If you’re going to launch a product, there are a bunch of things you have to do. Lots of things. Virtually uncountable things. You’re drowning in things. But when it’s been launched, all of a sudden you have NOTHING to do. Nothing except click “refresh” on your sales stats. It’s lonely and obsessive compulsive and you run the risk of turning into Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good As It Gets.

Anyway, as y’all know, SEO School is back.

It’s Jamie’s birthday this week, and to avoid spending the entire celebration taking furtive peeks at my numbers, I’m leaving. We’re going away. Goodbye us. We’ll be back next Monday. There will be posts, though.

If you have download issues, you can email kath AT ittybiz DOT com and she will be nice to you and make it all better.

In the meantime, check out the PS. It’s awesome. I may as well give you a pony, for God’s sake. Everybody who’s already bought gets it, too, so don’t overload my poor assistant on her first full time day with emails complaining. It’s cool. You’re covered.

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 29, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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First, let’s all take a moment to stand in awe of the ridiculously fantastic picture to your left. Karen, the STUPIDLY talented animator who does storyboard templates and other cool stuff, made this for Jack’s birthday. The tragic lack of ninjas means it cannot be the new cover of the book, but it can be the cover of this blog post. Note the drool. Fan socks, you have met your match.

***

OK, I’m not really a perfume person, but I was tooling around on the web the other day and I saw a reference to Jo Malone’s White Jasmine and Mint. That’s a fairly awesome sounding combination, so I clicked through and checked it out. Here’s a snippet of what I found: Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 26, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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Rant time.

There are three reasons why I blog:

1. I want to help nice but confused and poor people who can’t afford to pay for it.

2. I want people who CAN afford it to buy my shit.

3. I want to feel famous.

You’ll notice that “starting a meaningless conversation with total fucking strangers” is not on that list. (If you haven’t already, I very strongly recommend you read The 6 Types of Blog Commentators. It is utterly delightful and one of my favorite posts on this blog. And yes, you can still comment on that one.)

This is the first week we haven’t allowed comments on new posts at IttyBiz. It’s too soon to tell what the impact will be, but I thought I’d throw out some thoughts. Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 25, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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While we’re in filthy marketing whore mode, I may as well remind you that the price for consulting goes up by $100 next Friday. You can read the details on this in How To Work From Home When You Have No Fucking Talent.

You can still pay now to lock in the price if you’re not ready to use your time yet. Sally from Practical Archivist, bright girl that she is, locked in her price in January when it was fifty bucks an hour and we just talked last week. Awesomest testimonial evah:

“My favorite benefit from working with Itty Biz? I get an advisor who can identify which kw searches are more likely to convert into sales. A hilarious, generous, smarty-pants boozy naked potty mouth advisor who hands me a 1-2-3 step plan that I can actually handle. Did I also mention that you get a cheerleader? A cheerleader who truly wants you to succeed *and* doesn’t think you’re crazy for trying to make a living selling information products via the internet. Business coaching will never be the same. A-fucking-men.”

If I can come up with any other ways to fleece you out of your hard-earned money in the next week or so, I’ll let you know.

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 23, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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Story time. If you don’t know the whole sordid story behind the ebook, you can read it here. (For SEO School students, that was a really bad example of optimization. Because I heart irony.) Settle in, though, because it got 95 comments and none of them were me going in to pad the numbers.

Today, I got some traffic from Problogger. (I totally just wrote that as “Problotter”, by the way.) It’s always nice to get traffic from there because it is a Really Big and Important Blog. Today, though, it was especially nice. Skellie’s in charge at the moment because Darren is off cavorting with other bloggy types at Blog World Expo right now. She wrote a post about blog business models. 10 of ‘em. IttyBiz and Ninja SEO School were number two. I think we can all agree on the total fucking awesomeness of this.

You should go and read it, but if you’re busy, here’s a snippet: Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 22, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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Towards the end of the Great Depression, J. Paul Getty — the first American billionaire — bought the Pierre Hotel in New York City at a fire sale price. He paid $2.5 million, a quarter of what it cost to build the hotel just eight years earlier. He later quoted Baron Rothschild, 18th century British nobleman in saying:

“The time to buy is when there is blood in the streets.”

To paraphrase America’s current fearless leader, it’s time to go shopping.

Democrats in the United States have been playing the recession card for years now. As far as I can gather — and I try to avoid watching the news, so I don’t gather much — everything sucks since Georgie Boy weaseled his way into office. Am I right so far?

Whatever your political slant, you’ll probably agree that most people think that America is in an economic crisis. The auto industry, the oil industry, the recent Lehman brothers debacle — basically people are freaking, no?

The lovely Pam Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation alerted me — via Carlos Hernandez — that the New York Times has recently published an article stating that with the economic crisis being what it is, now is not a good time to start or run your own business. (If you really want to read it, you can create a free account. Frankly, I wouldn’t recommend it. The link’s just there to show that I’m not lying.)

I call bullshit. Oh boy, do I ever call bullshit. Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 19, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 53 Comments
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This is a guest post from my fellow Stomper Eric Doggett, work-at-home dad, photographer, online business owner and all around cool guy.

As any of you that work from home know, trying to fit everything into a day is an incredible challenge. Add in a few kids who aren’t yet in school and you are guaranteed a hectic schedule that can easily rival anything your old fluorescent-lit cubicle ever threw at you.

As an Austin, Texas photographer, about 20% of my time is spent actually shooting. The rest of my schedule consists of image-editing, marketing, accounting, and the like. All of the things that us home-business types have to manage. I also have two boys, both of which aren’t old enough for school. My home is rapidly becoming a testosterone-dripping lair of insanity that neither my wife or I are ready for.

In an attempt to deal with this craziness, we’ve come up with some techniques to improve our productivity and save our minds. Here are 5 things that we’ve learned that you might be able to apply to your own household: Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 17, 2008 in Guest Post - 6 Comments
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To the nine of you reading this blog who happen to be experts in AdWords, you can skip this post. For those of you who have no intentions of launching an AdWords campaign ever, read it anyway. The lessons extend into other areas.

Because of the fan socks, I get a lot of email with “socks” in the copy. Most of the fan mail I get now starts like this:

“I know it’s not fan socks, but…”

This means that a lot of the contextual advertising I get in my gmail is sock related. Since I like socks, this isn’t quite as ridiculous as it could be.

The other day, I got an ad that read “The Funkiest Toe Socks” and since I dig funky toe socks, I clicked through. Bear in mind, this came in through my business email and I was busy doing, um, businessy things. But the promise of the funkiest toe socks was too much temptation.

I click through. The page takes forever to load. (Yes, I know THIS page takes forever to load, but I’m not advertising in your email, am I?) I’m waiting. I’m waiting. I’m waiting. Somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I feel that the longer I wait, the better the socks will be.

Finally, there it is. The left sidebar loads, then the right. Then the header. Then, finally, after much ado and excitement, the content!

It says: Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 15, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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So, it’s been about a year since I’ve started IttyBiz. Normally around this time in a blog’s life you’ll see a post telling all the shit the blogger has learned. (Excellent linkbait and traffic strategy, btw.)

Since I’ve spent the last year telling you about all the stupid stuff I’ve done and what I’ve learned from it anyway, a post like that would be pretty redundant here. So instead, I’ll tell you what I’m changing. Continue Reading …

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 12, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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Because I’m the type of person who gets my wisdom from Starbucks:

“Failure’s hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever.”

– Po Bronson

It’s tragic that instead of this being required curriculum at every school in the country, we have to read it on coffee cups.

By Naomi Dunford - Sep 9, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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