When you’re first starting out on your home business journey, you’re generally a.) excited, b.) scared shitless, or c.) both. The fear generally comes from the fact that you have no clients and no money and the possibility of sleeping in a cardboard box seems quite likely.

Home business growth traditionally comes verrrrrrrrrrry, verrrrrrrrrrry slowly and then at some tipping point explodes to the point of ridiculousness. (Just ask the charming gentlemen who hang out at Men With Pens.) If you’re in the beginning phases, though, it seems like the tipping point is either so far into the future that you can’t see it or completely impossible.

This growth explosion usually comes by word of mouth. Word of mouth is awesome, but you have to have a few mouths going before you can benefit from it. There are a bunch of ways you can do this, but today we’ll tackle barter.

(EDITED: After I wrote this but before I posted it, the lovely Tei wrote on bartering at Barter: It’s What’s For Dinner. When I saw this in my feedreader I told myself I really should go back and read it before posting this piece. Then I forgot and now I look like Miss Copy Pants. Sorry, Tei. I suck.)

What is bartering?

Bartering is trading services or products for other services or products, bypassing filthy lucre altogether. I “sell” you marketing in exchange for unlimited access to your porn collection, for example.

Why bartering is cool for your home business

People, especially broke ones, are much happier to trade services than pay you money that could be used for exciting things like groceries and electricity. You show them your stuff and get on their radar and they can whore you out to all their — hopefully less broke — friends.

It works the other way as well. If you are dirt ass poor but need a website, you might be able to swindle someone into doing your website in exchange for your services instead of your money. You both get stuff you want but nobody pays a dime.

How do I get the barter party started?

There are two main types of bartering:

Interpersonal bartering is when two people or home businesses trade products or services, generally services. You do graphics, I do copywriting, we trade. Easy peasy.

Network bartering is a much more formalized process. Somebody somewhere starts a network of businesses and they create a fake cash system. I do copywriting for the guy who cleans pools. I charge him $200 fake dollars and get that fake money in my account. His account is debited $200 fake dollars, meaning he has to clean $200 worth of pools for other people in the network. These pools do not have to be mine.

This is a pretty insanely complicated process at the back end and I wouldn’t recommend starting your own network, but it’s easy to join one that already exists and hang up your little shingle.

Is it legal?

Each state/province/country has its own rules about bartering and taxes. If you care about this sort of thing then you’re likely the type of person who has an accountant. Ask him or her. If you don’t care about this sort of thing then I strongly recommend you ask nobody, your accountant or otherwise.

I’m not going to get into the ethics of cheating on your taxes because I am morally vacant. If YOU have thoughts, please post them and I promise I won’t argue.

So if bartering is so cool, why aren’t we all doing it?

Bartering is good for those just starting out. When you’re new, you don’t have anything better to do anyway. You need the work or the portfolio or the references. Once you reach a certain point in your career you don’t have a whole lot of time to work in exchange for a free haircut and some nice words from Jenni down at Jenni’s Custom Clippery.

Bartering is good for the socially aware. If you want to do a favour for someone, bartering can be a nice way to go.

Bartering is good for those who want to stick it to the man. Some people, some home businesses, (hell, some societies) exist on barter alone. If you don’t feel like making a bunch of money just so you can turn around and pay taxes to a government you don’t support, bartering is a handy way to get around that.

Bartering is good when you can’t afford stuff. When you can afford it, it’s a lot simpler to just write a check.

Bartering is good when you like what you’re getting. DO NOT get sucked into crappy barter arrangements for things you don’t like, need, or want. You will get screwed and end up totally resentful.

Bartering is good when everybody’s equal. If I charge $100 an hour and you charge $100 an hour, each hour is equal. If I charge $100 an hour and you charge $10 an hour, the hours are not equal anymore. Two hours of graphic design does not have the same market value as two hours of babysitting. The closer you can work it to resemble cash, the happier everybody will be.

Well, except the $10 an hour guy. He’s going to feel screwed but that’s what he gets for working in a $10 an hour industry.

How to score barter clients

Tell people you do it. The internet is big and the economy is down. Add it to your services page, preferably at the end. Tweet it. Tell your friends.

But won’t everybody go for barter instead of cash?

No. Why? First of all, not everybody’s as broke as you are. Second, some people don’t dig equality in client/provider relationships. Sometimes I just want to pay you to do it and never talk to you again. Barter is not conducive to that. Last, many clients can’t work with you for whatever reason. If you don’t work online it doesn’t matter how good my social media marketing strategy is for you — you can’t use it so I’m just gonna have to pay cash..

So should you be bartering your micro-business?

Generally speaking, barter only when you can’t get cash and when the product and service for which you’re trading has value for you. (How to figure out if it has value: If you have to think about it, the answer is no.) Barter can’t pay your rent but it might have a hand in paying your future rent.

I’m curious to hear your experiences in bartering? Have you done it? Have you been happy with the results? Are you doing it now? Speak! Let your voice be heard.

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 30, 2008 in Home Based Business - 32 Comments
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So I’m in a sex shop today, because that’s the kind of thing I do on a Tuesday morning. (And they ask me why I run a home business.)

It’s fairly new, and it’s one of those women’s only deals that markets nice things, not sleazy things. Body balms, belly dancing costumes, very lovey dovey. It’s a good idea, and from what I can tell, business is going gangbusters. (Do things “go gangbusters” or do they “do gangbusters”? Is “gangbusters” really a word I should be using when discussing sex shops?)

So I go in and it’s all pink lighting and nice displays and there is a zero sleaze factor. There’s even a sign on the door that says, very politely, that they don’t sell novelty items so don’t even ask. Everything is going well. My could-be shopping experience is all good.

There is a charming little dog that comes up and sniffs my shoes and then goes back to biting his chew toy. There is a woman behind the counter talking to someone on the phone. The person she’s speaking to appears to be her girlfriend. She says “fuck” a lot, but in a nice way, like I do.

By all accounts, this is the kind of a place I wouldn’t mind shopping.

So I head over to the books, the DVDs, the massage oils. There are even locally made massage balms that come in 100% post-consumer recycled tins. What more can you want in a sex shop? I mean, really!

I pick up a set of three of these little balms, very much like the Body Butters that you buy at the Body Shop. These things are so classy I would give them to my mother-in-law in her Christmas stocking. They’re beautiful. They have little testers that smell heavenly. I’m a little bit in love. I turn over the tin to see the price, bracing myself for something I imagine will be terrifying.

Oh, it’s terrifying alright. There’s no price.

Hmm. Weird. I look at the other ones. No price. No price, no price, no price. No price on the movies, no price on the books, no price on the belly dancing bindi things. There’s a sign that says clothes and candles are 50% off, but 50% off what, we’ll never know.

Everybody’s heard the term, “If you have to ask, it’s too expensive.” This is true when it comes to high-end call girls and Lamborghini’s, but I don’t think it should be true in retail stores located between a teapot shop and a dog groomer. We’re not exactly on Saville Row here, people.

Here’s a little lesson for sex shops everywhere:

“How much for the pink vibrator?” is not a question anyone ever wants to have to ask.

I’ve said it a trillion times before, and I’ll keep saying it until I’m dead.

Eliminate barriers to purchase.

Making me say “vibrator” in front of my toddler constitutes a barrier to purchase. If I feel uncomfortable, I’m going to leave. If I’m going to leave, I’m not going to buy. Bottom line.

Lesson for everyone who does NOT run a sex shop: Have someone impartial and inexperienced check your sales process for barriers. Have them try to buy something from your online store. Have them try out the Contact form on your website. Listen to what they say. You might be surprised.

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Image: preciouskhyatt (NSFW.)

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 29, 2008 in Home Business Marketing - 75 Comments
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IttyBiz has been awful busy lately, and I figured I’d give y’all an update on what’s going down at the home business HQ.

IttyBiz and Brazen Careerist Get Together To Make Sweet, Sweet Love

Brazen Careerist is:

“We’re an online career center aimed at Generation Y — young professionals who want to design and define their careers using the new rules for success.

“The Brazen Careerist network is made up of a vibrant, curious and ambitious group of career-minded bloggers, passionately covering a variety of fields: personal development, entrepreneurship, public relations, technology, marketing, and politics, each blog offers a unique, informed perspective to our ever-expanding audience.”

They’ve included me in that network of bloggers, which is damn nice of them, wouldn’t you say?

IttyBiz and Alltop Get Together To Make Equally Sweet, Sweet Love

Moving on to the lovely folks at Alltop:

Guy Kawasaki, general internet dude extraordinaire, created Alltop as a place to go to get all the top stuff in one place. You dig Mommy blogs? Daddy blogs? Humor? Religion? Wine? Books? Social media? It’s all there, all on one page.

“We import the stories of the top news websites and blogs for any given topic and display the headlines of the five most recent stories.”

The cool kids are saying that Alltop will help non-RSS people start reading blogs regularly. This is, shall we say, highly cool.

Anyway, they say I’m good enough to hang out with Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, Seth’s Blog, and Copyblogger, among other cool people and websites in the Small Biz category. Yay!

I Never Said It Was A Meme

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that what follows is even snarkier than my usual fare. This is what happens when I try to be funny. Sorry if it sounds bitchy. I’m just playing, y’all.

Certain readers of this blog have accused me of starting a meme with the What’s Your Small Business? post. I would like a chance to defend myself against such a grievous and public attack.

(For the uninitiated: A meme is when a blogger creates a post with the intention that it goes Viral Lite and gets them incoming links. They pose a question or challenge, and generally tag several people to answer it on their blog, linking back to the original post. A popular meme that goes around a lot tells the reader to grab the nearest book, open it to a predetermined page and post a predetermined sentence or word from that book.)

Memes, while allegedly fun, don’t help your business. What’s Your Small Business? does. Therein lies the subtle but important difference.

Contribute! Participate! It’s fun. It opens the conversation with your homeboys. It might get you business. It will get you a PR 4 link from IttyBiz, not that you’re so shallow to care about that sort of thing.

You don’t have to link back to me, although it’s nice when you do. In fact, you don’t even need to participate.

You can die in obscurity for all I care.

Anyway, that’s all folks. I’m going to go do weekend things with my family. (By weekend things I mean tie Jack to a keyboard and whip him until he comes out with legible web copy.)

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 24, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 57 Comments
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This is a guest post from Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain. It takes a brave man to tackle a Moral of the Story post. I told him I’d post this last Tuesday. You’ll notice I am a little late. This is because I am a deeply flawed human being. Thanks for your patience, Mark.

“You canna change the laws of physics, Captain!” I don’t know if Mr. Scott actually said that classic phrase in a Star Trek movie or episode, but I learned that lesson very well during one of my summer jobs. It was a messy, embarrassing, humbling experience. Since this is IttyBiz, and Naomi slipped away for a few minutes, I’m going to share this story with you. Because that’s what IttyBiz is about — embarrassingly personal stories that (should) teach someone a lesson! Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Apr 24, 2008 in Moral of the Story - 8 Comments
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“So what do you actually do for a living?”

This question came to me in an email from somebody I know. I clicked ‘reply’ and was all set to type out an answer when something very disturbing occurred to me. This person reads my blog.

Not just casual reading. Not just you-say-you-read-it-but-I-call-bullshit. The person who wrote this email has commented frequently and we’ve shared emails back and forth on several occasions. I would have thought they would have known.

I took a moment to get all up in arms about how they haven’t been paying attention. Then I got over it. If they don’t know what I do for a living, it’s not exactly their fault, is it?

How many of your readers don’t know about your home business?

I got to thinking… how many of your readers don’t know about your home business? How many knew one time 8 months ago when they read your About page but have promptly forgotten? How many of them have room on their credit cards? How many of them know people who could use your products or services? How many of them would fall over their own feet to recommend you but don’t have a damn clue what you really do?

Scary stuff, y’all.

So here’s the game. Take these questions, and your answers, to your own blog. Let the people know what you do when you’re not blogging. They might comment, they might buy, they might be bored into a trance-like state. Doesn’t matter. They’ll know.

The people want to know.

This does not only apply to home business blogs. Let’s face it, if you read Men with Pens and you don’t know what they do for a living you’re probably doing so with the monitor off.

This is for people who are just starting their home business or haven’t started it yet but need to build some anticipation or those who blog in a completely different area than their field of work. This is for people who just got some new readers from a nice link and the new readers don’t know them yet. This is for people who don’t yet have a home business but want to get to know their readers a little better.

It also could be for people who don’t have a damn clue what they’re going to write about tomorrow.

Here are the interview questions. There are no swear words in them so you’re free to cut and paste.

What’s your game? What do you do?

What’s next for you? What’s the big plan?

I’ll compile a list of everybody’s links so if you have readers who might want to get in, let ‘em know.

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 22, 2008 in Home Based Business - 61 Comments
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Those of you who have been following along on Twitter will know that I got it into my head that with my newfound riches I should get myself an office. Like, the kind that isn’t in my house.

I’m not altogether sure what possessed me to do this — OK, I’m totally sure, I was just trying to get away from my toddler but didn’t want to admit that to several thousand strangers. Whoops! — but I’m doing it and my home business is collapsing around my stubbly ankles.

I kind of thought it would be like picking up my laptop and getting on the bus and buying a soy latte and plugging in my laptop in a separate location and WHAMMO! I’m an office dweller. Well, not so much.

The point is, I’ve totally bailed on y’all the last few days and frankly, that will probably continue for a few more while I grovel and beg for forgiveness from those of you who are actually paying me and not just hanging out in my comments for free.

In the meantime, go read somebody else’s stuff. I have a feeling this article will change lives. It’s long. Don’t skim.

Back soon!

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 22, 2008 in Home Business Psychology - 8 Comments
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OK, you have to stay with me on this one. I will get around to relating this to home business, I promise, but it’s going to take me a while. So go grab yourself a coffee or a Crown & Coke or whatever because here we go.

The other day I was talking to a very good friend and she said something to me that really got under my skin. She and her boyfriend are looking to buy their first house, and a couple of weeks ago they found perfection — love at first sight. They put in an offer and held their breath. This weekend they just found out that their offer was refused and the owner had sold the house to another couple.

Naturally, she was disappointed. But what really seemed to annoy me was just how much it seemed to get her down. After all, at least she had someone she loved, they both have great jobs and good health, and at least they’re in the position to buy.

I was feeling jealous because Naomi and I would like to buy a house but can’t right now.

I was feeling petty and believing that any problems Naomi and I had were much more serious than just not getting the house we wanted. After all, there are plenty of houses out there and my friend just needs to keep looking. I didn’t like that I was feeling this way so I started thinking about it. I came up with a theory.

The Re-Calibrating Happiness Scale Theory

Most of us believe that events come along with their own preset happiness quotient. If viewed objectively, most of us can rate a list of events in order of the amount of happiness they would bring the average person. Good is good, bad is bad, that sort of thing.

Let’s say I gave you three events and asked you to rate them in order of least-happiness-inducing to most-happiness-inducing — 1 being the lowest and 3 being the highest. If those three events were a funeral, getting a new job, and your own marriage, most people would rank these 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

This is all well and good, but when it comes to our own lives, we can’t be objective.

If we all have a happiness scale of -10 to 10, my -10 is not going to be the same as your -10, and your 10 is not going to be the same as my 10.

My friend is in a different stage of her life than I am. What she expects to get from her life is different from what I expect to get from my life. This is why not getting her house is a -10 on her scale — she expects that she should be able to buy a house based on where she is in her life. I can’t relate because putting an offer on house is so far beyond my scale right now, and therefore I have no expectations about it.

When I thought about it a little further, I realized that not only is my scale different from my friend’s scale, but my scale is different from my own scale of even a few months ago.

Because my life is changing, my scale is being re-calibrated based on my new circumstances and the new expectations that arise from those circumstances.

OK, we’re almost to the part where I relate this to your own home business.

In a previous life, I worked at a job where I had to deal with a lot of red tape. This used to really piss me off, especially when I kept seeing commercials for my company on TV talking about our wonderful customer service.

A -10 day at work for me was any day where my interactions with a client were hampered by red tape. Then Naomi came up with the brilliance which is IttyBiz and I quit to work with her. One of the things I clung to was with our own business, we make the decisions. No more red tape.

When I did that, my expectations about my new job role changed. I no longer expected to have to deal with red tape, and at that moment my happiness scale re-calibrated. My old concept of -10 was deleted. But while the events on your scale may change, the scale itself never does.

The scale doesn’t change.

You always have to have a -10 and a +10 and they always feel the same. You feel just as frustrated or elated at -10 or +10, only the events and your own expectations have changed.

A few months ago I was getting disappointed with working from home because it felt like it hadn’t made me any happier. I was thinking about going back to work. Guess where I was going to apply first? You got it, my old red-tape job. Naomi was able to remind me of all the reasons I wanted to leave that job, and finally I realized that I did not want to go back. I was indeed happier working from home.

The moral of the story? Any given day can be a -10 or a +10 or even a 0 or a 3 or a -2. But…

Just because you’re having a -10 day doesn’t mean you’ve made a bad choice in your life.

Some days working from home will seem like the best decision you ever made. Some days you will wonder whatever possessed you to leave the security of a 9-5 job. Once you realize that you will always have days like this — no matter what you’re doing — it’s easier to look at your life as a whole and see that it’s not as bad as you might think.

The key is not “how do I feel today?”, but “how have I been feeling since I made a change in my life?”

The secondary moral of the story (can a story have more than one moral?) is to remember that everyone has a scale, and everyone feels their -10 or +10 just as intensely as you do. Just because I may wish I had my friend’s problem doesn’t mean she’s not deeply affected by it.

So what can you do to help keep some perspective?

One little thing I’ve found that works for me is to schedule the tasks I most enjoy doing for the end of my work day. I can have a pretty good day, but if the last hour is shit then I think I had a shitty day. Ending on a positive note can turn a bad day into a good one. (Charlie from Productive Flourishing made a similar point here.)

Secondly, keep a journal. Not a “I had tuna fish on rye but we ran out of light mayonnaise” journal, just a simple little journal of how things went. This helped me when I was thinking about rejoining the rat race.

I was able to go back and read about how badly some of those days at the old job made me feel. After time and changed expectations, those bad feelings lost their edge. When I realized that some days I felt as bad as I did today, I was able to remember that the old job wasn’t as great as nostalgia would have me believe.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, try to get rid of your expectations. I don’t really follow Buddhism but Naomi tells me this is like losing your attachments. If you don’t wake up each day expecting the day to turn out a certain way then you’re less likely to be disappointed.

Less disappointments mean more happiness.

I’m sure this is not groundbreaking stuff, and it may not even be all that original. But I was at a point in our home business where I was wondering if this was really for me, and what I came up with on my own helped me get through it. As always, if you have any thoughts on how to cope with indecision or unhappiness, please let me know, I’d love to hear them.

Photocredit: netsrot

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By Jamie Dunford - Apr 17, 2008 in Home Business Psychology - 33 Comments
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When I first started blogging — she says, like it was OH SO long ago — I encountered a young man in a niche similar to mine. He expressed an interest in networking with me but frankly, I had bigger fish to fry. I mean, the guy wasn’t even self-hosting, for God’s sake. (OK, let’s be honest. I was very busy trying to become Darren Rowse’s best friend. There. I said it. Can we move on?)

So I sent a cursory email back every time he shot one my way and left it at that. At some point, I ended up subscribed to his newsletter. When this happened, I thought he had put me on the list, although in hindsight I was drinking a lot back then and would’ve put myself on a Porno for Chemical Engineers mailing list and not remembered it in the morning.

I went to unsubscribe from the list and there was some kind of technical screw up. I figured I’d do the nice thing and email him to let him know. Because I’m nice like that. He writes me back in about four seconds saying something to the effect of, “Don’t you want to be on my list anymore, Naomi?” I felt so bad for this poor kid that I told him I was happy to remain on his list and made up some shitty excuse about clicking the wrong button.

Every week or so, I get an email. And every week or so I delete it, thinking I should stop being such a pussy and unsubscribe, for God’s sake. But I was terrified it would screw up again and necessitate another heart-and-dream-crushing email that I never bothered. The emails generally existed to notify his subscriber base that an article submission deadline for something or other was nearing.

Today I got another email. Once again I deleted it. Then I started getting more emails — lots of them — from complete strangers, all congratulating the original sender. (Somebody obviously clicked “reply all” and everybody afterwards followed suit.) When the count reached about ten, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Turns out, the sender of the email won an award I’d never heard of from a site I don’t visit.

Delete.

When the send count reached about 20, I figured there couldn’t be that many people in the world congratulating him over nothing, so I click on the link in the email.

At this point I’m frankly bored.

Blah blah blah. Scan scan scan. Until “…as the nice folks at Fast Company put it: “If you haven’t heard about … Schawbel, you will. Schawbel is a personal branding force of nature.”

To quote the great Jeff Foxworthy, in response to being told that one of his fans qualified for redneck status because he’d had his nipple bitten off by a beaver:

“You have my attention.”

Honey, when Fast Company is talking about you, you have my attention.

Moral of the Story: Watch Who You Snub.

I am about to write an email to Dan Schawbel to apologize for being an ass. He will probably forgive me because he knows the moral to this story already and doesn’t snub people for no good reason. I will ask if I can put an article in his magazine — oh yeah, apparently he has a magazine, another little tidbit I learned from the charming folks at FC — and hope that he’s OK with it.

While I’m crossing my fingers and getting drunk to soothe my shame, read the article and check out his personal branding blog. Maybe if I send him enough traffic it will help to assuage my guilt.

Like hearing how I’ve made an ass out of myself? Try these!

Moral of the Story: Topless Edition (with Photos!)
Moral of the Story: Violent Snuggling Edition
Moral of the Story: Marketing to Alcoholics Edition

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 16, 2008 in Moral of the Story - 29 Comments
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So I’m on Twitter today (are you following me on Twitter yet? Areyouareyouareyou?) and I get an email notifying me of a new follower. In many cases I just follow back, but I wouldn’t know this guy if I woke up in bed beside him, so I went to investigate.

He doesn’t know me, he just lives in my city and found me on one of the local apps. Anyway, his most recent tweet goes like this:

“Twitter isn’t a chat client. I don’t follow people with too many @ symbols. They don’t know what Twitter is really for.”

True enough. I had to unfollow one very prominent SEO chick for filling my entire page with chats smack in the middle of primetime. Not cool. OK, so I check him out a little further. (I am not, after all, a complete Twitter whore. I will follow a lot of people, but a gal’s gotta draw the line somewhere.)

Finished my exam. Heading home. about 6 hours ago

Home now. about 5 hours ago

Quick how-to lesson for you home business Twitter newbies out there: Don’t fucking do that.

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