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.

It’s fairly new, and it’s one of those women’s only deals that markets nice things, not sleazy things. Body balms, belly dancing costumes, very lovey dovey. It’s a good idea, and from what I can tell, business is going gangbusters. (Do things “go gangbusters” or do they “do gangbusters”? Is “gangbusters” really a word I should be using when discussing sex shops?)

So I go in and it’s all pink lighting and nice displays and there is a zero sleaze factor. There’s even a sign on the door that says, very politely, that they don’t sell novelty items so don’t even ask. Everything is going well. My could-be shopping experience is all good.

There is a charming little dog that comes up and sniffs my shoes and then goes back to biting his chew toy. There is a woman behind the counter talking to someone on the phone. The person she’s speaking to appears to be her girlfriend. She says “fuck” a lot, but in a nice way, like I do.

By all accounts, this is the kind of a place I wouldn’t mind shopping.

So I head over to the books, the DVDs, the massage oils. There are even locally made massage balms that come in 100% post-consumer recycled tins. What more can you want in a sex shop? I mean, really!

I pick up a set of three of these little balms, very much like the Body Butters that you buy at the Body Shop. These things are so classy I would give them to my mother-in-law in her Christmas stocking. They’re beautiful. They have little testers that smell heavenly. I’m a little bit in love. I turn over the tin to see the price, bracing myself for something I imagine will be terrifying.

Oh, it’s terrifying alright. There’s no price.

Hmm. Weird. I look at the other ones. No price. No price, no price, no price. No price on the movies, no price on the books, no price on the belly dancing bindi things. There’s a sign that says clothes and candles are 50% off, but 50% off what, we’ll never know.

Everybody’s heard the term, “If you have to ask, it’s too expensive.” This is true when it comes to high-end call girls and Lamborghini’s, but I don’t think it should be true in retail stores located between a teapot shop and a dog groomer. We’re not exactly on Saville Row here, people.

Here’s a little lesson for sex shops everywhere:

“How much for the pink vibrator?” is not a question anyone ever wants to have to ask.

I’ve said it a trillion times before, and I’ll keep saying it until I’m dead.

Eliminate barriers to purchase.

Making me say “vibrator” in front of my toddler constitutes a barrier to purchase. If I feel uncomfortable, I’m going to leave. If I’m going to leave, I’m not going to buy. Bottom line.

Lesson for everyone who does NOT run a sex shop: Have someone impartial and inexperienced check your sales process for barriers. Have them try to buy something from your online store. Have them try out the Contact form on your website. Listen to what they say. You might be surprised.

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Image: preciouskhyatt (NSFW.)

“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

“Oh, I stand by my not-so-casual disregard for the semicolon. It all stems from my tattoo. One morning, a teensy bit hungover, I decided to get my tattoo. (My tattoo, and not a tattoo. It had been in the works for a while. This was not a flight of fancy.) I have four Japanese symbols across my back, gleaned from a Japanese-English dictionary. In case you weren’t aware, Japanese-English dictionaries are printed in 6-point font. Like 6 Sigma, but with less “Sigma” and more “point font”.

Anyway, there I am in the tattoo parlour, all by my lonesome on a rainy Tuesday morning, design in hand. Said design has been photocopied and enlarged to within an inch of its life. It begged for mercy and I didn’t care. I settle in to the chair and raise the back of my shirt. Anthony, my friendly neighborhood tattoo parlor employee, asks where exactly I want the ink.

“Right above the bra line,” I say.

“What bra would that be?” Anthony is amused.

I guess I hadn’t worn one. This was before I nursed three ungrateful children.

Anyway, I was totally embarrassed and in a rush to get out. When we were done, I thanked him profusely and essentially ran like hell.

Upon my return home, I showed my roommate. He had seen the desired design many times, so he knew what he was looking for. I pulled up the back of my shirt, removed the gauze, and showed the new art.

“Dude, is that a fucking semicolon on your back?”

Yes, it would seem that in our haste, nobody took the semicolon from the dictionary entry out of the design and it now lives for eternity on my skin.

Moral of the Story: Always Proofread.

If you’re new here, you don’t know the joy that is Moral Of The Story. You may want to check out:

Moral Of The Story: Problogger Edition
Wherein I almost unleash semicolon style rage on Darren Rowse.

Moral Of The Story: Neocitran Edition
Wherein I figure out why I didn’t do too well as a freelance writer.

Moral Of The Story: Marketing To Alcoholics Edition
The one that made Moral Of The Story famous.

Moral Of The Story: Psycho Blogger Edition (With Bonus!)
This is a guest post from my husband, Jamie. Wherein I interrupt, graphically comparing PLR to child pornography and say a very bad word.

Moral Of The Story: Generally Ashamed Edition
Wherein my customer service skills are put to the test.

After all that, how can you not subscribe?

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.