If you’re from Digg, How We Killed Social Media is here.

Problogger has a question post up asking his readers to tell their biggest blogging mistakes. The answers — 187 at the time of this writing — are surprising. Amazing how the same answers keep coming up over and over.

Got me thinking, what about home business mistakes? It’s easy to think of the mistakes bigger businesses make — insufficient funding, too much funding, not hiring the right people — but those aren’t really applicable for your home business.

My Small Business Mistake

Mine was definitely not scaling for growth. I just didn’t realize that the marketing for small business services I was offering would take off as well as they did. I was totally unprepared. I was working 18 hour days and still falling behind. Don’t know how I would have pre-empted that without halting my growth, but it’s something to think about.

What about you? What mistakes did you make? What would you do differently if you could start again? What advice would you offer?

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 8, 2008 in Entrepreneurship - 12 Comments
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I get a lot of shit for being so sarcastic on my little home business blog, and I happily take it. If I wasn’t sarcastic I wouldn’t have very much to say at all, so for me it works out to being either sarcastic or blogless. Blogless means businessless — I get about 95% of my business because of my blog — so I choose the former.

But what happens when people don’t get the joke?

I didn’t post an April Fools’ post on my blog — well, I posted on the first of April, but it wasn’t a joke — because I’m not into it. A lot of people are, though, and the blogosphere was abuzz.

Deb Ng Quits Freelance Writing Gigs

Darren Rowse Launches PayPerTweet

Tim Ferriss Quit Blogging A Year Ago (Thanks, Hunter, for this one.)

While some readers, especially North American ones who are familiar with April First shenanigans or those who have been in the blogging world for more than a year and were prepared for some craziness, thought these things were funny, “touché” or “well-played”, some didn’t. In fact, a lot didn’t.

Why didn’t it work? Why did people not get the joke? Why are people threatening to unsubscribe left and right? Three reasons.

1. These people are not known for being funny.

Maybe they are funny — I read a few of the blogs that ran April Fools’ jokes, and they can be funny folks — but they’re not known for it. Dooce is known for being funny. David Sedaris. Many of the lesser known mommy bloggers. But not these three.

Many of the readers of these blogs were not expecting a joke, and April Fools’ jokes are traditionally known for being practical jokes. Practical jokes are often not funny. They’re something one person does to make someone else look or feel stupid. They are an expression of superiority, or one-up-man-ship, of derision. And when you’re not the type of person who does this thing normally, people feel like they got screwed over.

On this blog, I make a regular habit of talking smack about everyone I can find. People come here and expect a certain level of snarkiness. Other than those who are very, very new (Hi, new people!) nobody’s surprised when I talk a little shit.

Tim, Deb, and Darren are known for offering fairly serious advice, and people felt betrayed. They are trusted resources, and it didn’t cross many people’s minds that their trusted resources were kidding.

2. A lot of people don’t like April Fools’ Day.

I, for one, like comedy movies. I like to laugh. But I don’t remember the last time I went to the theatre to see a comedy because I don’t like the comedy that’s on offer. I don’t like the Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn/ Ice Cube/ Wayans brothers style of comedy. Not inherently bad, just not for me.

Many people feel the same way about April Fools’ Day, or about physical comedy, or about practical jokes in general. Some people don’t like the Saran-Wrap-On-The-Toilet thing. Birds of a feather flock together, and when people realize you’re not like them, sometimes they leave. Sometimes they don’t, and I’m the last one to tell people to change who they are just to keep a few dozen blog subscribers, but it’s worth noting.

3. A lot of people aren’t North American/British/Australian.

While I’m not an expert on the culture in Tanzania or Serbia or Mauritius, I have a feeling that the citizens of these countries don’t hold April Fools’ Day in the same high regard as your average Connecticut WASP. (Don’t start. You know damn well I’m not saying a word against Connecticut WASPs. I’m just saying they’re different from your garden-variety Tanzanian. Am I wrong?)

Many international readers just weren’t prepared for April Fools’ Day. Thus even when people said, “HA HA! Don’t freak out, it was April Fools’!” they still didn’t get it. They were in many cases offended and pissed off and I don’t particularly blame them.

My point, and I do have one:

Joke, don’t joke. Doesn’t really matter. Just consider the impact your joke might have. If you run a business blog, consider the potential impact on your clients. I lose some clients because of my language, because of my sarcasm, and because I tend to run off point. I’m fine with that — it was a conscious decision I made to eliminate potential pain-in-the-ass clients.

Your business might be the same, but it might be different. You might be at the point in your career where you don’t want to run the risk of pissing off the Mauritians. (Who knew THAT was a word?) Whatever. Just know what you’re doing, and if you do end up pissing people off, don’t blame them for leaving.

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By Naomi Dunford - Apr 2, 2008 in Blogging, Entrepreneurship - 34 Comments
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When I was four years old, I had a crush on a boy named Forbes. (I don’t know why either. Let’s leave it alone, shall we?) We were in kindergarten together. I got early admittance into school, so he was my first experience with an older man.

We played with blocks a lot. We used to count them together, making little piles of red blocks and blue blocks and yellow blocks. It was fun.

Then one day, he held up a handful of blocks and asked me how many were in his hand.

“Three,” I say.

“Nope.”

“Uh, yeah!”

“Nope.”

“Fuck you!” (Yes, I swore then as much as I do now. My Dad was training me to be in the navy.)

He opened his hand, showing the three blocks I could see previously and revealing a fourth green block that I couldn’t.

“April Fools!” He laughed. I did not.

Now I do not like April Fools’ Day and I do not like the color green.

Because of this, I don’t do anything on April Fools’ Day. When I was in school, I would skip. When I used to work outside the house I would take the day off. Now that I run a home business, I do not leave my house, I do not watch anything but reruns, and I avoid all kinds of media.

I was not planning on blogging today, but I wrote a guest post for Michael Martine of Remarkablogger and it ran today. Thus, I will blog just long enough to share it with you. You should read it. It’s good. Next year I’m writing on the 2nd.

7 + 1 Things Rock Band Can Teach You About Business Blogging

A highlight:

“Because we don’t live in Rock Band Communist Utopia, some band members are better than others. My husband is a mean guitarist and vocalist, but neither one of us could drum our way out of a wet paper bag. If you base your guitar strumming on my drumming, you’ll be booed off stage before you can say ‘Blitzkrieg Bop.’

In blogging, in business, and especially when you combine the two, your esteemed colleagues will lead you off a cliff if you give them a chance. Don’t give them a chance.”

I’m going back to hanging out under a rock. Have a nice day.

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Overwhelmed? Freaking out? Borderline hysterical? Click here to get your own small business marketing plan. It’s not scary, I promise.

By Naomi Dunford - Apr 1, 2008 in Entrepreneurship - 23 Comments
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Oh. Wait. Never mind. I write a site for home and micro business owners, too.

Anyway, every now and again, I like to introduce a new or small blogger to the big wide world of IttyBiz readers. (While I am not paid to do this, I do accept offers of free babysitting.) Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Crystal.

Crystal, even though she knew how I felt about free themes, had the balls to get in touch with me anyway. (Although her free theme is not ugly — it’s one of the nicer Brian Gardner ones.) Considering some of the absolutely asinine requests we get here at IttyBiz HQ, I figured that Crystal’s completely non-asinine site deserved a look.

“This site is for the 20 million American business owners running the smallest shops on the smallest budgets. Most of us don’t last three years, but we’re all doing our best to get something started and keep it profitable.

Many of you are like me, flying solo with only one pair of hands to do all the work. Others have two or ten people to help out, but we’re all working with the same limitation: we don’t have deep corporate pockets when it comes to starting up, branching out, or moving forward.

And really—though it would be mighty fine—we don’t need the big money. There are loads of free and affordable tools and services to keep us rolling with the agility that big businesses envy. There are books and websites aplenty on how to leverage our size to get what we want.

Loads. Aplenty. Mountains of stuff, really. More than you have time to read about…

Really.

So I’ve assigned myself the task of sifting through it all and bringing you the best bits. I’ll tell you what works for me, what works for others, and what simply doesn’t work.”

Big Bright Bulb is worth a look, especially for those just starting out on their IttyBiz path. Some starters:

No logo? Find one at the morgue

How Small Is Small

Dismissing The Doubts That Derail You - Bonus points for this paragraph: “Other times it’s other people’s doubts that knock me off course: “Do people actually read that?” “What’s your backup plan for when this blog thing doesn’t work out?” Lovely.”

Anyway, head on over to her site (especially her cool stuff about microconsulting) and check her out. (Well, don’t literally check her out. There’s no photo anyway, so you couldn’t even if you wanted to, you dirty dog, you.)

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By Naomi Dunford - Mar 20, 2008 in Entrepreneurship - 9 Comments
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First of all, I want to say thank you to everyone who responded so kindly to my emotional outburst. That was so lovely and so appreciated — I wish I had the time to respond to each and every one of you who commented, emailed, and called. Wow. My readers rule.

Today, I would like to talk about home business technology and productivity. I know shit about productivity, so this is exclusively my opinion and what works for me, or more to the point, what doesn’t work for me.

I was reading Anywired today and came across Origami Productivity: Why I Don’t Want a Paperless Life. It is a defense of paper, and long overdue.

Why, oh why, do we feel the need to technologize everything? Why does everything have to be digital? What the hell is so wrong with a pen and a piece of paper? Why is the hipster PDA the amusing exception, rather than the rule? Why in God’s name do we want to read entire books on a device specifically made for that purpose, and available at amazon.com for $399? I know a device specifically designed for reading books, it’s called a fucking book.

I read the productivity blogs. I have been evangelized to about the glory that is this software or that software or this PDA or whatever. I know about BaseCamp and remember the milk and that (admittedly addictive) thing where you’re not supposed to break the chain. It’s not that I don’t know about them, it’s that I don’t like them. To quote Skellie, “But it’s portable, they say. Well, so is paper. It even works outside wi-fi hotspots.”

A few weeks ago, I bought a laptop. When choosing the laptop, I really struggled with which one to buy. It was down to three. One, the Sony Vaio. To be honest, the Vaio made the short list almost exclusively because it came in pink, although it’s also very light, which came in handy. Two, a HP model. Almost as light as the Vaio, cheaper, but not nearly as pink. And another one, the make and model of which I don’t remember. What I do remember was that the monitor turned into a writing tablet.

The lovely Best Buy salesman, who, I have it on good authority, recently celebrated his ninth birthday, explained to me the features of this particular model. Flick a switch, flip the monitor, and write away with your handy dandy stylus. If my handwriting was “good”, which, by the way, it is, I could have it reading my writing and converting it to text in under three months.

Under three months! Isn’t that amazing? All I’d need to do was write by hand on my laptop for several hours a day, coaching it and teaching it every step of the way, and at the end of three months, it would take my handwriting and turn it into a Word document. Brilliant.

I hemmed. I hawed. I went out for a smoke. I ate some of the baby’s chicken nuggets. I hemmed again. I went to look at HD camcorders. While hanging out with the HandyCams, I was struck by a flash of insight.

I type at a rate of about 90 words per minute.

In the time it would take me to teach this fabulous piece of technology to recognize my handwriting I could handwrite whatever I was writing twice, type it up twice, and likely be onto the next piece before the tablet would figure out I spell my name with an N.

I bought the HP and a brand new spiral notebook instead.

While we’re talking about spiral notebooks and I’m losing subscribers by the minute, I’ll admit here, publicly to over 1000 people, that I don’t get the big fuss about Moleskine notebooks. There. I said it. I feel naked now.

Don’t hate me because I hate technology? Subscribe here, we can hate it together.

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By Naomi Dunford - Feb 5, 2008 in Entrepreneurship - 34 Comments
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My good friend Shane over at Shane and Peter put out a request for answers to these questions. He also wants an original question of my own, but I figure that since I came up with Bikini or Thong, I’m exempt. (By the way, when you’re done reading my answers, go read Jarkko’s. They’re way better. I get the feeling that, unlike myself, he may have actually thought about his answers.)

What’s your personal mission statement?

The very idea of me getting my shit together for long enough to write a mission statement is laughable.

What’s the biggest mess you’ve dealt with this year?

There was this one time? At band camp?

Seriously, though, I recently passed out in the middle of Walmart (the electronics section, if you must know) and it was basically due to overwork. I had to lay off a bunch of home business clients because otherwise I would have died. It was awkward and uncomfortable and it sucked. A lot. I don’t recommend it.

What current entrepreneurial efforts consume your time?

Well, I run a website. It’s called IttyBiz. You might have heard of it. I do marketing consulting for very small businesses with very small budgets. I’ll do freelance writing if the right client comes along. I’m writing a book. And I’m the editor and blog manager at First Wives World.

Why do you do what you do? What inspires you? When do you get most excited?

I get an almost physical thrill bashing marketing campaigns and figuring out how I would have done them better. It’s sick, really.

I also really, really love the ROI that comes from taking a very small and floundering business and turning it into something profitable. I love how excited people get. I like watching them experience their version of success for the first time. I love it when I can help a blogger boost their traffic by 1000%. So cool.

Boxers or Briefs? or as Naomi says, Bikini or Thong, duh?!?

Bikini. I have too many children to walk around with string up my ass all day.

What do you do when you’re not doing this?

I read trashy romance novels.

What one thing made the biggest difference when getting started?

Somewhere – probably on a blog – I read that to be successful, you should think about how you would do what you plan to do, only with one tenth of the time you’ve allotted. I realized that I don’t have to be mousy and conservative. I don’t have to “take my time”. I don’t have to follow arbitrary rules. I can just chuck myself on the scene and say, “Yo! I’m here!”

What’s your exit strategy?

Dude, I don’t even have an entrance strategy.

What is the last thing that made you belly laugh?

With a one-year-old in the house, you laugh a lot. You have to – the only alternative is shooting yourself. My favorite is probably this one.

Jamie and I are at a bar, and he goes up to get more drinks. This guy comes over while Jamie’s gone, not realizing that I’m attached, and starts trying to bust a move on me. Jamie gets back with two drinks in hand and, in true diplomatic Libra form, asks the guy if he can reach in front of him to put my drink down. (It should be noted that Jamie is so calm, it’s like he’s actually dead.) Dude gets all indignant and looks from me to Jamie and says, “Hey, man. I got here first. Wait your turn.”

Jamie shows the guy his wedding ring and says, “It is my fucking turn.”

Have you ever been in business before?

I have never not been in business. I went to software conferences with my Dad when I was five. I hawked his custom mustards when I was 12. When I was in high school, I used to charge people five bucks to forge their parents’ signatures on sick notes.

At what point do you consider yourself successful?

When I can stop working for pay.

What was your first experience with a computer?

My Dad bought me my own C64 when I was 3. I actually won second place in the National Science Fair with an artificial intelligence program I wrote. I was 12. That was before the sex change.

Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates in a Jell-o wrestling match, where’s your money?

Steve Jobs. Jell-o favors the sexy.

Where do you do your best thinking?

In bed, before I go to sleep. I would go so far as to say that’s where I do all my thinking.

What does your average daily work / life balance look like? How much time do you work, play and sleep?

I get up around 6 and mess around with my blogs. I get Jamie and Jack up around 9, and Jack goes to the nanny’s for the morning. I’ll work and hang out with Jamie in the morning, and when Jack gets home we’ll all have lunch together. In the afternoon, I work and Jamie studies. I try to do something leisurely in the evenings, but I often end up working then, too. I’m usually in bed by 1.

As far as “play” goes, Jack stays overnight at the nanny’s on Friday nights so Jamie and I can go somewhere and have a real date in a place without a high chair in sight.

If I could introduce you to anyone, who would it be?

It would be Peter, because I’m still convinced he isn’t real. (Note to Canadians: Peter is actually Polkaroo.)

What stops you from giving up when you are frustrated?

I bought a big screen TV with my first big check from freelancing. It’s a very tangible representation for me – it shows me, every day, the actual and practical benefits I get from doing this work.

That, and I’m completely unemployable. It’s this or get a real job.

If Chuck Norris and Steven Hawking had a baby (hey it’s my damn interview), would you vote for her for president?

It would probably depend who she was running against.

If you’re the entrepreneurial type, take the challenge. Do this on your own blog. But you have to make up a question, too. Only I am exempt. Suckers.

***

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By Naomi Dunford - Dec 6, 2007 in Entrepreneurship - 22 Comments
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