OK, we all know how I feel about memes. (Although if you want to read a meme IttyBiz-style, check out Duct-Taped Breasts, Hairy Mangoes and New Kids on the Block. You know you want to.) But 90% of you are recovering from The Great Turkey Incident of 2008 and I am recovering from seeing Australia, the longest movie ever made. So we’ll slack off and just chat, huh? Totally not a meme because nobody made me do it.

(Re: Australia. Total thumbs up. I LOVED it. I would love to say it’s the best movie I’ve seen all year but there’s a good chance it’s the only movie I’ve seen all year, so that’s not the best endorsement I can give. But yeah, awesome.) Read More

(This is a guest post from Conrad Hees who writes about self-marketing, among other things, at ConradHees.com. He realized that I was moving across the Atlantic and that might make me a little busy, so he very nicely offered to pitch in. Not a bad little self-marketing effort, come to think of it.)

As marketers, our main job is to connect in an effective way with clients/customers who are in need of our product or service, and elicit a desired result from them. This can sometimes be difficult, and other times it is easier. But one surefire way to fail at marketing is to chase after and/or try to convert people who just don’t get it.

Many of us feel like if we are passionate enough about our product or service and a good enough salesperson, we will be able to convert potential customers who really need what we have to offer, but just don’t realize it themselves yet. While you may sometimes be able to convert an ill-informed or ill-motivated potential customer, most of the time you can’t, and it will take too much time and effort to do so, making it an effort in futility.

In this article, I will illustrate exactly why you cannot waste your time trying to market to those who just don’t get it. Read More

Tomorrow, there will be a very well reasoned guest post on this blog, discussing something important and topical and intelligent. Today, you get me screaming, “WHAT THE FUCK?” So much so that I’m opening up comments because I am DESPERATE to hear if somebody, ANYBODY, has an intelligent answer to this question.

What is the point of this?

Let’s say I go to your website. And you have a flash intro. And the flash intro gives me no information whatsoever. It’s just, you know, some pictures fading in and out. And then you have an option that says I can “Skip Intro”. WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN SKIP THE FUCKING INTRO? Read More

First of all, in a delightful homage to something — irony, maybe? — I’d like to let you know that according to Alexa, this website gets no traffic. Nope, not even from you. (Alexa is a website traffic ranking website that compares your traffic to other sites.) Back when this site was getting 15,000 hits a week, it was about the 60,000th most popular site on the internet.

Now that it’s getting 100,000 hits a week, it is the 357,930th most popular site on the internet. Isn’t that nice? I think that’s nice.

Thank you, Alexa, for being slightly more unreliable than the Bush administration. Read More

The First Thing You Should Know:

The submissions for the IttyBiz Gift Guide end today. Click for details if you’re interested. It would appear that my writing ability is getting better because only two of the submissions were wildly and ridiculously inappropriate. Based on the frankly shocking level of inappropriateness, I choose to assume these people had Google Alerts for “gift guide” and were submitting with their eyes closed and their finger poised over their mouse clicker.

The Thing That’s Kinda Neat:

Thank you for all of your emails asking if I’m spending my days having dirty sex in a pile of American money. No. But not for lack of trying. I’ve been very busy responding to hate mail. (See below.) Since I have to make sure I’m drunk and angry before responding, it’s taking me some time. You can only get redrunk so quickly, you know? Read More