First of all, you’ll be happy to know that the top search term entered into Google which results in an IttyBiz visit is “naked firemen”. Not home business. Not small business. Not entrepreneurship. More people enter naked firemen and arrive here than those who enter IttyBiz and Itty Biz combined. Oh, the glorious power of Page Rank.

Other search engine highlights:

“At what point do you think you can be an entrepreneurship”
When I was in high school, there was a grade eleven course called Entrepreneurship — which, for the record, I did not take — and the teacher had a running joke that if you could spell “entrepreneur”, you would pass. Let’s make a new rule, shall we? If you don’t know that “being an entrepreneurship” is not the correct word usage, you’re not ready.

Where they ended up:
Entrepreneurship — What To Do When You’re Scared Shitless

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 29, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 47 Comments
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Don’t start getting used to two posts in one day. This is very special.

Not something I’d normally broadcast, but there’s no other way to say thanks. Remember Lisa? The funny, pretty one I don’t remember why I’m friends with anymore? Yeah, so she sends me another email today:

“You have a HUGE blog fan who has kindly prepaid a gift certificate for some tea for you today!!

I will match this so you now have $50 – choose away, sipping girl.”

To all those people who say the internet is a cold and impersonal and inauthentic, I say screw you. I know better.

Whoever you are, thank you. I am now crying like a big, fat loser.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 28, 2008 in Personal - 17 Comments
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Push button publishing is cool. Everybody’s little home business can say its piece. We can discover levels of genius to which we would never have been exposed without the internet. Everybody has a voice.

But there’s a problem with everybody having a voice. Everybody has a voice.

Online productivity experts suggest that when you are overwhelmed by stuff, you should cut out time suckers. For me, the time sucker was reading the fifty million blogs I had in my reader. So for a while, I wasn’t very active on blogs. (Side note: For naysayers, in the few days since I’ve gotten back involved, I’ve gained about 90 subscribers. Just FYI.)

Anyway, now I’m back into blogging and snooping and reading comments, and I’ve been re-shocked by the stupidity of some of the things I read on the internet. Blog posts, comments, tweets — man, people are mighty dumb sometimes.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 28, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 39 Comments
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So, you’ve been hearing about Twitter and wondering what the big fuss is about. Am I right? You read the right blogs and all of these important and successful people are talking about how damn amazing it is, and you just don’t get how it will help your home business.

Well, here is the official IttyBiz synopsis:

I officially got onto twitter in January with a tweet that read:

“Figuring out how the fuck to use this thing.”

This was followed two days later with:

“Still don’t get it. I’ll follow Maki. He gets it. Or he fakes it well.”

Not an auspicious beginning. I then spent a few half hearted weeks sitting around going, “I don’t get it”. Then I did nothing for a while. What got me to finally check it out was a combination of two things. One, Michael Martine (@remarkablogger) blogged about it. I have it on good authority that Michael is: a.) above the age of 17, b.) a very busy person who is unlikely to promote MySp***-like uselessness on his blog.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 27, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 22 Comments
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Generally speaking, I’m a fairly relaxed parent. (It’s easy to be relaxed when you let them do whatever they want and make your husband be the bad guy all the time. He’s not the one running the home business, goddammit.) If my kids don’t want to eat, that’s fine. If they don’t want to put pants on, no big deal. Read, don’t read, I don’t really mind.

Today, however, I am ready to trade my youngest for a year’s worth of hosting and two packs of Marlboro Lights.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 26, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 66 Comments
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I’d like to give you a few updates, the first of which is a little story about my friend Lisa Wynn. That’s her over there on the left. We met via the Intertoobs when we were both sponsors for the Problogger birthday giveaway. She is generally awesome, and the prettiest and funniest person I have ever known. (Having said that, I’m not absolutely certain about why we’re still friends.)

Lisa makes custom tea (flavors include the “My mother-in-law is coming” blend, the “Pass my fat pants” blend, and the “My boss sucks” blend), and she runs a PR business, and she’s a VP of PR for somewhere large and impressive, and she’s the single mother of three teenagers. Oh, and she runs another home business called Hell on Heelz, which is a place for cool chicks in business women to hang out and bitch and learn. Basically, she makes normal women want to shoot themselves.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 25, 2008 in Personal - 35 Comments
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I’m going to try very hard not to swear too much in this post, I promise. Well, I promise to try, anyway.

I read an interesting article on Blogging Without A Blog, called Blog Loses Massive Traffic Due To Profanity. (Thanks, Nez, for the pointer to this post.) It showcases a fictionalized letter to a fictional blogger from a university, saying that because of the use of profanity on a blog, the university would be blocking access to the site. In the writer’s response, she says “a seven year old could be reading your blog…. it could be your own child, or grandchild.” One of the points made, both in the post itself and in the comments section, is that many bloggers would not want universities, schools, or parents blocking a blog from their computer.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 21, 2008 in Home Based Business - 41 Comments
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Oh. Wait. Never mind. I write a site for home and micro business owners, too.

Anyway, every now and again, I like to introduce a new or small blogger to the big wide world of IttyBiz readers. (While I am not paid to do this, I do accept offers of free babysitting.) Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Crystal.

Crystal, even though she knew how I felt about free themes, had the balls to get in touch with me anyway. (Although her free theme is not ugly — it’s one of the nicer Brian Gardner ones.) Considering some of the absolutely asinine requests we get here at IttyBiz HQ, I figured that Crystal’s completely non-asinine site deserved a look.

“This site is for the 20 million American business owners running the smallest shops on the smallest budgets. Most of us don’t last three years, but we’re all doing our best to get something started and keep it profitable.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 20, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 10 Comments
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Oh my God, WHY do I not read my trackbacks more often? WHY?

Please go and read the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher. I promise you, nothing you are doing right now is as important as this. If IttyBiz is your home business blog of choice, select it as your rehashed blog of choice. When you’ve seen what divine comedy this bad boy spits out, click “discuss” to witness James Chartrand getting all Angry French Dude in the comments.

Seriously, go.

***

Want a small business marketing consultant of your very own? Click here to get started.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 20, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 19 Comments
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Have you ever been in a restaurant and overheard a customer telling some poor waitress that, because of her poor service or the evening’s bad food, they were losing a loyal customer?

“They may never give us money. We may never ask them to. But we want something from them, and that makes them our customers.

The people you want to subscribe to your feed? Customers. The people you want to link to you? Customers. The people you want to enroll in your affiliate program? Customers.”

(Yes, I’m quoting myself, but I wrote this in October and nobody read it the first time.)

It would appear that there has been home business blogosphere drama surrounding the issue of spec work. (Raise your hand if you’re surprised.) For the uninitiated, here’s the scoop.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 19, 2008 in Home Based Business - 36 Comments
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