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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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.) Read More

Today’s post is a guest post from Erin Atherton of DurtBagz. (You know it’s a guest post because she uses semicolons and we all know how I feel about semicolons.) Go check out her site. As you’re about to find out, it won’t be around for long.

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Five months ago, I launched my first home business; an online bag company called Durtbagz.com. Today, I’ve hardly sold 30 bagz, my web traffic is atrocious, and my website is about to be shut down due to breach of contract by the web designer.

Want to know how you can avoid this situation?

Yeah, I thought so.

On paper, I should never have been put in this position. I’m smart, I have experience locking down vendors, I have a mentor who was in business for himself for 25 years, and I have more financial backing than the typical first-time entrepreneur. So, with all this going for me, how can I be struggling like this? Read More