Occasionally, I try to get off my elitist, conceptual high horse, swanning around talking about marketing theory all day (whilst wearing nothing but a boa, naturally) and talk tactics. Today is one of those times. You may as well pay attention. I’m not scheduled to be tactical again until 2013.

In this series, we’ve been addressing some of the more common roadblocks that stop potentially fabulous ittybiz owners from being, well, fabulous. Today we’re talking about a big one.

How to communicate with the people with the money in a way that does not turn you into:

a.) an irritating pest,
b.) a marketing skeezy pants, or
c.) someone they hear from so infrequently, they don’t remember your name.

I think we can both agree that those are bad things you do not want.

But! Problems! Danger! Read More

I will try to be brief. Please understand that it has taken me five years to write this article, so if I cannot be brief, please forgive me.

Long ago, before I started this company and before I started this blog, I realized there was something wrong with marketing and sales training. It wasn’t right. It’s not that it wasn’t working, per se. It was working okay, I guess. Buyers were happy enough. It just wasn’t right.

You read a book, you got what you could out of it, and you tried to apply it as well as you could, given the constraints of your resources and capacity. It seemed that there was perhaps a better way, and that nobody had found it yet. I started making my own training and development guides, figuring I may as well try my hand at it. But still. Read More

Naomi is in Ireland and mostly away from all things internet, and so we present for your reading pleasure and general edification Post #3 in the Unofficial List of The Top 15 Best / Favorite / Most Popular IttyBiz Posts.

Originally published January 31, 2008

You’re not alone.

I’m typing this in bed, on the new laptop my IttyBiz readers bought me. (By the way? Thanks for that.) To my right, on the floor, on Jamie’s side of the bed, sit two Macintosh computers. They belong to my mother. For those of you who are new, I’ll take this opportunity to mention that my mother moved to Europe in 2005. I have yet to get off my ass to put them in storage. To my left is a floor full of books. They used to live in my busted chipboard bookshelf, but Jack likes to play with them, taking them down and putting them back in an order he feels is more appropriate. The last time he played this game was about 10 days ago. The books are still on the floor. Neither of us can get into bed from the sides, so we come up from the foot. Read More

“Should I write pieces made for the front page?”

“Should I spend more time on StumbleUpon?”

“Can Twitter seriously do my blog any good?”

“What about Reddit? Del.icio.us? And what the hell is Sphinn?”

If I go four waking hours between hearing one of these questions from a home business client, it must be a religious holiday. Everybody wants to know about social media. But they don’t want to know just anything about social media.

They want to know what they’re doing wrong.

They’re doing all the right things. They’re getting involved in the community. They’re putting all the right buttons in all the right places. They’re networking. They’re making friends. They’re voting up other people’s content. They’re doing everything Skellie and Maki told them to do.

So why is nothing happening? Read More

Somebody (Tim Ferris? Gandhi? Princess Di?) once said that if you’re not offending anybody, you’re doing it wrong. You’ll be happy to know, I’m clearly doing it right.

When I clicked “Publish” on my most recent post, I can honestly say I didn’t know people would be so bothered. I had no less than five snarky emails in my inbox before the damn post hit my Bloglines. (Yes, I subscribe to my own feed.) Seriously, people were mad. Really mad. People were mad at my word use, people were mad that I called them cocky, people did not dig it. (For those of you who did like it and commented, thank you. That was very nice of you.) Read More