You’re not alone.

I’m typing this in bed, on the new laptop my IttyBiz readers bought me. (By the way? Thanks for that.) To my right, on the floor, on Jamie’s side of the bed, sit two Macintosh computers. They belong to my mother. For those of you who are new, I’ll take this opportunity to mention that my mother moved to Europe in 2005. I have yet to get off my ass to put them in storage. To my left is a floor full of books. They used to live in my busted chipboard bookshelf, but Jack likes to play with them, taking them down and putting them back in an order he feels is more appropriate. The last time he played this game was about 10 days ago. The books are still on the floor. Neither of us can get into bed from the sides, so we come up from the foot.

Jack is covered in a rash from ankle to neck and scratches himself every hour of the day and night. My bathtub is full of baby sleepers and cold water where I tried, and failed, to get the blood out of his clothes. He is crying in his room and Jamie is trying to comfort him — nothing I was doing was helping and I am now under my covers sporting silent headphones, trying to drown out the noise so I can cry and type in peace. I fear he either has or will shortly get an infection from the cuts that don’t heal, and all the doctor does is tell us to try Aveeno. Because I guess we never thought of that.

I missed a client call. I want to reschedule but everything is so up in the air, I don’t even know when to tell them. I feel horrible, guilt-ridden and sick. I feel like I’m drowning. I feel like my home business, doing what I love, is a fabulous sparkly present and I’m stomping on it daily. I feel like every time I fuck something up, little bits of sparkle wash down the drain and soon I will be left with nothing. I don’t know how in the hell I’m ever going to deliver on all of the promises I’ve made — promises I want to keep, promises I had every intention of keeping, promises that I didn’t think would be a problem.

There is no how-to in this post. I do not know how to dig my way out of this. Sometimes when something is wrong, it’s helpful to pretend that the problem belongs to someone else and you can think of the advice you’d give them. Unfortunately, under these circumstances, my advice would be trite and ridiculous. I would tell people to plug away, item by item, list by list, until they had fought their way out. I think we all know that’s delightful advice in a vacuum, but it doesn’t account for emotional states that include bursting into tears watching Ellen give away $100 gift cards to Trader Joe’s. Overwhelm does not occur in a vacuum and vacuum advice doesn’t help worth a damn.

The only thing I really hope to accomplish with this post is this: If you feel shitty, you’re not alone. If you feel like, now that you’ve got your itty bitty business off the ground, you’re furious with yourself for not skipping with glee every moment, it’s not just you. If you feel like nobody on the goddamn planet understands what you’re going through, at least I do. If you feel like, now that you’re at home full time, you should provide your children with home-cooked meals and wash the sheets every other day and only show quality, commercial-free programming on your television and have sex with your husband six nights a week and have a floor that’s more carpet than ground-up-Cheerio, you’re not the only one.

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 31, 2008 in Home Business Psychology - 76 Comments
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Did you like that title? Isn’t it search engine optimized? (It’s definitely optimized, but I’m not sure for what.) That is because I am an excellent and well-respected marketing professional. In other news, thank you for all of your emails asking if I’m dead. I’m not.

If you have a home business marketing consultant, they will often advise or supervise a split campaign — often called an A/B split.

This sounds scary. It’s not.

When I first heard this, I freely admit I freaked out. I will always associate A and B with algebra (X and Y I associate with chromosomes) and I don’t dig algebra. I am not saying this for comedic effect — I was borderline hysterical. Granted, I become borderline hysterical when I can’t calculate the tip at my friendly local tavern, but this was worse than usual. Anyway, moving on.

Splits are simple. Take your ad or your sales letter or your landing page or your spam or font or whatever, make another version that is very slightly different, and send them to two groups of equal size. Then measure the response. Easy peasy.

The reason for this is simple. When it comes to copywriting, either you’re doing it yourself — and let’s be honest, you probably don’t have a clue what you’re doing — or you’re paying someone else a hell of a lot of money to do it for you. In either case, figuring out what works as quickly and as accurately as possible is of the utmost importance. (According to MS Word, “upmost” and “utmost” are synonyms. Who knew? And I call myself a copywriter.)

Here’s what you need to know about splits, A/B, X/Y, and otherwise.

Make the difference between A and B very slight. If A and B couldn’t pick eachother out of a police line-up, you don’t have A and B. You have A and L. A and L is bad because if 90% of your sales come from L, you don’t know why. You can’t tell exactly what it was that made L better than A. (Actually, if 90% come from L, just go with L. It’s obviously fine.)

Make the difference between A and B at least marginally important. Do not change “very” to “really” in the third paragraph from the end. Any difference in effectiveness will be coincidental and not representative of a trend. If you’re new to splits, headlines are generally a good start.

Make everything else as equal as you can. If you’re doing direct mail, alternate houses. Don’t send A to a rich neighborhood and B to the projects. You need to keep everything consistent.

For God’s sake, measure it. Set up a system that can let you know which sales or leads are coming from where. This is a sadly and surprisingly easy mistake to make.

The best A/B split is one where you can hand both versions of your copy to an impartial observer, ask them which they like the best, and they don’t really have an answer. (Of course, if they don’t have an answer because both versions are shit, well, sorry dude.)

What kind of splits can you run? AdWords will monitor A/B split campaigns for you. You can have slightly different landing pages. You can have different colored fliers. Hell, you can even have different prices. Pretty much anything you want, you can split.

Some Common Splits:

Ever see a TV commercial run on a major network — one that you know isn’t a local feed — and the ad says to “Call Sue at …”? On the other commercial, they’ll say to call Jane, or Mary, or whatever. They want to see what ads are making people call. You call and say, “Yo, I wanna talk to Sue” and they know you were watching Dancing With The Stars at 9 on Wednesday in Duluth.

How about coupons? When you get a coupon in the mail and it has a numeric or alphanumeric code, it’s usually because they’re running a test. Some poor sap in the data entry department types those bad boys in and then The Powers That Be In Marketing determine what got the most asses in the seats.

Online sales and information products are notorious for splits because they’re nauseatingly easy to do, with the potential for astronomical profits. If I’m selling my ebook to you guys for $29, I can run an AdWords campaign to see if it will sell for $59 and keep tweaking until I hit the optimal price.

In other Search Engine Optimization news, I’m pleased to announce that no less than 25% of my search engine traffic typed in some combination of the words “Naomi” and “thong”. Because I’m cool like that.

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 30, 2008 in Marketing School - 16 Comments
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Before we get into today’s lesson, I present you with Spam Of The Day:

Subject: Reach out and BONE someone

According to Wikipedia — which, as we are all aware, knows everything — spam as we know it today comes from the Monty Python sketch of the same name.

For your interest, Wikipedia also defines spam as:

A song by “Weird Al” Yankovic. It is a parody of R.E.M.’s song Stand. It is mostly an ode to the canned lunch meat SPAM.

The abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages.

For the sake of argument, we’ll go with the latter.

There are two types of spam in the world. Spammy spam and not-so-spammy spam.

Spammy spam is, as the definition suggests, indiscriminate, unsolicited, and sent in bulk.

Not-so-spammy spam is more discriminate but less bulk. It is also mostly unsolicited.

The key to spamming for fun and profit is understanding what it is about spam that people hate and avoiding it. People do not hate unsolicited email. I get unsolicited email all the time. People hate stupid and untargeted unsolicited email.

When Jamie is messing around on StumbleUpon at three o’clock in the morning and sends me a link, it’s unsolicited. I didn’t ask him to send it. He didn’t send me a double opt-in letter several months ago asking if I gave him permission to send me stupid jokes every now and again. Sometimes what he sends is annoying, but I don’t hate him for it. I know that on some level, he thinks I’ll like it and I usually do. I still didn’t ask for it.

How To Spam

Personalize.

If you’re looking at all the email addresses that you have in WordPress and you want to send them all an email, use their actual names. I comment as “Naomi Dunford”. Do not address an email to “Dear Naomi Dunford”. You may as well say “Dear… ah, fuck it. You and I both know this is spam. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?”

Personalize more.

Feel free to use standard body text, but tell me you hope my stomach flu is better. Mention this in the first line if you can. It shows you read my blog and then I like you. This is a very easy thing to do. Click link. Read most recent post. Read “About” page. Find something to say. Repeat with other lucky spam recipients.

Be human.

Write your home business spam like an email, not like a sales letter. If I’m selling, say, my new IttyBitty package, I write it to a friend. Then I send it out to a lot of people who are not my friends. I pretend that my good friend Melanie — who occasionally comments here and sent me a lovely email expressing her concern over the other day’s technical drama — has asked me about my package and I’m telling her. I try to say “shit” a little less than I would in an email to the actual Melanie, but you get the idea. If it’s too salesy for Mel, it’s too salesy for my email list.

Try not to sell.

If you can avoid selling anything altogether, that’s even better. If you can send an email that says, “Hey! What’s up? I haven’t seen you around in a while. We miss you” you will garner a lot more trust. And nobody will ever buy a damn thing from you if they don’t trust you.

Offer something at least marginally valuable.

When I say “offer”, I don’t mean sales offer. I mean honest-to-goodness offer. Offer your virtual friendship. Offer a funny story. Offer something you think they AS AN INDIVIDUAL might be interested in. For example, I write for Work It, Mom! If Nataly were to spam me, she should spam me with something like, “[somebody interesting] wrote a piece on how to get work done with kids in the house. I thought you might like it.” Frankly, she could send this to anybody in her database of members who works from home. But she shouldn’t send it out to everybody, because for only about 15 minutes more effort, she could send the work-outside-the-home moms something about child care or something and they would be delighted to receive a personalized email from the founder. They are happy. They love Nataly now. They are loyal.

Don’t be an asshole.

Email is not the place for hard sales. People get hard sales through email all the time and they ignore it completely. Do not bully. Do not cajole. Do not try and make me feel guilty. Do not make claims any intelligent person would know to be false.

Don’t use sales tactics.

I got an email from Teaching Sells the other day telling me that if I wasn’t one of the next 34 people who signed up, I wouldn’t get the introductory rate anymore. This wasn’t spam — I’m on the mailing list — but I wasn’t delighted. That may work on some people but it doesn’t work on someone in marketing. It just pisses me off. The worst thing was, I was going to sign up for it but now I’m tempted to drop an extra $200 to take it after the price increase purely so I can be stubborn about it and say “your sneaky sales tactics didn’t work.” Yes, I’m that stubborn.

Don’t use heavy graphics.

Heavy graphics removes the personal element and it forces me to click “display graphics”. I don’t want to. If you can’t say what you have to say using words — if you can’t get your point across adequately without big flashy pictures — it wasn’t worth saying and therefore isn’t worth reading.

Don’t use spammy text.

Do not use exclamation marks (points?). Do not use ALL CAPS. Do not use the word “free”. Do not use the word “cheap”. Do not use the word “discount”. Do not use any words that show up in the thesaurus under “free”, “cheap”, or “discount”.

This is for two reasons. One, they’ll get caught by the spam filters. If you have a thesaurus, odds are, so does their spam filter. Two, if they don’t get caught by the spam filters, they’ll get caught by the reader’s mental spam filter and the reader will mark you as spam, forever relegating you to spammer purgatory.

Put your opt-out at the bottom.

For the love of God, do not make your first line “You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up…”. Please don’t do this. You may as well just click unsubscribe for me. I barely have the time to read your email, let alone the administrative bullshit at the beginning. Everyone knows you can opt out at any time. You don’t need to beat them on the face with it.

Read it.

If someone sent YOU the email, would you read it? Would you click through? Would you buy? If not, CTRL-A Delete and start over.

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***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 24, 2008 in Marketing School - 20 Comments
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You know when people say “Stop the world, I want to get off”?

Note to self: Take own advice.

* My grandfather used to read this section of the Bible — Matthew 13:42 — look up very seriously, and add “…and for those who have no teeth, teeth shall be provided.” And they ask me why I turned out the way I did.

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 22, 2008 in Home Based Business - 25 Comments
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[This is a guest post by James Chartrand of JCME. You too can tramp yourself out on my site by contacting me. Send the whole post -- if you're the next Dan Brown, I want to know immediately without having to mess around with email for weeks.]

Would you love to never worry about losing your job?

I thought of that freedom last night while standing on my porch, taking a break to freeze my ass off and look up at the stars. (Actually, I was racking my brains for a topic for a blog post, but hey. I like the stars concept better.)

Where I live, the economy is poor. Jobs are rare, and they don’t pay well. The area depends on the tourist industry. Winters can be cold, long, hard, and cold… and they feel even harder when a summer job gets cut short by frigid snow.

Employment security is, at best, tentative. There are a few large, industrial companies that churn out tons of goods, but job stability is shaky. Layoff is a common household word. A job that pays $10 an hour, barely more than minimum wage, is considered a good one.

Mention a layoff, and people turn a little pale. They mentally tightening their own belt, grateful that layoff isn’t affecting them. They fear losing their job – and that fear and insecurity is part of their daily life.

Where else would they work?

Lesson 1: If you work for someone else, you never have absolute job security.

I thought about how lucky I am and how much I love doing what I do. I thought about how great it is to call my own shots and not have to answer to anyone.

I will never lose my job.

In my home business, I cannot be fired. I cannot be laid off. I am the deciding factor of my own workload. I am my own employer. No one can swoop down and sweep away my livelihood because of corporate games. No one will ever walk over to my desk and say, “James. Pack your stuff. You don’t have a job here anymore.”

I will always have a job, and no one can ever decide that I don’t.

Projects come and go. So do clients. My current line of work might dry up. Demands might change. I may need to adapt to continue earning money.

Lesson Two: You will always have a job. You just may not have income.

While I stood there on the porch philosophizing, I couldn’t help but think of a friend of mine. Years ago, he earned thousands of dollars a day doing photo shoots. He hasn’t worked professionally or for that kind of money in over two decades. In fact, he hasn’t done any photography work to speak of for years.

But he never lost his job. When asked what he does for a living, my neighbor always answers, “I’m a professional photographer.” No one took his job away. He consciously chose to stop pursuing work. He may not have income – but by god, he has a job.

[Hi. It's Naomi again. James seems to believe he is The Comment King Of The World. Govern yourselves accordingly.]

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 21, 2008 in Guest Post - 33 Comments
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Hello, my favorite person in the world. (That’s you, by the way.)

First, the RT Cunningham thing turned out amazingly well. Richard received over $3000 in donations over a 24-hour period and has shut down donations because he has all he needs. The coolness of this is overwhelming. Thank you, IttyBiz readers. You rock.

Next up, thanks to everyone who entered to win the Zen To Done ebook which was subsequently made free. (EDITED TO ADD: Leo stopped by to remind me that it’s not actually free. It’s just no longer under copyright. Subtle but VERY important difference. Thanks, Leo! Note to self: Sometimes the joke falls flat. Accept. Move on.) It is my honor to announce the winner of the ebook is Tzaddi Gordon of Zodomatica. She wins based on my very objective ruling of “Best Use Of The Words ‘Drat’ and ‘Potty’ In A Blog Post.”

Lastly, one big fat juicy piece of link love. I don’t remember how I found the blog post I’m about to disclose, likely because I, like Britney Spears, tend to do my web surfing while drunk and high and in the arms of my husky Muslim bodyguard. (That’s not the link, by the way. That’s a link to a piece I wrote on FWW about Britney converting to Islam to marry her paparazzi boss.) I give you:

Walking home last night, a banana fell on my head.

Go read it. While you’re there, read the dude’s About page. Seriously. I’m not joking. “Holy shit” is all I can say.

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 18, 2008 in Personal - 15 Comments
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Over the last week, three people have called the IttyBiz helpline — well, they emailed, but that doesn’t sound nearly as cool — asking how to increase the comments on their home business blogs. Since I have been blessed with the loudest and most prolific readers on the internet, I thought I’d take a stab at it.

***

Before you can get more commentors, you need to understand why people comment. Commentors can be split into three groups. Each of these groups has two subsets. Hence the title. Get it?

The Emoter:

The Emoter comments because you provoked an emotional reaction in him, and he wants to share it. You made him spit his gin out laughing or you made his eyes get misty. You shocked him. You scared him. You surprised him. Maybe he thought, “Holy shit, that’s GENIUS!” Basically you got him out of his drone-like existence for long enough to feel genuine human emotion and he feels the need to say something about it.

The Selfless Emoter makes a comment because he wants you to know that your mission was achieved. Except in the most tragic of cases, a piece is funny because the writer wanted it to be funny, and it’s nice to hear you made someone laugh.

The Self-Centered Emoter wants to get something off his chest. This has nothing to do with you. Maybe your piece reminded him of their long deceased hamster Stinkie and he needs an outlet, or maybe he just wants his friends to know he’s smart enough to get the joke. These people are the ones who will corral you at the bus stop while you’re standing in the cold, cold rain waiting for a bus that’s already late and whip out all 28 plastic-coated, waterproof pictures of their long deceased hamster Stinkie because they assume you must be just as riveted by the rodent in question as they are. OK, maybe that one touched a nerve.

The Dissenter:

The Dissenter comments because he doesn’t agree. These can be large scale disagreements or they can be “You spelled Tim Ferriss’ name wrong”. Either way, he’s coming to say you’re wrong.

The Genuine Dissenter is doing it to either contribute to the conversation or to alert you to a mistake that might make you look like an ass. When a loyal reader lets you know you have a typo in your headline or accidentally posted a picture of your cat’s most recent hairball in place of a shot of Barack Obama, he’s not being mean, he’s trying to do you a favor. When these people disagree in the spirit of healthy discussion, it’s often because you asked for feedback or because they think that a nice, friendly debate makes everybody come out smarter at the end.

The Asshole Dissenter is commenting to either make himself look good or you look dumb. He’s disagreeing because it makes him feel cooler or smarter than you, or because he’s defending himself against a real or perceived attack. This type of commentor can often be found ripping apart what you said and referring to you as “my friend” somewhere in the comment text.

The Starfucker

The Starfucker comments because he thinks that in some way or another, you are superior to him. He is treating you like a mini-celebrity. He almost always says something nice, although it’s often tremendously bland and contributes nothing real to the conversation. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s lovely for the ego — but when this commentor writes, “Amazing article, blah blah blah, I’ll definitely try to incorporate this into my own [blog, business, sex life]” you probably have a Starfucker on your hands.

The Worshipping Starfucker comments because he really, really likes you. He has probably read your archives back to your first entry. He loves everything you’ve ever read. He always thinks you’re right — sometimes because you really are, and sometimes just because you’re the one who wrote the piece. You can find these people by writing a completely asinine post and seeing who says nice things about it anyway.

The Upwardly Mobile Starfucker wants a piece of you. He wants you to notice him or he wants a piece of your traffic or he wants his name seen on high-traffic blogs. He might want other people to think you and he are friends. He is just as likely to disagree as agree, as he’s noticed that when he disagrees, some bloggers will comment back and address him by name. He feels that’s one more way of getting on your radar. He is also likely to be a big, fat bragger — he’ll find a way to weave in the name of his blog or a marginally relevant story of his own blog or business into the comment.

BONUS: Then there are your friends. That’s just what they are — friends — and they defy classification.

This is probably where I should add an open-ended question to encourage reader participation, but can we just pretend I did and you can insert your own?

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 16, 2008 in Ask IttyBiz - 85 Comments
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Tomorrow we’re going to talk about how pissed I am at James for guest posting on Copyblogger without even telling me and then writing the guest post on THE SAME DAMN TOPIC as I was going to write about today. But that’s tomorrow.

Today, we’re going to talk about RT Cunningham, a blogger who’s in a tough spot. Dude’s wife is in seriously rough shape — I don’t know the details because I was busy trying to get his post up — and he’s basically fucked if people don’t help him out. He needs to fly to another country and bail on blogging and his wife’s scared out of her head and it’s generally a big mess. Whatever, I’m not saying it right.

Point is, his readers bullied him into putting up a PayPal donation button because he needs cash. I’m putting the shout-out to you guys — I know you have it because half of you bought the IttyBitty on like, 30 seconds notice. Dude’s flight alone is $1200 and it’s a scary, scary business. Please send this guy some dosh. Five bucks, fifty bucks, your Christmas bonus, whatever.

To those of you who have it and can give it, thank you. For those of you who don’t have it, I’ve been there and I understand, but head on over and show some blog love anyway.

Thanks to Darren for putting it out there and Vic for giving him the tip.

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 16, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 15 Comments
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As you probably already know, I’m a pretty big fan of Zen Habits. I’ve made no bones about my outright and flagrant attempts to score a guest post there. Today, Daniel Scocco, Editor of Daily Blog Tips — which I also read — wrote a guest post for Zen Habits.

Normally I’m all for snarkiness, but I don’t even know what to say right now. Here’s the full text of the post so it does not look like I’m taking things out of context.

***

“Today I was having an argument with my girlfriend about her watching Big Brother. Basically I was trying to discourage her from watching it. I gave her many reasons not to. It is a waste of time, it is petty, it promotes vanity. In other words, it is the panis et circenses [link mine for those of you who aren't "pure" enough to know] of our days. I don’t think there is a coincidence in the fact that most people that watch Big Brother don’t know the works of George Orwell in the first place…

Anyway, after about an hour of sermon she told me she would try to stop. Thinking about the whole discussion, though, I realized that I could have summarized it in a better way: Big Brother is not something pure.

If you search in the dictionary, pure refers to things that are free of dirt or pollution, that have a uniform composition, that are complete and sinless.

The interesting thing is that this concept can be extended to virtually any field or endeavor. There are pure movies and impure movies. There is pure talk and impure talk. There are pure people and impure people.

Apply the principle of purity to your life and it will become much easier to decide the things you should be doing and the ones you shouldn’t.

Sitting in front of the television watching soap operas or reality shows is impure. It will not make you grow as a human being. It will not make you more conscious. Sometimes, in fact, it will do exactly the opposite.

Have time to spare? Learn a foreign language. Spend some time with friends and family. Read a classic book. Learn how to play an instrument. Practice a sport. These are pure things.

Not convinced that this principle applies to virtually anything? Think about your job. You could always step on other people to rise and make more money. You could always put honesty and integrity aside and do whatever it takes to gain more power.

Is such attitude pure? Would this be worth it? I don’t think so.

In the end it will be only you and a mirror, and usually only pure images get reflected.”

***

Yes, I’m sick right now and possibly not reading right. It’s possible there’s a hilarious joke in there that I’m just not getting in my guacamole-fueled stupor. Is it just me, or is the first two paragraphs of that both out of this world and wildly out of character for ZH? I’m trying to stem the urge to go over and rant and rage and scream that yes, lecturing your girlfriend for an hour about what she should or shouldn’t do in her spare time is TOTALLY PURE until I get your thoughts.

Thoughts? Anyone? Help me out here.

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 14, 2008 in Home Based Business - 54 Comments
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[rant] So I’m reading Steven Snell’s archives tonight (because that’s what the cool kids do on Saturday nights) and I come across a post discussing the benefits of guest blogging.

Guest blogging rocks, without question. You get to see your name “in print” in something you didn’t “print” yourself. You get new readers. You get new subscribers. You expand your brand. It’s pretty cool. Some might call it, uh, marketing.

Phil, one of the commentors, left this little ditty.

“The involvement level might be a little more than the average internet blogger might be willing to endure.”

Phil is totally right, and that totally pisses me off. (Not that he’s right. I’m sure he’s a really nice guy. It’s not his fault he’s right.)

Marketing is work. Get over it.

Why is it that perfectly intelligent home business owners think that because something is work, they don’t have to do it? We discussed this (and oh, did we ever discuss it) about the Problogger real site vs. fake site drama the other day, too. In that case, it wasn’t work, it was expense.

It seems like a colossal amount of business owners or, to be more accurate, would-be business owners, want it all to be easy.

They want it cheap, they want it fast, they want it easy.

One of my clients, who shall remain nameless not to protect the innocent but to protect my boob job fund, is stuck in this right now.

That seems really hard.
That seems like a lot of work.
It seems like there’s a lot involved in that.
Isn’t there something easier?
Do you think that’s really necessary?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for avoiding hard work. I avoid hard work on a daily basis. I hate hard work. But sometimes you have to do it. Such is life.

About five years ago, someone suggested I should think about going into law, and I actually thought about it for a while. Law seemed cool. I like logic and arguing. I like valiantly defending the underdog. I like watching Boston Legal. Sounds like fun.

The shitty part was, I didn’t finish university. I didn’t even start university. For me, a law degree was a long way off. Too long to make it worth it. The benefits did not outweigh the costs. I didn’t do it. (Duh.)

I am not, however, paying good money to bitch and moan to a career coach that there should be an easier way to become a lawyer.

If you don’t want to be a business owner, there’s nothing wrong with that. I know a lot of lovely people who are not business owners. They cease to be lovely, though, when they whine and whinge that they are trying OH SO HARD to be business owners when in fact, they’re doing piss all but complaining and justifying their asinine actions.

Yes, marketing takes work. Networking takes work, guest blogging takes work, giving topical advice in forums takes work. If it’s too much work for you, don’t run a business. OK. Whatever. No-one cares. But you might be a lot happier if you invested the time you’re currently spending bitching about how hard it is to run a business in something that is worth it.

I don’t care if you hire me or you hire Mason or you hire Sonia or you hire Susan or if you hire any other respectable marketing consultants. I don’t care if you hire non-respectable marketing consultants. I don’t care if you read everything Levinson and Godin ever wrote and decide to do it yourself with wild success. I don’t care if you fail and end up living in your car.

I care when you tell me that proven marketing techniques that have been hand-picked for your situation, including your budget, your ability level, your commitment level, and your time availability are too much money or work or time or whatever.

For the love of God, get over yourself. [/rant]

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By Naomi Dunford - Jan 13, 2008 in Home Business Marketing - 32 Comments
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