You want a home business you can be proud of. You want to tell all those unbelievers to bite you. How do you do this? Marketing, people.

1. Figure out what you’re trying to do.

Business types call this management by objectives. Are you trying to get new customers or retain existing ones? Some methods of marketing (signs, ads, etc.) catch the eye of people who don’t know about you yet. Other methods (newsletters, blogs, e-mails, follow-up calls) keep the customers you already have from jumping ship to Joe’s FlyByNight. Once you know what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s a lot easier to focus your energies and get things done.

2. Figure out your resources.

Business owners these days have more marketing options than they can count. Or shake a stick at. Or some other bad cliché. Figure out what you can afford in money and time. Once you know what you can afford, you don’t even have to think about the things you can’t afford.

3. You have lots of eggs. Use lots of baskets.

No individual marketing effort will be the key to your success. You might have the best looking brochure in the world but if you don’t have a great business card, consistent networking skills, run appropriate ads, post in the right web forums, or whatever else it is you could do, that brochure won’t take you anywhere except obscurity, with a quick stop at the welfare office.

4. Consistency, consistency, consistency.

You like blue on your business cards? Make your website blue. Make your shirt blue. Make your car blue. Make yourself blue. Be blue. Own blue. Rock blue.

This is what’s known in the marketing industry as branding. If you saw any random words put in a certain white script on a certain red background, you’d think of Coca-Cola. That’s what Coke wants you to think, and that’s what you want your customers to think. (Well, not about Coke. About you, stupid.) Coke doesn’t change its logo every three months, and neither should you. Think about it, pick something good, and then stick with it.

5. Go where your customers go.

You might have a great plumbing business but nobody’s going to buy from you if you’re selling at a craft show. This should be obvious, but it’s generally not. If the customers you want are wealthy homeowners, sticking a big-ass sign up in the laudromat is dumb. On the other hand, if you’re selling cheap moving services, the laundromat might be just the ticket. Did I just say “just the ticket”? I’m really sorry about that.

6. Burn the box.

You know your potential customers well enough to know where they go when they’re looking to buy, but where else do they go?

Let’s say you’re selling wedding cakes. Brides go to bridal fairs - every moron knows that. But where else do they go? They hire caterers. They interview DJs. They spend hours choosing overpriced envelopes that recipients will throw out within three minutes of opening. If you can get into these places, get to know these people, your chances of success through referral skyrocket. Then you come recommended, which is solid gold for a small business.

Also, your target market has other interests outside of this business. Yes, brides read bridal magazines. They also want to be the hottest newlywed on the beach, so you just might find them at the gym. Or Weight Watchers. Or buying laxatives.

7. Know what your customers want.

Then give it to them. Let’s use a new example. You make custom furniture. It’s on the lower end of the budget scale. Most of your customers are likely to be young families. Can you round the edges of your coffee table so toddlers won’t poke an eye out when they’re cruising around eating your iPhone? Can you make the height of your kitchen chairs adjust for growing kids? Do what you can to envision what your customers want, and then make sure to tell them about it. I’m going to repeat that one. TELL THEM ABOUT IT.

8. Find a niche. Now make it smaller.

A lot of first time entrepreneurs think that they want everybody to be their client. If you’re marketing to everybody, you’re also competing with everybody. The thing is, there are a bunch of existing firms with strong referral networks and bigger marketing budgets than you have. These are not the guys to be competing against. If you do photography, think about staying away from weddings. Everybody does weddings. What about babies? What about pregnancy shots? Consider glamour photography. Take pictures of people that they can put on their business cards. (Real estate comes to mind. Those guys are begging for head shots.) The smaller your niche, the greater your chance of being regarded as an expert in it.

9. Benefits, features, blah blah blah.

Nobody cares about your fantastic technology. Nobody cares that your widgets come with a patent-pending Widget-o-matic. They want to know what it does for them.

As far as you are concerned, from now on, heaters do not heat. They keep your customer’s family warm. Alarm systems do not deter burglars. They help your customer feel safe at night. Pool cleaners do not clean pools. They give your customers a relaxing environment so they can invite their friends over. Cell phones do not make phone calls. They make your customer’s teenager feel cooler than all of his friends. If you want more info on benefits and features, check out Sonia’s Squidoo lens. Supercool.

Follow these rules and become wildly successful. Unless your product sucks. Then you’re screwed.

In completely unrelated news, when I bought my website (not this one), I wanted RockStarMarketing.com. I’m not linking to them. Wanna know who owns that website? The Driver’s Agent Network. Pulled straight from the website:

“The Drivers Agent Network is a online recruitment marketing company that works exclusively in the trucking industry.”

These assholes have my dream domain. Please subscribe to my feed. It will make me feel better. Or you could submit it to Digg. That would be cool, too.

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 30, 2007 in Home Business Marketing - 18 Comments
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Hello, readers of my blog and my favorite people in the world. Look! I’m all over the internet. Isn’t that cool? Please go to these nice people’s websites and look at the articles they let me put there. You should read them. They’re better than the crap I post here.

Behind door number one we have GetEntrepreneurial.com featuring Top Ways To Get a Fresh Business Idea Off The Ground courtesy of moi. In my completely unbiased opinion, it rocks.

Behind door number two we have Business Opportunities and Ideas, featuring Last Minute Marketing Tips To End The Fiscal Year On A High Note once again courtesy of yours truly.

Hopefully you will love these articles and show them to everyone you know. You can even show them to your Mom because I don’t say the F word once.

Go! Comment! Petition let me give more of my home business prowess!

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 30, 2007 in Home Business Blogging - 5 Comments
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I’ll cut straight to the chase here. While there are a lot of things you need to know about marketing, there is one question you need to answer before you do anything else. It is, without doubt, the most important aspect of both your marketing plan and your home business plan. Drumroll please…

Are You Selling Love or Money? Those are your choices. Your only choices.

Selling Love

The Premise: You are selling something that gives your customer emotional value. It could be sex, it could be safety, it could be the envy of their neighbors. Whatever. It all boils down to love. The vast majority of business-to-consumer items fall into this category.

Soap? Love. You’re selling the feeling of cleanliness, sexiness, smelling good, soft skin, whatever.

Mushroom soup? Love. You’re selling the feeling that your customer is nourishing her family. (You should probably be selling the feeling that she’s nourishing her family better than her neighbor is, but that’s a whole ‘nother article.)

Shiny new car? Love. You’re selling the feeling of power, wealth, prowess, virility, safety.

You heard it here first, people. When is a car not a car? When it’s love. Duh.

Selling Money

The Premise: You are selling something that helps your customer make or save money. If, at the end of the day, your customer will save money or get new business because they bought your product, you are not selling that product. You are selling them cash. The vast majority of business-to-business items fall into this category.

Cheap paper? You’re selling them the cash they’ll save because they didn’t buy the expensive stuff.

Expensive stationery? You’re selling them the new customers they’ll get because they’ve improved their image.

Graphic design? Ditto on the stationery. They don’t look like some bargain-basement Mickey Mouse jackass, so they get more customers, and then they retire in Greece.

Selling Both

Don’t. I know you think your product will make people feel better AND save them money. I know you think you’re the next Donald Trump. Both of these things may be true, but you’re never going to sell anything with that mindset. In your marketing efforts, you want to present one strong message. One. Pick a side.

B2C Example: You sell water softener pellets to homeowners. They have two primary benefits. One, they soften water, making it more drinkable and reducing hard-water related skin conditions. Two, they extend the life of your customer’s water treatment system, saving them money in the long run. Pick one angle. Personally, I’d pick the first.

B2B example: You sell biodegradable packaging products and your target market is small-to-medium sized businesses. You can sell to their love of the environment, or you can sell the idea that using your products will get them more customers. Don’t sell both, or you’ll water down your message. (FYI, I’d sell the latter.)

Tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, we’re going to talk about what to do with this fabulous new insight. You should subscribe. I was going to offer you a money-back guarantee, but you didn’t pay anything. I tell you what. If you hate it, maybe I’ll send you ten bucks.

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 29, 2007 in Home Business Marketing - 21 Comments
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Back in the day when I was first starting my home business blog and was terrified no-one would want to read it (yes, that day was about three weeks ago) a very nice man from Australia named Lindsay Polson wrote a highly complimentary post about my blog. I showed it to my mother, my mother-in-law, the nanny. I basically whored this post out so much it was demanding a raise. Things have been kind of crazy in IttyBiz world, what with all the How To Run A Business Without Killing Yourself posts and all, but I wanted to take some time to show you the absolute rockingness that is Lindsay.

He runs a few blogs. One, Stuff4Restaurants, is about, well, stuff for restaurants. Now, I would be arrested if I ever tried to run a restaurant because I am completely incapable of making nachos. However, I used to waitress at a number of them, and most of them sucked. If they had been reading Lindsay’s site, however, they wouldn’t have sucked nearly as much. (Okay, they probably would still have treated their wait staff like crap, but that wouldn’t have been Lindsay’s fault.)

Anyway, he has a lot of great things to say about restaurants and their associated, um, stuff, but one thing you should read right now is the eBook. It’s about signs. Good ones.

“But I don’t give a crap about signs”, you whine.

Well, you do now. Go read it. Scroll down a bit and click on the red thing that says “Where the hell are you?” If you have a brain in your head at all, you will realize that this is brilliant marketing advice that with a teensy bit of extrapolation can be applied to pretty much any business in the universe. Go. Since Lindsay is a pretty prolific poster and I don’t want you to miss the gems, also check out Business Plans Are BORING, But Bankruptcy Is Not Exactly a Barrel of Laughs Either. More truth is spoken in jest, people.

Moving on, he’s got Stuff4Business. Odds are, you can guess what that one’s about. Best stuff to be had there? Hard to choose, but I dig Do You Have A Billion Dollar Idea Hiding In Your Business? With all the stupidity floating around the blogosphere right now (”Oh my God! My PageRank dropped! How will I ever annoy my nine readers with ugly ass advertising again?”) his ideas for finding ideas are as refreshing as nine consecutive mojitos on Canada Day weekend. (That’s in July, by the way. Three days before Independence Day. It’s usually hot. Never mind. It’s not even funny anymore. Forget it.)

He shows real live pictures of mind-blowing marketing techniques in action, including this one about urinals. You’ll never look at a bathroom the same way again. (Where does he FIND this stuff? You know what? I don’t want to know.) Also, check out the Brothel in Pimlico post. Yes, I said “brothel”. If you don’t read it, you’re only hurting yourself.

Lastly (for now, God only knows what else he has up his sleeve), there’s his art. When he’s not traipsing all around the continent finding cool stuff for me to read, he does art. Really good art. I offered him one of my children in exchange for one of his pieces but he was elusive in his reply. Some of his stuff doesn’t seem to be for sale, I don’t know, but you really, really need to check it out.

Dude has so many pies, he’s going to need more thumbs. Plus he looks like Jay Leno, which is cool. He is so passionate about advertising and promotion, it’s kind of scary.

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 27, 2007 in Home Based Business - 2 Comments
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(Note: The photograph you see here is one of my favorite photographs of Jack, one I fully intend to show at every special occasion, nonspecial occasion, and basically every available opportunity. In the same set of photographs, I caught him peeing on the couch on film. You just KNOW that one’s going to show up at the wedding.) You are in no way obligated to read this post, as it is all about me. I’ve had a pretty fantastic week and I want to brag. That’s it, really.

First of all, the nice folks over at Young Go Getter held a contest, the prize for which was a set of 5,000 business cards, custom designed by Travis, and printed by the uber-cool Andreas at Orange32. (When I say uber-cool, I do mean uber-cool. Yes, I’m pretty lavish with the awesomes and the wickeds here at IttyBiz, but uber-cool? Go check his site out. Neither you nor I will ever be as cool as Andreas or his website, so we must accept it and move on.) Anyway, I submitted The Art and Science of No-Bullsh*t Business Cards, and I won. Yay for me, yay for Travis, Yay for Andreas, not-so-yay for my printer. Five thousand business cards are going to last me a long time. I better not change my phone number.

Next up, Melonie at Workerette was getting trashed by some crazy person who called her sexist. As in, sexist against women. Put down your gin & tonic and read that again. Yes, I DID say that Melonie writes at WorkerETTE. Anyway, I came to her defense and called the other chick a psycho (not verbatim, but I’m trying to be brief here) and she came to check out my blog. Then out of the blue? This highly complimentary post that I swear to God I didn’t pay for. Basically, Workerette is for chicks who work. At home, outside the home, on the street corner, whatever. She talks about child care issues and home business and work-life balance and how to force yourself to shove something in the Crock Pot so you don’t order pizza for the sixth night in a row. Not that I would need that, or anything.

Then, we have the wicked Cyan of Freelance Switch, which you probably already read. On the off chance that you don’t already read it, please get off your ass and go subscribe. Do not pass Go, people. (A little aside about Cyan - if you don’t know anything about graphic design, this will mean nothing to you. But if you do, and that includes you, Mom, Cyan was named after “one of the four quintessential colors of the print medium”. You know CMYK? Yeah, Cyan is the C. How freakin’ cool is that?)

Anyway, the point is, Cyan ran a little fundraiser for Blog Action Day and raised almost three hundred bucks, which I said I’d match. Her money is going to Greenpeace and The National Wildlife Foundation. Mine is going to Greenpeace and The WILD Foundation, a charity I heard about through Sonia Simone’s blog, Remarkable Communication. Did you know that “a child living in the U.S. is far more likely to have ever seen a zebra or lion than a child living in Africa is”? Neither did I. Not cool. Go read her post about it because she says it a lot better than I could.

Oh, and I hit 100 subscribers today. That was pretty cool, too. If you’re reading this by RSS, hi, and thank you. If you’re not reading this by RSS, help me hit 1000 subscribers by Christmas and subscribe right here. One hundred random strangers can’t be wrong.

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 27, 2007 in Home Business Blogging - 10 Comments
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Let me guess. You can’t afford it.

You’d really love to [start a home business/spend time with your kids/give money to charity/adopt a child from China], you really would, but you just can’t afford it. If I hear that phrase one more time, I’m going to do something drastic.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re lying. You can afford it. You’re just choosing not to. In your case, that could be a wise choice or it could be a stupid choice, but it’s yours and you’re making it.

I could tell you about Christine who spent time hanging out in the upper echelons of homelessness. I could tell you about Harri in Finland, busting his ass and saving like crazy to work from home with his two little boys.

I could tell you about the time I spent six months in a homeless shelter. I could tell you about rolling pennies to buy a half-pound bag of generic rotini.

I could tell you what it feels like to have no money for baby formula. To fill the empty can with flour and return it to the store, claiming it tastes funny. To lie and steal to get free milk for your kid. To be 20 and single and totally unprepared for motherhood and dirt ass poor.

You don’t care and I don’t blame you. But don’t tell me you can’t afford it.

When I had Jack, Jamie took parental leave. In Canada, we get 55% of our salary for 50 weeks, up to 35 of which can be taken by the father. People looked at him like he was crazy. People came right out and said he was crazy. “How can you afford it?” “You’ll never be able to afford it!” “I wish we could do that but we can’t afford it.”

Here’s my open reply. We did not have a car. We did not have a house. We did not have cable TV, or a Best Buy account, or a shoe habit. We did not take vacations. We did not have a gym membership. We did not drink non-negotiable morning cappuccinos.

We sacrificed a damn lot and we got six blissful months of doing nothing but getting to know our new baby son.

Is this for everyone? Absolutely not. Are there things I will not give up? Hell, yes. But if I don’t do something or buy something or go somewhere, it’s not because I can’t afford it.

It’s because other things are more important.

When you say you can’t afford something, you are giving away your power. There might be damn good reasons for you to keep your day job. You want to save up some money first. You like the security. The health benefits come in handy. You can’t stand the sight of your wife. Hell, maybe you actually enjoy it.

Those are all choices, and they may be good ones, but they’re yours and you’re the one making them. Stop wimping out and start telling the truth.

This is the end of my ranting about money week. Next week, I rant about marketing your home business. Subscribe to the feed, you just might get to watch me explode live on the Internet.

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 26, 2007 in Home Business Money - 23 Comments
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Let’s talk about money, shall we? I mean, we’ve been doing that all week, but let’s get dirty about it. Money is not hard to understand. Earn more, spend less, you’re golden. It’s not exactly rocket science. The problem most people have, though, is that they spend all their time trying to do one of those things, while summarily ignoring the other. Half the world busts their ass to make more money and then promptly spends it all on crap. The other half drives halfway across town to save a nickel on a can of peas, but charges fifteen bucks an hour for their SEO services.

That’s really dumb.

I’ve compiled a little Best of the Web on money, broken down into Making and Saving. Some of this stuff is directly related to freelancing and home business ownership. The rest should be required reading before you’re allowed to own a baseball card, let alone a credit card.

How To Make More Money

The lovely Cyan (who linked to me yesterday, by the way, and sent me a boatload of traffic - thanks, Cyan!) offers the super-in-depth Freelance Switch Rate Calculator. It incorporates a whole bunch of things that’ll make you smack yourself in the forehead wondering why you didn’t think of it before.

They also have a great article, Nine Factors To Consider When Determining Your Price, for those who don’t like filling out forms or actually doing the calculations. If you’re just starting out and don’t have all of the information to put in the calculator yet, this is a great article to read.

Since you’re here, you probably think blogs are cool. You either already have a blog of your own, you’re planning to start one, or you’re related to me or my husband. Along the lines of the whole diversify your income thing we’ve been talking about, Maki from DoshDosh has a great post about making money blogging. Problogger has a lot of good stuff about this, too, but you’ve probably already read it.

How To Spend Less Money

The ever-awesome Trent takes on Money Magazine’s 25 Rules To Grow Rich By, Simple Dollar style. Each of the 25 tips is linked up to a more in-depth post, so you can take what you want and leave the rest.

Also from Trent, check out his 31 Days To Fix Your Finances. This one is long. LONG. It’s also one of the most valuable resources available on the Internet. If you don’t feel like clicking around, you can send Trent two bucks and he’ll send you the whole 60-page insanity in PDF.

The very nice people at Free Money Finance gave this crazy round-up of financial goodness, My Best Piece of Financial Advice? Spend Less Than You Earn. Don’t be put off by the title - each letter in each word links to a post with yummy money advice. In other news, FMF also gives all their income to charity. Why? Cause they’re cool like that.

My contribution?

Double your rates. I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what you’re selling, but I’ll tell you right now, your rates are too low. They always are. Every time I talk to entrepreneurs and freelancers, when I’m doing seminars or coaching or just hanging out at the coffee shop, I am shocked and appalled by how cheap they’re selling themselves. Want hard data? Go here and check out the numbers.

UPDATE: The handsome and knightly Dave Navarro of Freelance Folder and Your 30 Hour Day fame gave me a heads-up about his awesome article, Selling Yourself On The Value Of Your Time. He calls it tasty. It is tasty, and that’s not a compliment I go handing around, all willy-nilly. Read it, learn from it, then spend a few minutes hanging your head in shame about all the time you’ve been wasting.

* One thing I’ll mention - watch out for the comment streams on The Simple Dollar. Some of the readers are totally psychotic. The Frugaler-Than-Thou crowd is a bitch.

Liked the round-up? Why not subscribe to the IttyBiz feed? There’s still more than 2 weeks left of home business and freelance advice to come.

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Overwhelmed? Freaking out? Borderline hysterical? Click here to get your own small business marketing plan. It’s not scary, I promise.

By Naomi Dunford - Oct 25, 2007 in Home Business Money - 15 Comments
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I like risk. Risk and I have spent a lot of time together, and we’ve become close friends. Risk has spent a lot of nights sleeping in my bed, nestled cozily between Jamie and me.

Jamie does not like my relationship with Risk. He thinks we’re too close. He thinks I don’t see Its flaws, the problems It could cause, the havoc It could wreak on our home business. The perfect entrepreneur would be halfway between Jamie and me - someone with a healthy balance. (Maybe we could just have Jack take care of it.)

Knowing where you exist on the risk spectrum is vitally important to entrepreneurs. If you are well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your position, you can better determine who to ask for help, who to choose as mentors, and who to avoid like the plague. You’ll be able to intelligently decide when to spend your money and what to spend it on. Most importantly, you’ll know your business’ financial potential and how to optimize your position for the best possible gains.

The Riskophile

Riskophiles get off on danger, unknown outcomes, and fear. They find it a healthy motivator. I, for example, am quite comfortable when my bank account is in overdraft. It gets me off my ass. I think there’s nothing like not having any money to make you want more money. Jamie, not so much. Jamie is a Riskophobe.

The Riskophobe

Riskophobes are safer people. They get uncomfortable spending money they don’t have to, or taking actions that might cause them financial hardship. He wants to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we will be able to pay our rent on time. The fact that we have paid our rent on time for the entire four years we’ve been together is irrelevant. He wants to know it again. Now.

Finding Your Balance

If you’re anything at all like every other person on this planet, your balance is off. You exist too far on one side of the spectrum. You either take too many stupid chances, or you miss opportunities because of fear.

In order to be successful as an entrepreneur or a freelancer, you need to get out of your risk comfort zone and come closer to the middle. To make money, you have to take some risks. If you want to keep money, you have to stay a little safer.

Where’s your spot on the Risk-to-Anti-Risk continuum? Do you like where you are?

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Overwhelmed? Freaking out? Borderline hysterical? Click here to get your own micro-business marketing plan. It’s not scary, I promise.

By Naomi Dunford - Oct 24, 2007 in Home Business Money - No Comments
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One of the best ways to avoid the whole living in the gutter thing we talked about yesterday is to create multiple streams of income for your home business. This is a very trendy topic right now and I figured I’d clear a few things up.

In order to succeed using this model, there are two main steps involved.

Step One: Diversify your income streams.

When you are starting out, your diversification involves getting lots of clients. If you run a small business or you are a freelancer and the vast majority of your income comes from one company or individual, you do not have a client. You have a boss.

Lots of clients means lots of checks. If one client flakes out, you’re okay because you have other clients. You make your mortgage payment on time, your wife doesn’t leave you, and everybody’s happy. For now.

The reason this is only the first step towards income stream utopia is because this is not a sustainable business model for a company with only one or two employees. You work your ass off and you get paid. You keep working your ass off and you keep getting paid. At some point, you’re going to want to stop working your ass off. This is where step two comes in.

Step Two: Diversify your TYPES of income streams.

There are three main types of income streams. You want lots of income streams coming from as many of these as possible.

Active and Direct

This is the most common type of income. You do something for which you get paid. You take a freelancing gig for $1000. You perform the service and you are given $1000. Your income is directly related to your activity level. You don’t do it, you don’t get paid.

Active and Indirect

This is becoming a more and more common type of income. You write on your blog and get thousands of readers. Advertisers come beating down your door and offer you money to shill their stuff on your site. Your level of activity does not directly impact the amount of money you get - if you don’t blog today or tomorrow or the day after, there will probably be a negligible net impact on your income. It is still active, however, because eventually, a lack of activity on your part will impact your income.

The vast majority of unconventional income streams fall into this category.

Passive or Residual

Everybody loves the idea of passive or residual income. We all seem to have this image of laying on a beach in Bali, sipping a Mai Tai and having hula-clad groupies lovingly applying our sunscreen. The problem with this fantasy is that in the vast majority of cases, it’s crap.

There are very, very, VERY few income streams that are completely passive.

Patents provide residual income. Certain blue-chip stocks that pay dividends provide residual income. Books that are already wildly successful provide residual income. That’s about it.

Figuring out your income streams

To know what kind of income stream you have, figure out this little equation. It’s easy. Look at your activity (A) and your income (B).

If you take away A, what happens to B?

If you eliminate A and B disappears, your income stream is active and direct.

Example: You are working at a job. You quit. Your income goes away.

If you eliminate A and B diminishes over time, your income stream is active and indirect.

Example: You stop blogging. Gradually, readers start to leave and so do advertisers. Your income decreases gradually.

If you eliminate A and B keeps trucking along happily, your income stream is passive.

Example: You are Stephen King. You decide never to write again, and do not engage in any promotional activities. You have invested your money wisely. People keep buying your books and your stocks keep paying out. You never have to worry about money again.

That’s great. Why do you care?

When you know how much of your activity is directly impacting your income, you can decide where to assign your efforts. Like doing the job that’s closest to a bill, if you don’t have enough time or energy to get everything done, work on the activities that provide direct income. As you successfully create more indirect income streams, your level of activity can decrease without impacting your level of income, bringing you one step closer to Bali.

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 23, 2007 in Home Business Money - 10 Comments
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“Do you want to be homeless and live in the gutter?” Apparently, this is the biggest fear among would-be home business owners. It also seems to be the biggest fear of people who know and love would-be entrepreneurs. When I was about a week away from launching Itty Bitty Marketing, somebody very close to me (thankfully, not Jamie) asked me that exact question. Verbatim. What do you say to that? “Yes, actually, that’s exactly what I’d like. In fact, why don’t you just take my house and my car and I’ll do it right now?”

Many advice types suggest having something like seven gazillion months worth of savings before you make the leap, thus mitigating your risk of poverty and ridicule. While I’m sure that is a nice, safe plan for many people, in our case we would have shot ourselves had we waited that long. Instead, we decided to go with the Back-Up Plan method of small business management.

How To Make a Back-Up Plan

There are two key elements to a successful back-up plan. One, it has to be tolerable. Two, it has to be doable.

First, let’s look at tolerable.

Back when I was still attempting to be employable, I used to temp as an administrative assistant. I was pretty good at it, but I hated it. I mean, I really hated it. I hated getting dressed up. I hated acting like I gave a crap about their mediocre, random company. I hated having to pretend like I wanted, more than anything else in the world, to stay with said random company for the rest of my working life. Not cool.

Therefore, temping isn’t a good back-up plan for me. The key here is for me to analyze what sucks about temping (working in an office) and what isn’t too bad about temping (typing, administrative work). Once I’ve figured that out what works for me, I can identify a tolerable alternative to whipping on the pantyhose and kissing ass all day.

In Jamie’s case, he’s a pretty wicked photographer. While I doubt we’re going to retire off the income from his photography, it’s a viable back-up plan in case we’re ever on the verge of the poorhouse. I have no doubt there are plenty of lovely babies out there just dying to have him make them laugh on film. For my mother, she types about 95 words per minute. She can always get freelance work as a voice transcriber, which I gather pays pretty well for sitting at your computer all day in your underwear. Not that she would do that or anything.

Some other options you can consider are:

* freelance writing
* graphic design
* web design
* computer programming
* tutoring
* resume writing
* editing (essays, copy)
* babysitting
* seasonal work
* part-time jobs
* dog walking
* pet sitting
* house cleaning
* note-taking

This is not a comprehensive or exhaustive list. I just hear from so many entrepreneurs that they can’t think of any other ways of making money. If you have any level of skill whatsoever, there is something you can do that people will pay you for that does not necessitate going back to work full time. Nothing this list is supposed to make you millions. It’s supposed to get you through your rough patches.

Now what about doable?

The second requirement of a successful back-up plan is that it needs to easily and quickly executable. The whole point of this plan is to be able to implement it immediately if you need money. Starting a mail-order cheese business, while admirable and potentially very fulfilling, does not fit the bill.

If you want to be a freelance writer, you can start making money this week. The same is true for many other marketable skills. Through services like Elance, Guru, and GetAFreelancer, you can find work almost instantly. The key is to have an infrastructure already in place before your situation becomes urgent. When you’re ready to start working from home on a full time basis, spend a little bit of money to get a membership for your site of choice. If your plan is to take in kids for babysitting or do some tutoring on the side, have flyers printed and ready so there’s nothing stopping you from starting right away.

When you realize that there’s a very good chance you won’t make this month’s mortgage payment, that’s not the time to start thinking about writing your flyer copy. Get everything ready beforehand, and the stress of not knowing what to do next virtually disappears.

What about you guys? Do you have a back-up plan? Do you end up using it? How’s it working out? Talk to me!

Related: Aaron over at the Shane and Peter Blog has a great post about making the leap to freelancing today. It was nice to read someone actually talking about the good sides of freelancing for once.

In other yummy acts of linky love, Genesis over at At Home Mom did an interview with me that’s live on her blog today. It’s fun for the whole family. Except the members of the family who don’t like the word “sex”. Them, it’s not so fun for.

If you want to catch the remaining three weeks of our as-requested-by-you tutorial, subscribe to the feed. To quote everyone’s favorite purple dinosaur, it’s super-dee-duper.

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By Naomi Dunford - Oct 22, 2007 in Home Business Money - 17 Comments
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