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

“Big pootang”
I have a feeling that IttyBiz was somewhat of a disappointment for this particular reader, don’t you?

Where they ended up:
Go Big Or Suck: A Guide To Being Unforgettable

“Breasts like mangoes”
If you knew me in person, you’d know exactly how disappointed this poor bastard was.

Where they ended up:
Duct-Taped Breasts, Hairy Mangoes, and New Kids On The Block

“Cattle branding kids”
What the fuck was this person searching for? Yes, we all think of doing it, but who searches for it in Google?

Where they ended up:
Brand Vs. Image: What’s The Difference, Anyway?

“Does my ass look good in a thong?”
Honey, if you’re asking, the answer ain’t yes.

Where they ended up:
Bikini Vs. Thong: My Response To The Challenge

“Had to pee in the sink desperate”
Has Google become a confessional? Is it no longer for searching but for admitting stuff? Is it just one big ass PostSecret?

Where they ended up:
Moral of the Story: Violent Snuggling Edition

“Im brand new at my job and i fucken get the flu”
See previous entry. Um, sorry?

Where they ended up:
What To Do When You Hate Your Job

“Morals in marketing”
Honey, there are no morals in marketing.

Where they ended up:
Moral of the Story: Marketing to Alcoholics Edition

“How can I be the ultimate starfucker?”
Somebody, there is an ebook begging to be written here.

Where they ended up:
The 6 Types Of Blog Commentors — Do You Know Them?

“What does Gen Y eat for breakfast?”
Gen X, baby. Gen X.

Where they ended up:
Penelope Trunk Says I Am Older Than My Mother

“Women Painted To Look Like Tigers”
I liked this one so much I Googled it myself. Not nearly as interesting as you’d think.

Where they ended up:
What Tiger Woods Can Teach You About Marketing

Now for the lesson. Seriously, this is important.

Somebody reached my blog using this search term:

“How do I know my mummy and daddy love eachother?”

All joking aside, some poor kid out there is up in his room, searching for this in Google. Remember this when you’re bitching at your spouse for not cleaning up the toothpaste. Do you want that to be your kid?

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Mar 29, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 44 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.

(Obviously also thank you to Lisa, but she was probably just sucking up to me because one day I’ll be almost as famous as her.)

To all of my home business readers — every day, you delight me.

Your comments and your hate mail and your fan mail and your Tweets and your blog posts make this whole work-from-home lunacy the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. (Parenthood is great and all, but I don’t have to toilet train any of you. Or pay for your college. Wait. Did I just publicly commit to paying for my kids’ college? Damn.)

I am very, very grateful for all of you.

Photo credit: Perago89

***

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***

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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.

Seriously. What the hell are these people thinking?

What seems to get forgotten by 79% of the people on the Internet is that it doesn’t go away. It is completely public, uncontrollable, and it exists forever.

You will be on Google forever. Forever, forever, forever.

You can delete your own blog, but you can’t control who’s already seen it. But other people’s comments? Forum posts? Even emails? They. Do. Not. Go. Away.

People forgive. They don’t forget.

I’ve seen comments lately, both in my own comments section and in the comments sections of other blogs, that make me cringe to read them. Are these people going to be happy with themselves when the hangover has worn off?

Here’s the thing. You are entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to broadcast your opinion. You are not entitled to control what other people think about it. And that’s the problem.

Here are some ideas:

Do not comment when drunk. Do not blog when drunk. Do not tweet when drunk. Keep in mind, you can be a little silly and tipsy, but if you’re a snarky drunk or an angry drunk or a maudlin drunk or a stupid drunk — and let’s face it, most of us can be described as at least one of these — get yourself a bottle of water and walk away.

If you have a personality disorder that causes you to have major mood swings (like, say, I do) do not comment when you’re in a bad mood. You won’t think the same way later, and you’ll either feel or look like a jackass. Bookmark and come back if you have to.

If you don’t know all the facts, put the laptop down, Tolstoy. How many times have you read a nasty snarky comment and then read the backpedal later that says, “Oh. I didn’t realize that.”? Do you want to be that person?

If it’s none of your business, shut up.

If you’re commenting as a marketing strategy, don’t comment when your blog sucks. If you’ve been posting things lately that are highly off topic, you haven’t posted in six months, or your last four posts have been shitty link posts, you will be wasting a first impression. You don’t have to wait for perfection, but at least wait for mediocrity.

Remember when somebody told you — and somebody ALWAYS tells you — that if you wouldn’t want it printed in the newspaper, you shouldn’t put it in an email? Emails are generally read by one person. Blog comments can be read by thousands.

Do not turn somebody else’s comments into the All About Joe Show. How many times have I read something on Problogger that talks about, say, Adsense, and some genius with 8 subscribers comes on and takes four paragraphs to talk about, “Well, in my blog, I’ve experienced…”? If the blogger is asking for your input or your experience, awesome. Leo Babauta does this a lot. Darren Rowse does it sometimes too. If you’re do talk about your own experience, make it relevant. If you respond personally to every comment — all three of them — don’t go around flaming Dooce for not responding to each and every one of hers. Apples and oranges, dude.

If all else fails, qualify. Say it’s a rant. Say you’re in a bad mood. Say you didn’t take your happy pills today. Whatever. Just don’t leave it alone and bitch.

Finally, keep in mind that the internet is not all about you. In the vast majority of cases, nobody cares what you think. Feel free to say it anyway, but be aware that nobody wrote a blog post because they wanted your specific input. You are not God. And even if you were God, you don’t hear Him talking shit in the comments, do you?

***Conclusion: I’m not trying to turn people off commenting. I love comments. The blogosphere would be a very different, and in my opinion inferior, place without active comments. I’m just trying to say that people get opinions of you based on what you write online, and those opinions are hard to change.***

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***

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By Naomi Dunford - Mar 28, 2008 in Home Business Marketing - 38 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.

(See how I blocked that word out? Remember when I said that a certain occasion would be the first, last, and only time I would use that word on my blog? All about keeping the promises.)

Two, James Chartrand (@menwithpens) is addicted. I wanted to go on and prove that I was better than him and was not likely to get addicted to some stupid online app.

Guess what, folks? I’m addicted. I’m not too proud to admit it. I’m a big girl.

So here’s the deal, as far as I can tell.

1. Twitter is fun.

However, Twitter is only fun when there is stuff going on around you. If you are only following four people, there’s just only so much going on. They’re all having conversations with people you don’t know, and you’re only reading their end. Not exactly my favorite way to spend a Saturday night.

Takeaway point: Follow lots of people, and hang out on Twitter when they are hanging out on Twitter. There are times when it’s awesome and dynamic and like a big party with only the people you like in attendance. There are times when it’s like sitting in a room where a party was recently held but the attendees have passed out on the floor. Avoid the latter, cultivate the former.

2. Twitter is pretty good marketing.

However, Twitter is only pretty good marketing in the same way that any offline networking event is pretty good marketing. You meet people. Some of them are cooler than you. Some of them are less cool than you. Some of them might eventually want whatever wares you’re hawking. Some of them won’t. Some of them will read your blog. Some of them won’t. But it gets you on the radar and it gets you in a situation in which you and they are hanging out in an unstructured and fun environment. Blogging ain’t exactly formal either, but compared to Twitter, blogging is the goddamn coronation.

Takeaway point: Be yourself, and don’t be slimy. If they like you, awesome — it’s one more person you don’t have to bust your ass at impressing later. If they hate you, they were going to hate you anyway. Might as well get the hate-and-be-hated thing out of the way sooner, oui?

3. Twitter is like crack.

If you do not find this to be true, you’re not following the right people.

If you would like to follow me on Twitter, my ID is IttyBiz. You should. Then I’ll feel cool and popular.

***

In other news, it has come to my attention that some people’s comments are not getting picked up and are ending up in Akismet. This is scary, because when I went to check, there were 26 comments currently in Akismet, four of which were valid comments from people I already knew. Before that, there were over 1500 comments which had already been deleted. God knows who they were from.

If you’re commenting and it’s not showing up right away, please, please, please send me an email at naomi@ittybiz.com or submit something using my contact form. Thank you. I appreciate it.

***

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***

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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.

Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 26, 2008 in Home Business Marketing - 64 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.

Anyway, there’s a point to all of this sucking up. Unfortunately, I lost the baby in a late miscarriage. The powers that be suggest it had something to do with running a fever for approximately 700 days straight. I had to go in for surgery last week, and it generally sucked.

The outpouring of support I received from those in the know has been phenomenal, and I’ve been very grateful. There came a time, though, when I didn’t know what to say in response to all of the supernice things people were saying, and I was starting to feel like a bitch because I was just responding by rote. Lisa, who is probably psychic in addition to everything else, ascertained that I was okay, and then sent me this email:

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry! When can you drink again? More importantly, when can you have sex again?”

Sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to hear. In answer to your questions, Lisa, now, and next Wednesday, respectively.

***

In other news, Chris Cagle, my web designer and honorary member of the IttyBiz family, has added to his family. Little — or not so little, depending on your point of view — Alexander Cagle is the newest addition to the clan. Best wishes to him, his 18-month-old daughter Elise, and most importantly his wife Krista. She managed to give birth to a nine pound baby, God bless her. We have no time for nine pound babies in this house, so I’m glad somebody does. Congratulations, Cagle family! If you need a website done, check him out. Babies ain’t cheap, y’all.

***

Clay Collins of soon-to-be The Growing Life fame has been kicking some serious ass lately, and the newest addition to his repertoire is a guest post on writing and research on my blog crush’s newest baby, Write To Done. You’ll notice that I have not written a guest post for the aforementioned blog crush, but I suppose I haven’t asked either. Rock on Clay — please, go check it out if you’re the writing or blogging type.

***

Lastly, the comments on Friday’s post about swearing have been pretty awesome. I’ve been hiding out at my in-laws house, drinking wine and eating free turkey that I didn’t have to cook. (Everybody knows that the best kind of turkey is the free and cooked by someone else kind.) I would have loved to respond to each comment individually but a four-day-weekend put the stops to that. Therefore, if you’re interested, head on over and check out the comments that are in many cases, better than the post.

***

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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.

This comes very recently after one of my regular commentators told me that there were many times when she considered unsubscribing from IttyBiz, partly due to the swearing. I thought I’d take on that issue.

I wish I could say that I’ve put a lot of thought into the swearing on IttyBiz issue, but frankly, I haven’t. I briefly thought about keeping the swearing out, if only because my mother-in-law reads this, and decided against it. I realized that it is my home business blog, and I’ll say what I want to. I try not to put swear words in header text, in case someone’s kid or boss is looking over their shoulder, but other than that, I pretty much don’t think about it.

I have a couple of thoughts here. One, if someone wants to unsubscribe or block access to your blog because of its content — regardless of their criteria for doing so — you cannot stop them and you shouldn’t try. You’ll never please everybody. My readers are adults, my target market is adults, and I would seriously wonder about how a seven year old found themselves here. If I ran a site on something more interesting to young children, well, that would be different. When I launch my Bible reading blog for teens (something that I have seriously considered, by the way) I won’t exactly be running around yelling “motherfucker” hither and thither.

Secondly, and I’m not going to even go into my theories on censorship because we’d all be here for a very long time, I would consider it fairly hypocritical for a university to block access to a website that contains swear words but not literature that contains the same. That particular breed of intellectual snobbery — if it’s in print, it’s okay, but if it’s online, it’s smut — is something I have no time for. It’s rife within many echelons of the academic community, and I don’t think one should change oneself to suit their whims.

Lastly, when deciding whether or not to swear on your blog or in your novel or as a part of your doctoral thesis, you need to understand your purpose. I was reading a review of a Louise Bagshawe novel (British chick lit writer in the sex and shopping genre) written by a 13 year old girl. She was saying that she liked the sex scenes in this particular book because they weren’t as repetitive as the ones in other similar works. I am not going to put detailed descriptions of sex acts in my blog because it’s not appropriate. I think it’s perfectly appropriate within the context of a book like that one.

If Louise Bagshawe took the sex out of her books because young people might be reading them, she wouldn’t have books anymore, and she would lose a tremendous portion of the readers she already has. Losing 80% of your readers for the possibility of getting 10% more is nor a smart business decision. Perhaps, if the parents of 13-year-olds don’t want them reading sex scenes, they should take a smidgen of responsibility for what their children are reading.

My blog has two purposes. One, I want to provide a gathering place for like-minded people. If certain people who find themselves at my blog are offended by its content, we are not like-minded. It’s not their fault, but it’s not mine either.

Two, I want to get clients who are not pains in the ass. I swear on the phone and I swear over email and I swear in my blog and I swear in person. People who don’t mind that sometimes become clients, which is cool. We end up having a pleasant and relaxed working relationship, and nobody is under any illusions. One of the reasons I work in my own company is because I have a hard time following certain rules. If I make the expectations clear from the get go, my life is a lot simpler and a lot happier. That’s my decision, but it doesn’t have to be yours.

Many of my customers have expressed concerns about alienating portions of their potential readership by incorporating certain types of content. Politics, religion, and abortion seem to be hot topics of concern, as is swearing. Personally — and it can only be a personal decision, there is no hard and fast answer — I think that deliberate censorship of matters that are important to you as an individual is not an effective long-term strategy.

If you’re adamantly pro-choice or pro-life, if you love or hate Bush with a passion, or if you don’t want readers who can’t accept that you are a born-again Christian, you may as well say so. Figuring out what you can say to whom, when you can say it, and where it is or isn’t appropriate is exhausting enough — you may as well not bring the internal conflict to your own blog.

Rated R is rated R. It is what it is. Some people are going to be offended by Pulp Fiction or Trainspotting and some people are going to find them wonderful. If you are offended, or if you have particularly precocious children with the tendency to raid your DVD collection while you’re not in the room, you probably shouldn’t buy them. Otherwise, you might want to. It’s not rocket science.

I liked Barbara’s post, because it did provide me with something to think about, something that is sadly missing in a lot of blog posts these days. After thinking, I retained the conclusion I had before, but good for her for putting it out there.

***

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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.

Many of you are like me, flying solo with only one pair of hands to do all the work. Others have two or ten people to help out, but we’re all working with the same limitation: we don’t have deep corporate pockets when it comes to starting up, branching out, or moving forward.

And really—though it would be mighty fine—we don’t need the big money. There are loads of free and affordable tools and services to keep us rolling with the agility that big businesses envy. There are books and websites aplenty on how to leverage our size to get what we want.

Loads. Aplenty. Mountains of stuff, really. More than you have time to read about…

Really.

So I’ve assigned myself the task of sifting through it all and bringing you the best bits. I’ll tell you what works for me, what works for others, and what simply doesn’t work.”

Big Bright Bulb is worth a look, especially for those just starting out on their IttyBiz path. Some starters:

No logo? Find one at the morgue

How Small Is Small

Dismissing The Doubts That Derail You - Bonus points for this paragraph: “Other times it’s other people’s doubts that knock me off course: “Do people actually read that?” “What’s your backup plan for when this blog thing doesn’t work out?” Lovely.”

Anyway, head on over to her site (especially her cool stuff about microconsulting) and check her out. (Well, don’t literally check her out. There’s no photo anyway, so you couldn’t even if you wanted to, you dirty dog, you.)

Click here to subscribe to IttyBiz.

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Mar 20, 2008 in Entrepreneurship - 9 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.

***

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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.

Jonathan Fields, writer of Awake at the Wheel, has scored a well-deserved book contract from Random House and decided that he would like to hold a contest for the cover design. Nice, oui?

Skellie mentioned the contest on Freelance Switch and hysteria ensued. As usual, Freelance Switch commentators had a field day and basically lost their shit. Here’s a sampling:

* What the f*** is this? FSw asking for spec work, even defending it? For me, this could be the end of this site.

* Fsw - you just lost another loyal follower.

The last one was perhaps my favorite. I’m sure the folks at FSw are just weeping over the loss of that loyal follower.

Nothing says loyal like bailing at the first sign of a disagreement.

Here’s a little secret about business and blogging. You have to fuck up really, really, really badly before you’ll lose a loyal customer or reader. You’ll lose lots of disloyal and neutral and ambivalent ones — it’s the nature of the beast — but loyal ones don’t leave because they didn’t like one post.

Click here to subscribe to IttyBiz.

***

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