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!

If you avoid C, you might end up being A or B. Everyone will hate you and mark you as spam.

If you avoid A and B, you’ll probably end up being C. Everyone will forget you and mark you as spam.

Fun, right?

Hello, rock. And hard place! What a surprise! We really must stop meeting in such close quarters like this. People will talk.

OK. Let’s get on to the good stuff.

How often can I email my list?

You may email your list as often as you have something valuable to communicate to at least 20% of them.

So if you have 500 people on your list, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that 100 of those people will gain some potential value from hearing what you have to say today, feel free to email them. Even if you emailed them yesterday.

Now, if your potential financial payoff is particularly high and you can limit the irritating or skeezy quotient, you can email when you have something to say that would be potentially valuable to 5% of your list.

For example, if you are opening up private coaching and there’s a good chance you’ll make $10,000, annoy whoever you need to annoy. You’ve got ten grand worth of skin in the game.

But won’t they unsubscribe/unfollow/de-friend/shoot me?

Definitely. It’s part of the game. You really need to try and get over that. It’s hard as hell, I know, and you’ll never fully succeed. But you have to try.

Try to remember that people sign up for mailing lists or blog feeds or social media updates for some VERY bizarre reasons.

I received a nastygram from someone once who told me they were annoyed I kept selling things. They were only subscribed because they thought I might actually show screenshots of a topless Skype call.

I have heard from someone who was upset that I kept telling personal stories since they’d only subscribed so they could put me in their swipe file of subject lines to steal.

I have been told on more than one occasion that the only reason they signed up was because they were drunk and bored.

Weird, anomalous subscribers become weird, anomalous unsubscribers. IT’S FINE.

Your list is NOT a list of hot leads. Your list is a motley crew of random internet strangers, some of whom are hot leads. If non-hot leads unsubscribe, you MUST STOP CARING.

No, but seriously! Every time I mail, I get unsubscribes! Every time!

Yes. So do I. And it’s hard to click “send” when you know it’s going to make certain people click “spam”. I know that.

But let’s look at some math.

If you email 200 people and 4 of them unsubscribe, you lose 4 people.

If you DON’T email 200 people, you lose 200 people.

And the 196 people who LIKE hearing from you get totally screwed out of the kind of stuff they signed up for because you’re freaking out about the four.

That’s really dumb and you have to stop doing it.

OK, but how do I know what’s “potentially valuable”?

Well, think of the things you’re a relatively active fan of. What do YOU find valuable?

I’m subscribed to six blogs. One I read religiously. I click refresh to see if it’s come in yet. The second, I read maybe half the articles. The rest I read about one in five of their posts, generally based on the compellingness of the title, but sometimes if I’m trying to avoid work I’ll read all of them at one time, plus back posts.

(This means include links to your other, or recent content. I’m bored! Give me something fun to do!)

I probably open 3 out of 5 emails from Sunwing Vacations. They have sort of a “deals of the week” newsletter that they send out, and I read it more often than I don’t. (It should be noted that the last time Jamie and I took a vacation through Sunwing was when we went to Cuba two years ago. We’re still reading.)

Norwegian Cruise Lines sends me probably four emails a week and I at least glance at about half of them, even though their “sales” are hardly sales at all. (Norwegian: I adore you. More than you could possibly know. But onboard credit is not a sale, it’s a bonus. I like both, but one is not the other. A dog is not a cat, and you can’t say it’s a cat just because cats get a higher open rate. It’s cheating.)

I’ve emailed three times this week to say “No. Seriously. Pay What You Can means pay what you can. Send $7.24 if that’s what you can afford. That’s why I’m DOING this, for God’s sake.” I will keep sending that email until I am thoroughly convinced that everybody who needs to hear that has heard it. I don’t care how many unsubscribes I get. As long as I keep getting, “OMG, thank you thank you thank you” emails right after I mail, I’m going to keep mailing. End of story.

Given that the average launch gets 50-60% of its sales on the last day, and 50-60% of THAT in the last hour, I mail twice on the last day. So should you. You think everybody’s heard about it, and you may, theoretically, be right. (You’re not actually right, but you could be in theoretical alternate universe land.)

Just because they’ve heard about it doesn’t mean they haven’t forgotten about it. You know, maybe I’ll say that again in bold. Just because they’ve heard about it doesn’t mean they haven’t forgotten about it. People are busy. They don’t spend their entire day thinking about you and your fantastic offerings. You MUST tell them again. And again. And again.

OK, I get that I have to mail. But what should I say?

Start with the simplest possible version of the truth you can think of. Get fancier as you get better at it.

If you don’t know what to put in your subject line that’s introducing your new line of jewelry, start with “We’re introducing a new line of jewelry”.

As you get better, start throwing “limited edition” or “get it while it’s hot” or “sale ends Tuesday” in there.

For most people, that’s really all you need to do if the communication is primarily commercial.

If the communication is pure content, or more content than commerce, lead with the title. If your ittybiz is at the point where you already have serious fans, put the title in sentence case. It makes you look friendlier. (This means capitalize the first letter, but not the first letter of every word.)

If you don’t have serious fans yet and you’re still proving yourself, leave it in title case. It makes you look smarter. (This means capitalize the first letter of every word, or the major words.)

Don’t put “newsletter” in your subject line. It’s a waste of ten characters, eleven if you include a colon, or twelve if you include square brackets. That’s just wasteful. This also applies to your name or your business name, unless it’s contextually relevant and necessary. They know who’s sending the email. That’s what the Sender field is there for. (Example: “IttyBiz is having a sale!” is fine. “IttyBiz: How To Sell To Damn Near Anybody” is not.)

Whatever. I’m still freaked out and confused.

OK, if you take nothing else from this article, take this:

The purpose of your list is to give people who like you the opportunity to hear what you say and buy what you sell.

Therefore, you must say it. And sell it.

It’s like reruns. People will watch their favorite TV show every day of the week, no matter how many times they’ve seen the episode. And if they don’t watch it, they still want to know it’s on. They might want to watch it, and if it went away, they’d be sad.

Your job is to become their favorite TV show.

You’re not going to do that by airing an episode once every five months.

The truth is, if you email your list frequently, whether it’s once a week, twice a week, or hell, even five times a week, EVERYONE will unsubscribe except for the people who love what you say and what you sell.

But here’s the secret…

They’ll bring their friends.

My point here is not that you should overwhelm your list with emails, especially if you don’t have anything valuable to say. My point is that you should write to the people who love what you say and what you sell, and give them as much good stuff to love as you can.

That is the only sustainable way.

And… one more time with feeling!

We talk a LOT more about these tactics and how to implement them in the Emergency Turnaround Clinic. Did you hear? It’s pay what you can. [oh my god, she's winking again]

Seriously. Check it out. Good things happen when you click this link.

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.

People were paying attention to why people buy generally. But nobody was even considering what made people buy specifically.

What makes a person buy something completely new, something they’ve never even heard of before? What kind of person does that? What weird and wonderful path must they walk to arrive at a space and time where they say, “Yes. Yes, I think I would like to buy that?”

What makes a person buy a service as opposed to a product? Surely, it must be different? But conventional marketing training says that no, marketing is marketing. It seemed like that couldn’t be all there was to it, but what did I know?

What makes a person buy a one-time service? Is it different from what makes them buy a service they’ll use again and again? Do we do something different when we don’t get a do-over — like getting our house painted or our wedding photographs taken — as opposed to something we’ll do again and again, like getting our nails done or our back massaged? Surely it’s different, I thought.

But conventional marketing training said no, buying is buying.

And if a transaction has more than one part, do we act the same in part two as we did in part one? Do we buy the shoe polish the same way we buy the shoes?

And what about from the seller’s side? When we learned something new — in a blog post these days, or a seminar or newsletter or even a book, back in the day — we had to think, how does this apply in my situation? And if it didn’t seem to apply, the person doing the teaching kind of said, “Yeah. Gee. I guess that won’t really work for you.”

If we found a teacher we could trust, we begged them for more detailed information. Action steps! Specifics! What do *I* do? What do I do *next*? What do I do *now*?

I teach marketing for a living. I understand that desire. People beg for it. Yes, but what can a photographer do? What can a craftsperson do? A dog walker? A coach?

I didn’t know how to improve things. If I created general training, it couldn’t help any one individual as much as they needed to be helped. If I created specific training, I couldn’t help enough people. Plus, it’s not financially viable. Copywriting for Dog Walkers would have to be VERY expensive to keep my people in health benefits.

I did a lot of private coaching, but there are really only so many hours in the day.

So I decided to do go away and not come back until I had the answer.

Hi. I’m back.

First, we’ll talk about how this applies to you. Then we’ll talk about how it applies to your customers.

Existing and accepted marketing theory says that you based your marketing strategy around, essentially, your resources. If you could afford big, splashy stuff, you should do big, splashy stuff. If you couldn’t, you should do some other next best thing and pray to the Patron Saint of Big, Splashy Stuff that one day you’d have more resources.

Failing that, you could pray to the Patron Saint of Cash-Strapped Business Owners and hope for some mercy.

If you think about it for long enough, you’ll come to the conclusion that this method is dumb.

You should really base your marketing strategy and tactics on how people tend to buy what you happen to sell.

Well, again, that’s not exactly rocket science. You’re going to sell soda differently than you’re going to sell a house. Sure.

But it turns out, there’s a system.

The way you sell what you sell is actually based around how often people are likely to buy it.

This is why, as a wedding photographer, you’re so frustrated when your friendly local marketing expert tells you how important it is to get repeat business.

This is also why, as an esthetician, it never really made sense when you were hearing how crucial it was to get new customers when, frankly, you had tons of customers already.

This is also why, if you sell handmade jewelry, absolutely nothing seems to apply to you.

We’ll come back to this.

So, one of the things I did when we went on our little marketing vision quest is talk to people. I’m pretty sure we spoke to, surveyed, watched, interrogated and harassed approximately 7.2 billion of them. We talked to ittybiz owners and customers and children and adults. We talked to Canadians and Brits and Americans and Australians and Germans. We talked to people in France and people in Turkey and people in the Czech republic and people in Greece and people in Italy.

(Although, to be fair, the people I talked to in Italy were mostly interested in talking about drinking a lot of wine, but that’s because I was on vacation. Also, Germans tend to demand refunds a lot, but that’s neither here nor there.)

We watched them shop. They showed us their junk mail and told us what they thought of it. They showed us what they bought. They told us about what they didn’t buy. We asked them how they liked to shop. We asked them what infuriated them.

We asked them what made them buy forever.

We asked what made them never buy again.

We asked what kind of annoyed them but they kept buying anyway.

Here’s what we found out.

The psychology of purchase when the person buys a first thing is very, very different from the psychology of purchasing a second thing.

The only research I had seen investigated the brain when it buys the first thing, but other oft-cited and well proven statistics show that it’s (around) 13 times easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to convince someone new.

So if the existing customer is the Holy Grail, why were we only studying the brains of people who hadn’t bought anything yet and basing our marketing strategies on them? What if we studied customers’ minds instead of prospects’? What would it change?

Well, I like nothing better than spending a very long time stalking strangers and calling it work, so I decided to find out.

Why people buy the first thing

People buy the first thing for many surface reasons but essentially, they move towards hope and away from fear. That’s pretty accepted among marketing nerds.

But here’s the interesting thing. After the first purchase, the hope and fear thing tends to fade and the buyer’s normal personality is much more likely to come out.

If you’re generally happy, you’ll shop happy. If you’re generally depressed, you’ll shop depressed.

If you’re generally logical, you’ll shop logical. If you’re generally emotional, you’ll shop emotional.

Cool, right? Well, yes. Cool, but useless.

Then we ran the math and things got a whole lot cooler.

Amy is a basically happy and logical human being. She’s reasonably confident, mostly optimistic, and her purchase is a fairly logical act. She has a high risk tolerance.

You rolls the dice, you takes your chances, but on any given day, as long as you sell something reasonable, Amy is around 80% likely to buy whatever you sell her next. (The numbers are rounded, but I have a feeling you’re not as much of a stats nerd as I am.)

If you offer, and do it properly, 4 out of 5 Amys will just go ahead and buy it, almost no matter what.

Huh.

We talk in-depth about Amy right here.

Bob, on the other hand, is capable of happiness, but tends towards stress and anxiety. On the surface, he seems quite logical, but his buying behavior is driven by emotion. He is anxious, concerned, and risk-averse.

He’s around 60% likely to buy.

We talk in-depth about Bob right here.

Carol is happy and confident like Amy, and they share the same high risk tolerance. She’s emotionally driven, like Bob, but unlike Bob, she only makes the most cursory attempts at appearing logical. She LOVES to shop.

She’s around 40% likely to buy. That’s not a typo.

We talk in-depth about Carol right here.

Daniel tends towards depression. like Amy, he’s very logical and loves efficiency. Like Bob, he’s pessimistic and has a low tolerance for risk. At any given time, he’s pretty sure things are not going to work out in his favor.

He’s around 20% likely to buy.

We talk in-depth about Daniel right here.

This part is really important.

So, in that part about Daniel up there? Where we said he was only 20% likely to buy? And we kind of get annoyed and we don’t really like him very much because the son of a bitch put his Visa back in his wallet? Do you get what that means?

That means that of your most cynical, jaded, depressed, eye-rolling customers, the ones most likely to mope and moan and get irritated, 1 out of every 5 of them will still buy your upgrade, upsell, or cross-sell.

And he’s your worst case scenario.

Take a minute to consider what your upsell, cross-sell and upgrade strategy is at the moment. Do you think you might change it if you knew 20% of even your most depressed and jaded customers would buy more stuff, as long as you presented it right?

Yeah.

But hang on a second. The title says “Your 5 Customers”! That’s only 4!

This brings us to customer five, otherwise known as, “the reason you’re terrified of upselling, cross-selling, upgrading, or getting the maximum potential revenue out of your customers and clients.”

Meet Auntie Vera. Auntie Vera is angry. Very angry. She has a highly dysfunctional relationship with commerce. She takes all but a very few commercial transactions personally. She yells about junk mail. She screams about sale signs in the mall. She spends a lot of time bitching in social media.

Something inside her feels ashamed that she bought something in the first place, so asking her to buy again is like backing an animal into a corner.

She’s about 0% likely to buy and 100% likely to complain her Congresswoman.

We talk more about Crazy Auntie Vera right here.

The reason you pull your punches when you’re selling stuff is because while Auntie Vera represents between 1 and 3 percent of the buying public, she’s also the loudest. By far.

On some level, we think Auntie Vera is the majority. She’s the majority of who we hear from, so we think she’s the actual majority. She squawks when we sell, so we don’t sell. What we don’t pay attention to, however, is that she was going to squawk anyway.

Back to the system.

So here’s what we’ve done.

We’re completely changing our training based on learning tracks.

If you’re a service provider and it’s reasonable for someone to buy what you sell more than once a month, you take track A. Life coaches, estheticians, dog walkers, acupuncturists, massage therapists, and ghost bloggers, I’m talking to you.

If you’re a service provider and it’s not likely for someone to buy what you sell more than once a month, you take track B. Photographers, interior designers, animal hotels, web designers, and wedding harpists, I’m talking to you.

If you sell products, you take track C. (And if you’re feeling industrious, think of whether your customers are likely to fit in the “more than once a month” or “less than once a month” category. Then give a few of those modules a glance, too. Neat, but not compulsory.)

Very soon, our first learning track-based course Same People, More Money will be available.

You’re going to learn about how to sell what YOU sell to Amy, Bob, Carol, and Daniel. You’re going to learn how to deal with Auntie Vera.

You’re going to learn about the five places in the upgrade process and what (and how!) to sell in each. (An add-on at the point of purchase is not the same as an upgrade months later, but we’ll tackle that and a whole lot more.)

You’re going to learn why your existing upsells, upgrades, and cross-sells aren’t working, and stupidly simple ways to turn it around.

You’re going to learn how to overcome the hurdles your customers have. (How to not BE icky.)

You’re going to learn how to overcome the hurdles you have. (How to not FEEL icky.)

You’re going to learn whether your customers and clients are Amys, Bobs, Carols, or Daniels — I’m pretty sure you can spot your own Veras — and you’re going to learn how to tailor your offers to maximize your success with each.

You’re going to learn how to sell to a group of strangers without spooking the hidden Bobs or pissing off the lurking Daniels.

And you just might learn what I got up to in Venice.

So, my apologies for being gone for so long. I hope you’ll find it was worth the wait.

Welcome to Act Two.

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.

Jack is covered in a rash from ankle to neck and scratches himself every hour of the day and night. My bathtub is full of baby sleepers and cold water where I tried, and failed, to get the blood out of his clothes. He is crying in his room and Jamie is trying to comfort him — nothing I was doing was helping and I am now under my covers sporting silent headphones, trying to drown out the noise so I can cry and type in peace. I fear he either has or will shortly get an infection from the cuts that don’t heal, and all the doctor does is tell us to try Aveeno. Because I guess we never thought of that.

I missed a client call. I want to reschedule but everything is so up in the air, I don’t even know when to tell them. I feel horrible, guilt-ridden and sick. I feel like I’m drowning. I feel like my home business, doing what I love, is a fabulous sparkly present and I’m stomping on it daily. I feel like every time I fuck something up, little bits of sparkle wash down the drain and soon I will be left with nothing. I don’t know how in the hell I’m ever going to deliver on all of the promises I’ve made — promises I want to keep, promises I had every intention of keeping, promises that I didn’t think would be a problem.

There is no how-to in this post. I do not know how to dig my way out of this. Sometimes when something is wrong, it’s helpful to pretend that the problem belongs to someone else and you can think of the advice you’d give them. Unfortunately, under these circumstances, my advice would be trite and ridiculous. I would tell people to plug away, item by item, list by list, until they had fought their way out. I think we all know that’s delightful advice in a vacuum, but it doesn’t account for emotional states that include bursting into tears watching Ellen give away $100 gift cards to Trader Joes. Overwhelm does not occur in a vacuum and vacuum advice doesn’t help worth a damn.

The only thing I really hope to accomplish with this post is this: If you feel shitty, you’re not alone. If you feel like, now that you’ve got your itty bitty business off the ground, you’re furious with yourself for not skipping with glee every moment, it’s not just you. If you feel like nobody on the goddamn planet understands what you’re going through, at least I do. If you feel like, now that you’re at home full time, you should provide your children with home-cooked meals and wash the sheets every other day and only show quality, commercial-free programming on your television and have sex with your husband six nights a week and have a floor that’s more carpet than ground-up-Cheerio, you’re not the only one.

“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?

Even a few months ago, your article would get Stumbled. You’d get a few thumbs up. You’d feel pretty good. Your article would get 5,000 visitors in a day.

Today, a comparable article gets Stumbled. You get a few thumbs up. You feel pretty good. Your website gets a few visitors. You get a few more thumbs up. Your article gets 5,000 visitors in a month.

What happened?

What nobody’s talking about is that you’re not doing anything wrong. The rules got changed and we didn’t get the memo.

So who changed the rules? We did.

We exploited the loopholes.

Let’s imagine you find an IRS loophole. You make a killing, and then you tell everyone you can find — you want to be seen as an expert, after all. “What a cool idea!” they say, and they try it themselves. They tell all their friends. Some get in themselves, some don’t, but soon enough, the IRS catches on.

If one or two people exploit an IRS loophole, it becomes the IRS’s dirty little secret. Not worth the time and money to fix it. When dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people exploit the same loophole — especially after the originals publicly broadcasted how they made their killing — it becomes worth it, and the loophole gets shut.

No killing for you. You lose.

Digg made headlines in January when they changed their algorithm, insisting on a diversity requirement for submissions to succeed. Why did they do that? Because we tried to screw the system. We said, “Hey! If I get 200 people to Digg all my stuff, I’ll be on the front page every day. I’ll be the Social Media King of the World!”

Uh, did we seriously think they wouldn’t catch on?

We watered down the hooch.

Let’s say you’re having a party, and you’ve set aside a certain amount of booze for all of your guests. When you have 10 guests, everybody gets happily loaded and goes to bed with the wrong people and the world is as it should be.

But imagine that each of your friends invited 10 of their own friends. Or 100. Or 1,000. Then you’ve got 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people sharing the original amount of hooch. No-one’s drunk, and everybody’s looking at each other and wondering why.

What the hell did we think was going to happen?

I don’t use StumbleUpon anymore, but I still have the toolbar installed. Clicking “Stumble” three times got me these three cream of the crop websites:

Support Save — “For just $897 per month each, you can have a full-time dedicated employee or team of employees with the skills you need. Your employee(s) will have excellent English skills with almost no accent.”

Franchise Direct — “Franchise Direct’s directory provides you with a wide list of franchises for sale and business opportunities for sale. It represents top franchises and businesses.”

Wikipedia List of Acquisitions by Google — “This is a list of acquisitions by Google, a computer software and an online search engine company. Each acquisition is for the respective company in its entirety, unless otherwise specified.”

Is this seriously the best of the Internet? The best of the best? The crème de la crème? We added shit to the wine and then wondered why the wine tasted like shit.

We didn’t lose the point. We tried to screw the point.

Let’s think about the colloquial definition of “stumble upon”. When you’re going about your business and you STUMBLE UPON something noteworthy, so noteworthy that you think you should tell your friends, you want to have a way to tell them. StumbleUpon gave you the opportunity to do so. The key here was that you were going about your business. Not paying a few thousand bucks to a marketing consultant to pretend like you were going about your business.

How about Digg? According to their website, Digg defines itself like this:

Digg — All News, Videos & Images.

News. Video. Images. Go take a peek at the last thing that you dugg. Was it video? No? Was it an image? No? Was it news? I highly, highly doubt it.

Everybody’s freaking out about the bury brigades, storming around Digg and burying what they believe to be “spam”.

“But it’s not spam!” we scream.

No? Is it news? Would Dan Rather cover it? The New York Times? Hell, Kelly Ripa? USA Today? No? THEN IT’S NOT NEWS AND IT’S NOT FOR DIGG.

What about bookmarking? Remember bookmarking? You’d find something you thought was worth coming back to later, and you bookmarked it. Del.icio.us made it possible for that to be web based, so you can access your bookmarks from anywhere. If you wanted, you could even give other people access to your bookmarks and they could check out what you thought was cool.

Then people started writing posts about common factors of articles that made the front page of del.icio.us. We noticed the headline tricks and that the number 7 worked in the title and that if we put a “bookmark this” button in our copy, that we could screw the system.

Now the system is screwing us.

Is social media marketing dead? Of course not. Will it ever be the same again? Ditto.

Click here to subscribe to IttyBiz. “IttyBiz – All the Shit You Wish You Knew, and Some You Didn’t” (Today’s stupid tagline brought to you by Kelly.)

Image credit: freeparking

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.)

Anyway, somebody else (Chuck Norris? Paris Hilton? The Will It Blend guy?) said the following, and I think you’ll agree that it deserves some funky red type.

The absence of fear is not courage. The absence of fear is mental illness.

When I got those emails, I was not exactly delighted. (OK, the exhibitionist part of me was a little bit delighted.) Am I afraid that no-one will come to my blog? That people will stop coming? That I won’t meet the goals I’ve stated quite publicly to people I don’t like and who will gleefully revel in my failure?

Of course I am. But I can’t let that water me down. I can’t let that fear dominate my actions. I can’t let myself become one of those bloggers who just rehashes everybody else’s crap.

I have to hang out, being afraid, and going about my business anyway.

I’d love to make this into a handy bulleted list with lots of outgoing link love. Then everyone could bookmark it and Stumble it and Digg it and I could be the linkbait queen of the world.

Sadly, I can’t.

I can tell you what I know about fear, though. It sucks. A lot. It can paralyze you and sicken you and leave you cold and lonely. I got pregnant at 17 with a man who wasn’t exactly my soul mate. I dropped out of college and people told me I would never make anything of myself. I have been on welfare. And I run my own business.

This is scary shit, people.

So here’s my not-very-linear advice on fear.

First, acknowledge it. Get to know it. The worst thing to do with fear is pretend it’s not there. You’re not fooling anyone, least of all fear itself, and by denying its existence you just look like an idiot. Get to the root of your fear. Analyze where it comes from. Find out what you’re really afraid of.

If you think you’re afraid your business will fail, you’re not. You might be afraid of poverty, of humiliation, of never finding happiness, but you’re not afraid your business will fail. Figure out what the problem really is and stop pretending the Big White Elephant of Fear hasn’t taken up residence in the corner of your home office.

For myself, I used to be almost constantly afraid. It’s gotten better, but here are some things that are still on the list:

I’m afraid if I move to the country, I will become isolated. I’m afraid that if I’m unhappy there, that will mean I’m vacuous and shallow.

I’m afraid that if we move to the city, I will be happy and Jamie will not. I’m afraid I won’t be able to enjoy it because of the guilt.

I’m afraid of finding out five years from now that we should have had more kids. I’m much more afraid of actually having more kids.

I’m afraid that now that I’m living my dream, I will be struck by a fatal illness and not live to enjoy it. (The dream, not the fatal illness.) I’m afraid that if I tell anyone that fear, then I will jinx myself and the fear will come true.

I’m afraid that all of my gigs will fall through at the same time and Jamie and I will have to go back to working for the man.

I’m afraid people will decide that given my background (see: pregnant teenager, college dropout) I have no business calling myself an authority on anything.

I’m afraid my oldest son will stay a Mormon, serve a mission, and be brainwashed to hate me.

I’m afraid if I rest, I will fail.

Guess what, folks. Fear is normal.

As a bloggers, artists, writers, business owners, we are afraid. Trying to avoid fear, circumvent fear, or remove fear is an act of futility. Fear will not go away.

Live with fear, do your thing anyway.

But before you do that, please subscribe to my feed.