash system. I do copywriting for the guy who cleans pools. I charge him $200 fake dollars and get that fake money in my account. His account is debited $200 fake dollars, meaning he has to clean $200 worth of pools for other people in the network. These pools do not have to be mine.

This is a pretty insanely complicated process at the back end and I wouldn’t recommend starting your own network, but it’s easy to join one that already exists and hang up your little shingle.

Is it legal?

Each state/province/country has its own rules about bartering and taxes. If you care about this sort of thing then you’re likely the type of person who has an accountant. Ask him or her. If you don’t care about this sort of thing then I strongly recommend you ask nobody, your accountant or otherwise.

I’m not going to get into the ethics of cheating on your taxes because I am morally vacant. If YOU have thoughts, please post them and I promise I won’t argue.

So if bartering is so cool, why aren’t we all doing it?

Bartering is good for those just starting out. When you’re new, you don’t have anything better to do anyway. You need the work or the portfolio or the references. Once you reach a certain point in your career you don’t have a whole lot of time to work in exchange for a free haircut and some nice words from Jenni down at Jenni’s Custom Clippery.

Bartering is good for the socially aware. If you want to do a favour for someone, bartering can be a nice way to go.

Bartering is good for those who want to stick it to the man. Some people (hell, some societies) exist on barter alone. If you don’t feel like making a bunch of money just so you can turn around and pay taxes to a government you don’t support, bartering is a handy way to get around that.

Bartering is good when you can’t afford stuff. When you can afford it, it’s a lot simpler to just write a check.

Bartering is good when you like what you’re getting. DO NOT get sucked into crappy barter arrangements for things you don’t like, need, or want. You will get screwed and end up totally resentful.

Bartering is good when everybody’s equal. If I charge $100 an hour and you charge $100 an hour, each hour is equal. If I charge $100 an hour and you charge $10 an hour, the hours are not equal anymore. Two hours of graphic design does not have the same market value as two hours of babysitting. The closer you can work it to resemble cash, the happier everybody will be.

Well, except the $10 an hour guy. He’s going to feel screwed but that’s what he gets for working in a $10 an hour industry.

How to score barter clients

Tell people you do it. The internet is big and the economy is down. Add it to your services page, preferably at the end. Tweet it. Tell your friends.

But won’t everybody go for barter instead of cash?

No. Why? First of all, not everybody’s as broke as you are. Second, some people don’t dig equality in client/provider relationships. Sometimes I just want to pay you to do it and never talk to you again. Barter is not conducive to that. Last, many clients can’t work with you for whatever reason. If you don’t work online it doesn’t matter how good my social media marketing strategy is for you — you can’t use it so I’m just gonna have to pay cash..

So should you be bartering your micro-business?

Generally speaking, barter only when you can’t get cash and when the product and service for which you’re trading has value for you. (How to figure out if it has value: If you have to think about it, the answer is no.) Barter can’t pay your rent but it might have a hand in paying your future rent.

I’m curious to hear your experiences in bartering? Have you done it? Have you been happy with the results? Are you doing it now? Speak! Let your voice be heard.

By Naomi Dunford - Apr 30, 2008 in Marketing - 32 Comments