You want a 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. Read More

Hello, readers of my blog and my favourite 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 to let me give more of my home business prowess!

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 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.)

Back in the day when I was first starting my 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.) Read More

(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. Read More