(Off topic: Have you read about the 12.5% solution yet? No? Get off your ass, honey. This shit is killer.)

This post is part of a series that will tell you how to create your USP by looking at other real, live ittybiz owners who have done it and kicked ass at it.

James Chartrand and the other fine gentlemen (and gentleladies) at Men with Pens are making quite a splash on the interwebs for pretty much being the go-to guys for design and copy, all in one place. That’s not an easy feat when everybody and their schnauzer thinks they can be a writer or web designer on the internet.

Today, we’re going to talk about the copy side of Men with Pens and what you can learn from that in your own ittybiz.

By Naomi Dunford - May 21, 2009 in Personal, Small Business Marketing - 5 Comments
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(This is a guest post from the lovely Wendy Cholbi. Wendy is running a course on creating a website and the business to go with it starting TOMORROW, so if you’re at all interested, go right now. Yes, before you read the post. The post will still be here when you’re done.)

Why are you reading this?

No, seriously, I don’t mean to be flippant or anything here, but why are you reading this, really?

In fact, I’m going to take a step back and ask you why you’re in business to begin with (or why you want to start a business if you haven’t yet).

Most business and marketing advice starts with your products, your business plan, or your customers.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 31, 2009 in Personal, Small Business Marketing - 1 Comment
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Fucking conferences. You meet cool people with really cool thoughts and then you start thinking. I blame Chris Guillebeau. He is generally the one responsible for me deciding to do stupid shit like change my entire business model to live on a houseboat. God dammit. (DO NOT email me to ask if I am really going to live on a houseboat. As of now, no, but if I keep talking to Chris, it’s always a possibility.)

I was going to write a post today about Zappos and how much they suck. (Only on IttyBiz, people. We like to buck the trends.) But when I went into my admin panel to start typing, I saw… comments.

If you don’t have a blog, you probably don’t understand that this is VERY DISCONCERTING for someone who does not have comments enabled on their site. Comments came out of the ether.

By Naomi Dunford - Mar 20, 2009 in Personal - 82 Comments
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Every now and again, when I’m feeling too cocky about being The Greatest And Funniest Marketer In Christendom, I like to read some of my emails to make me realize exactly how badly I communicate with my blog readers. If you are an aspiring marketing consultant or world famous blogger, I recommend this on a regular basis.

Therefore, some questions from my inbox. I only include ones I’ve received more than once.

Havi has a duck. Why don’t you have a duck?

First of all, I have publicly stated that Havi’s duck is a whore. You can tell by the look on her face. I can’t speak for Havi, but I’m not the type of girl to have a whore for a sidekick. If anybody in this business is going to be a whore, it’s going to be me.

By Naomi Dunford - Jan 22, 2009 in Personal, Small Business Marketing - 61 Comments
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I tried to make this a video post but I kept crying. We buy this totally sexy new video camera for the expressed purpose of shooting videos like the one you’re not currently watching and we can’t use the damn thing because I keep bursting into tears. Therefore, you just get a blog post and I can sob and sniffle as much as I want and you can’t even tell.

Na na na na na na.

In February of this year, my consulting and freelancing career was doing better than I’d ever hoped was possible. Four months earlier I was able to hire Jamie (if you’re new, that’s my husband) to come and work for IttyBiz. We were drowning in clients and earning about four times the average household income in this country. Things were going well.

By Naomi Dunford - Nov 11, 2008 in Personal
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There’s an ancient Scottish saying that I love:

“Build a thousand bridges and they’ll never call you a bridge builder. Fuck one sheep and you’re a sheep fucker for life.”

(Prove it’s not an ancient Scottish saying. Go on, prove it.)

It seems like a large portion of the world has taken it upon themselves to email me and tell me they hate me. I’m used to hate mail, but this has been a special time. I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a whole year’s worth of fuck-you, all in the matter of less than a month.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 25, 2008 in Personal - 102 Comments
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August 8th Update: As of today, SEO School is no longer available for purchase. Read about legitimizing scarcity in marketing for why.

So, yeah. Hi.

There’s this guy called Brian Clark. He writes a blog called Copyblogger. You might have heard of it.

He wrote a review of Ninja SEO School. Um, I’m pretty stoked.

Since everybody knows that everything you read on A-List blogs is true, now you can safely buy my book and know it’s not shit. If it’s good enough for Copyblogger, it’s good enough for you.

In related news, the aforementioned Ninja SEO School is going off the shelves tomorrow night at midnight EST. (OK, fine. Who am I kidding? Nobody in this house is going to be in any condition to be taking down sales pages tomorrow night at midnight. You’ve probably got till at least 3 AM. Count your lucky stars we’re alcoholics.)

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 7, 2008 in Personal - 10 Comments
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My email is back to trying to kill me again. If you have something that’s urgent, please send it to naomi DOT dunford AT rogers DOT com or call me at 519-204-1398.

Otherwise, we’re redirecting the @ittybiz.com over to gmail over the weekend so if it’s not urgent you can safely email the normal address on Monday and I’ll get it just dandy.

Payments go through my personal email, so for those of you who have sent payments in the last couple days, thank you, and I got them.

Thank you for your patience, and for those of you who are so inclined there’s plenty of space in the comments to say “I told you so”.

***

Think you need a micro-business marketing consultant? Click here to get started.

By Naomi Dunford - May 16, 2008 in Personal - 5 Comments
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I’m in email retrieval hell right now since GoDaddy is trying to kill me. If you’ve sent email and haven’t heard back, you don’t have to resend — they seem to be all there, but in a totally random order and there are millions of them. I will get back to you as soon as humanly possible, but now I’m going to bed and collapsing.

Do you think I can still do internet marketing without actually using a computer?

By Naomi Dunford - May 6, 2008 in Personal - 6 Comments
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Hi everyone, Jamie from IttyBiz here. It’s about 5 am here on Tuesday morning, Jack is as asleep as he’ll ever be and Naomi is sleeping blissfully unaware that I have hijacked her little home business blog for this one post. Believe me, when she realizes it I’m sure there will be more than a few computer passwords changed around our house.

Before I get started with the real reason I called you all here, let me take care of a few administrative things that may help minimize the amount of damage I sustain when Naomi finds out about this. First – please read her post Home Business Mistakes: What Would You Do Differently?. By doing so you will ensure I will not have to hear about how I knocked her most recent post off the front page of her blog. Secondly, please do not let her know about this on Twitter. We all know how often she is on Twitter and I need the time to come up with a good alibi proving that this could not possibly be me writing this right now. Thanks for your support.

By Jamie Dunford - Apr 8, 2008 in Personal - 28 Comments
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