Truancy For Grown-Ups (SEO School Is Back)

by Naomi Dunford

Monday, September 29th, 2008

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.

Humor in Marketing, Making Your People Buy More Stuff, and That Book We Keep Talking About

by Naomi Dunford

Friday, September 26th, 2008

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:

Why I Committed Blog Suicide

by Naomi Dunford

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

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.

Consulting Goes Up To $250 On October 3rd

by Naomi Dunford

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

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.”

When Something Goes Wrong With Your Small Business

by Naomi Dunford

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

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: