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.

A range of experts. And expertise.

I have worked with a lot of copywriters in my day, and many of them have been awesome. The thing that is occasionally not awesome is this: if you have a copywriter you love and they’re busy, you’re hosed. If they don’t do full length ebooks, you’re hosed. If they can’t do a hard sell when you need a hard sell, SURPRISE! You’re hosed.

The Pen Men have worked damn hard to build an arsenal of writers with a full range of expertise. This means they can secure jobs that a lot of one man shops can’t secure. They’ve made a concerted effort to create a portfolio of experience that encompasses a total spectrum of work. This means that if a potential customer wants it, the Pen Men can probably give it to them.

“But Naomi,” you say. “Doesn’t that violate all the rules of nicheness? Aren’t they supposed to focus on only writing Contact Us pages for life coaches in the greater Chicago area?” Yeah, keep your pants on. I’m not done, am I?

Broad capacity meets targeted specialty.

Writing is a hard and competitive business. It’s even harder and competitiver when you have a whole lot of families to feed. (Yes, I know “competitiver” isn’t a word. I did that to screw with James.) So James Chartrand and his crew have made the smart financial decision to provide their clients whatever copy they want… but. (There’s always a but, isn’t there?)

They have a specialty, and it’s rock solid. They can do whatever you need, but what they really rock at is website copy and ghostwriting ebooks. A lot of novice writers can’t take on jobs as big as a full website of copy or a full-length ebook. But the Pen Men can, and that’s where they really start to shine.

They are not niche snobs, but they still acknowledge the need to specialize. They’re not going to turn you away when you want blog posts written, but they really sparkle on the big stuff.

It’s not just about the writing.

Where a lot of would be writers (and designers, and marketers, and salespeople) fall down is forgetting that their work does not exist in a vacuum. If you’re a marketer, it helps to understand psychology. If you’re a designer, it helps to understand the human eye. And if you’re a copywriter, it helps if you understand the way people read.

James and the men realize that copy doesn’t float around in its own self-congratulatory bubble. It exists for a reason, and it is supposed to work in tandem with a host of other elements. So they highlight their branding, marketing and psychology experience when they sell their copy. They are moving their clients towards specific, measurable, tangible goals.

Higher conversion. More leads. Greater reader retention. They show their customers that they’re not just putting pretty words on a page.

So what can you learn from James?

Can you offer a broader range of services or products?

Can you get a partner to excel in new areas while you do what you rock at?

Can you show how your offering meets more needs than your competitors?

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.

Over at Your Web Coaches, we teach ittybiz owners how to think of their businesses as living things, using the metaphor of the Small-Business Tree. The leaves and branches are made up of all the marketing you do as a small-business owner, and the trunk is made up of your USP and target market.

I’m not going to offer advice on creating a USP or identifying your target market because Naomi has been there and done that. And I’m not going to give marketing advice because giving marketing advice in a guest post for IttyBiz would be like, I don’t know, showing up at Martha Stewart’s house to offer napkin-folding tips.

So I’m going to ask you to dig down to the roots of your business, the part of your business that may be invisible to anyone except you. Before you create a product, before you have your first customer, and before you write a business plan, your roots exist. Your unique roots anchor and sustain and feed you, whether your product fails or your customers desert you or your business plan goes awry.

Going back to Naomi’s post about Things, Chains, and Changing the Fucking World, she uses the word “thing” to mean one kind of root. The kind of root that gives you the strength to get up in the morning. To keep going day after day even when people think you are crazy or selfish or misguided.

No one can hand you a set of roots; you get to grow them yourself, and tap into them when you need them. They’re there whether you know they’re there or not, so the trick is to first become consciously aware of them, and then to purposefully strengthen the ones you choose.

That’s important, so I’ll say it again:

First: Become consciously aware of your roots. This can be as simple as jotting down the roots that you know exist, or as complicated as going on a soul-searching retreat and immersing yourself in personal-growth hippie-talk for a week.

Second: Purposefully strengthen the roots you choose. This is an ongoing (lifelong, probably) process. A business-speak way to put it would be something like “creating and maintaining systems that support your business.” Be ruthless in pruning the roots that don’t support you and drain your energy, too.

It’s my firm belief that your business roots are inseparable from the roots of your life as a whole (this is one reason why so many people are ultimately unfulfilled in so-called “regular jobs” — when you put in eight hours a day devoting your energy to someone else’s dream, your own life roots suffer).

There’s a saying about how you find out who your real friends are in a crisis. This applies to roots as well. Your real, true, live roots are not fickle. They don’t desert you when the going is tough or when money is tight. No, during these times your roots literally ground and anchor you; they remind you what is true and what you’re working so hard for.

So your roots deserve your full attention, and your conscious energy to grow them.

Businesses that lose (or maybe never had) their roots are sad and soulless. When you chop down a tree and sever its roots, you kill it. Without roots, a tree can be gorgeous (think Christmas trees!) but it’s totally and completely dead. You can stick it in a bucket of water, but in a week or so the needles will be turning brown and dropping off no matter what you do.

All the tinsel in the world can’t disguise a dead tree, and all the slick, fake marketing tricks in the world can’t disguise a soulless business. Stick to what’s real and alive, and your business (and your life) will thank you.

***

Wendy Cholbi teaches people how to consciously grow their businesses in an organic, heart-centered way. Along the way, she helps people make friends with technology so they can spend more time doing the things they love and less time stressing out about hiring a webmaster. For a free half-hour of tech hand-holding, free ebooks, and info on upcoming workshops, visit YourWebCoaches.com.

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.

Turns out it was not, in fact, the garden fairies that made the comments come, as was previously believed. I was just a dumbass and forgot to disable them from the starfucking post because I was all jetlagged and shit.

OK. Now this is the part of the post where I stop any pretense of making sense and just vomit it all out on the page. If you can make anything out of it, you’re a better person than I. I just do not have it in me to be coherent about this issue.

Here’s the thing. I liked the comments. They were good. They were not left by assholes or stupid people. And for a little moment of weakness I thought to myself, “Hmm… maybe it’s time to start rethinking the comments thing.”

(If you’re new to the blog, I took comments off to much public fanfare and/or derision. Some people said it was awesome. Some people said they gave my business six months before it collapsed in a blaze of fire and brimstone. What is brimstone, by the way?)

Anyway, I’m just all fucked up about the whole thing. Here are some random thoughts:

1. If I have comments back, am I going to have to respond to everybody?

2. Is the comment quality high because the ability to comment is rare? Will the comments become shitty if everybody gets to do it all the time?

3. Do you guys even WANT to comment?

4. Would you comment if you knew sometimes I couldn’t respond?

5. Is it reasonable to have a comment policy that consists of “If you’re a dick, we’re deleting you” and nothing else?

If you have anything to contribute on these or any other marginally relevant topics, I would appreciate it. Naturally, comments are open. :)

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.

Secondly, I don’t need a duck. I have a shaved head. Which leads us to…

Why do you have a shaved head? It’s weird/ugly/pretty/brazen/sexy!

My public answer: because I’m really fucking lazy.

My actual answer: I have Buddhist tendencies. Not only do I sort of think that if I zen out enough I can be Pema Chodron, but I also think it’s not healthy to obsess over your hair. And I spent a lot of my life thinking about whether I should cut it or dye it or grow it out or get a perm or whatever. Finally I decided that if I spent as much time thinking about my business as I did about my hair, I’d be a far richer woman.

Plus, I’m really fucking lazy.

Why did you move to England?

My mother lives in England. I suffer from depression which worsens in winter. It’s easier and cheaper to travel. (Well, other than traveling to places like Manitoba and Detroit.) My husband was born here. Those are all good and true reasons, but there was another more personal one.

Throughout my very young life — I say, at all of 27 and yes, I see the irony — I told myself that I wouldn’t buy a house unless I could afford to buy it in cash. (This is a very convenient way to avoid thinking about settling down and buying a house and I recommend it to anyone.) This was all well and good when I was poor.

But then our financial situation changed and I realized I was in a position where I could actually start seriously thinking about buying a house in cash. And I looked around and said, “Holy shit! I don’t want to pay two hundred grand to live here for the rest of my life!”

So we moved to England where nobody can afford to buy a house. Now I don’t have to think about it anymore.

Why don’t you have comments on your blog?

You can read this post for the initial explanation in all its ranty, furious, pissed off glory, but I’m guessing you’re looking for more? (My initial reasoning still stands, by the way.)

At the time of that writing, comments here were getting ridiculous. It was not uncommon to get more than 75 comments per post, and for a long time I was writing five days a week. It was almost completely unmanageable.

A lot of people were really angry about that post. People saw “meaningless conversations” and they thought I was talking about them as an individual. Unfortunately, the fifty people leaving awesome comments were drowned out by the five hundred people leaving shitty ones. So it goes, sometimes.

Several other bloggers wrote about this, and there were a lot of comments from people with very small blogs — ones with no business attached, and run by either students or unemployed people — saying that they cherished and responded to every single comment and that I was basically a big, fat, disgusting sell-out.

I run a pretty big little business here. At that time, I did not have staff. I was absolutely drowning in work. I was going to bed crying, only to get up and go back to work four hours later. I would go days without seeing my kid. Something had to give, and it was comments.

In the intervening period, I’ve hired some staff and things aren’t so crazy anymore. (Transatlantic move notwithstanding.) And I’ve given a lot of thought to the idea of reinstating comments. People ask me to do it a lot. But then there’s the other reason, one that nobody really needs to know but I’ll tell you anyway.

When you’re used to huge amounts of validation from strangers in your comments, it’s easy to get addicted to that. It’s easy to get your self-esteem from it. And it’s easy to feel really shitty when you only get sixty comments. (Yes, I’m well aware how ridiculous that sentence was to type. I’m trying to be honest here.) And I was going into my comments every time I wrote something I thought was good, over and over, thinking, “Did James come? Bob? Havi? Brian? What about Michael?” And it was really fucking unhealthy.

When you start basing your worth as a person on what people say in your blog comments, something’s got to change.

So yes. I will open up comments every now and again — like on this post — when it’s relevant or helpful or if I’m feeling like shooting the shit. But as it stands right now, no. I’m not opening them back up on a regular basis.

Why do you charge what you charge?

When I started consulting in small chunks — at the beginning it was two hours at a time — I thought that I was doing a favour for the little guy. Make it super cheap, I thought, and all the broke people will be able to hire me and I will win the Socialist Business Owner of the Year award. But the people who were hiring me at $50 an hour were not IttyBiz’s that couldn’t afford higher rates. They were high end professionals who liked scoring a deal.

People looking for a deal are NEVER happy. Never. Brand this into your brain.

I had web designers and wedding photographers and e-commerce store owners clearing more than ten thousand American dollars a month telling me they didn’t get their fifty bucks worth. Fuck that.

Plus it cuts down on the wait list.

Are you really going to be topless in Marketing 101?

If I told you that, you wouldn’t sign up. Jesus — do you think people are here for my brain?

When is SEO School going back on the market?

It’s been back on the market since September. In my efforts not to pimp it out so much, I tried to not make TOO big a deal about it. In so doing, it would appear that half the people reading this blog have no idea it’s available. Go here if you’re interested. Or click through to the site and click on the ninja.

Why is there no price on the SEO School page?

Because I forgot. It’s $39, by the way.

Can you charge in Canadian dollars/Australian dollars/pounds/euros?

No. As long as 80% of my customers are American, I’m charging in American dollars.

Are you really homeschooling your kid?

Yes. I reserve the right to change my mind when he turns four and starts asking questions neither Jamie nor I can answer.

Is your other kid really a Mormon who lives with your ex’s parents?

I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried, people.

Anyway, that’s me done. If you have questions or just want to hang out and chat, feel free to jump in. I’ll be around pretty much all day.

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.

I was pregnant and chasing a toddler around a too small apartment that we hadn’t even had the time to move out of, but we were happy. Busy and tired, but happy.

I knew that I was working too much and I knew that I had to slow down and I knew that when the baby came I wouldn’t be able to keep consulting the way I was, but I thought that was something I could deal with when the time came. Running your own business is like that. Feast or famine. Ride the wave for as long as it lasts.

I wasn’t really taking good care of myself, but I was busy. I was earning a living. I was helping to feed my growing family.

Then I got sick. I got hit with a killer flu and couldn’t work for about two weeks. I had a far-too-high fever that just wouldn’t break. Jack was sick, Jamie was sick, I was sick. I was missing deadlines, but I knew there were more deadlines looming on the horizon. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to catch up, even if I wasn’t pregnant and throwing up and recovering from the flu.

And then I lost the baby.

Deadlines that had been missed would never be recovered. Coaching clients I had put off wouldn’t be brought back. The perfect little baby that was going to be the perfect finishing touch to our perfect little family was never going to come into this world.

I felt like it was totally my fault. If I hadn’t worked straight through the weekends, if I’d taken more care of myself, if I’d rested when I knew I needed it, if I’d listened to my husband when he told me I was pushing too hard.

If, if, if.

I was recovering from a miscarriage, recovering from the flu, stressed about deadlines, stressed about how we were going to keep making money, stressed that I’d burned too many bridges, and stressed that I’d brought the whole thing on myself.

Add a panic disorder and some residual post-partum depression left over from when Jack was born and you’ve got a recipe for not a whole lot of work getting done in the Dunford household.

Things got better, obviously. With Jamie’s help, we thought of some ways to make it so our income wasn’t so dependent on my consulting gigs. We pulled through. We mended the bridges I thought I’d burnt. By the middle of summer, we were back to good.

In July, my mother came to visit from England and she looked like hell. She was commuting three hours a day to a job she hated where she was getting bossed around by some young bitch with a power complex. Her body was rebelling against her. The arthritis that had only been a twinge the last time I’d seen her had taken over her hips and her knees. She was covered in rashes from the stress.

My beautiful, strong, vibrant Maman looked old. Tired. Left behind.

We started talking about what she could do to get out of the job, but she was worried about getting clients in a crap economy. We tried to think of ways that she could get around it, things she could do to meet her (frankly very low) financial needs without relying on one source of income that could dry up at any time.

We talked about affiliate marketing, where she could review products that were made for people like her. We talked about setting up some little websites that could bring in a tiny bit of money every month. We talked about maybe having her do some VA work, maybe pick up some graphic design gigs again.

Long story short, I was able to hire my mom as my assistant. But if this business of mine collapses tomorrow, she’s safe in knowing that all her eggs are not in this basket.

She knows she’s going to be OK.

Business kept getting better. Money kept coming in from the little income streams we’d set up. We were able to hire my husband’s best friend, an incredibly hard worker who’s had a tough time finding work since the dot com bust. He’s been working hard co-ordinating the launch of Online Business School and he’s been seeing what we’ve been working on.

Then the other day he called us to ask about e-commerce. He’s thinking of setting up a little store. This diversification thing might not be too bad an idea after all.

This is why I’m doing this.

Online Business School launches tomorrow, and yes, I hope that those of you who can afford it choose to buy it. But whether you buy it or not is in the grand scheme of things pretty unimportant.

This is what’s important.

I never, ever, ever want you to feel like you can’t do it.

I never want you to feel like you’re too old.

I never want you to feel like you’re too stupid.

I never want you to feel like you don’t have enough education.

I never want you to feel like you don’t have enough time.

I never want you to feel like your health’s not good enough.

I never want you to feel like you’ve got too many obligations.

I never want you to feel like you’ve got too many kids.

I never want you to feel like it’s too late to get started.

I never want you to feel like it’s impossible.

I never, ever, ever want you to lose hope.

I dropped out of high school at 17 to give birth to my oldest son. I dropped out of college after less than a semester, living in a homeless shelter with my 2 year old for the better part of a year. I started this IttyBiz with no money and thousands of dollars in debt. And this year IttyBiz is going to make over $200,000.

If this last week in American politics has taught us anything, it’s taught us that anything is possible.

I beg you, please diversify. Please protect your family’s income. Buy OBS, don’t buy OBS, it doesn’t matter. But please take the steps you need to take to protect your loved ones from this horrible economy.

It’s not too hard, I promise you.

I got an email last night that I want to share with you.

How long will the stuff you are sending be posted? (She’s talking about the free lessons I’ve been sending by email.) Because I’m really new to this, and I know I really need it, but here’s the thing. I have two disabled children, who are young adults now, but still require lots of time. I’m taking care of my elderly parents (my dad lives with me) and I work full time.

Listening to the first audio really made me think that maybe, just maybe, I can do this crazy internet thing, and make money at it. So, thanks for inspiring me; and please let me know if there is some way I can capture your information to do later.

If you don’t have the money to buy my course, I’ve been there. To all of you who have emailed me privately telling me how much you wish you could afford it, how you’re going to try to find the money from somewhere, I am so, so, so grateful for your loyalty, but PLEASE DON’T BUY IT.

Take the two hundred bucks and put a few extra presents under the tree instead. Then go to Problogger and read the archives. (The 31 Days To Better Blogging Series’ are particularly good.) Take the 30 Day Challenge. Read Entrepreneur’s Journey. That’s how I learned it.

If you don’t have any money, watch my free stuff to get a little bit of income coming in before you start buying anybody’s info products or home study courses or ebooks. (As of today, the link for the free stuff is just the free stuff. By tomorrow it will be a sales page but all the content will be in there. You can go back as often as you want and I’m never going to take it down.)

But please, please remember. As the kind and brave woman who emailed me said so well, you CAN do this crazy internet thing, and make money at it. And next Christmas WILL be different.

“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.

Readers’ Digest version:

Some people are pissed/annoyed/disillusioned/confused about me taking SEO School off the market. They were pissed before, but after last week’s posts came out, they became uberpissed. They are the Pisserati.

The haters seem to fall into one of four camps:

They’re pissed they didn’t get a copy. They’re pissed they didn’t have a chance to get in on the affiliate program. They’re pissed because I have confirmed their theory that all marketing people are dirty, filthy whores. A few nice ones just think it was a stupid business decision. (Thank you, Mark, for being one of the nice ones. I truly appreciate your input and your kindness.)

I guess it doesn’t matter that you spend 364 days of the year being funny and informative and taking your shirt off to make marketing seem a little less boring or scary. All that really matters is that you made one decision that inconvenienced a few people.

Here’s a nice little story for you:

Once upon a time, it occurred to me that on average, SEO consultants charge more on an hourly basis than any other professionals I have encountered in my career. It is not unusual for an SEO to charge $1000 an hour. We’ll hit that again for those who haven’t had a coffee yet.

$1000 an hour.

Now, I’m pretty big into the whole “price to value” thing. A good SEO can give you enough information in an hour to earn you six figures in a year, easy. (Imagine being number one in Google for, say, “baby gift”. And imagine your products are dropshipped, meaning you don’t actually have to scale for that growth, you just have to cash the checks. Then tell me your SEO wasn’t worth a thousand bucks.) So I take no issue with an honest SEO charging that kind of rate.

At the same time, I write a blog for IttyBiz owners and wannabes. I write for people who don’t know if they can justify the purchase of a printer. My readers cannot afford a thousand dollars an hour. They can’t afford a printer, for God’s sake.

“Hey!” I thought. “I should write a book about SEO and then people could spend a little bit of money but get a basic understanding and their traffic wouldn’t suck. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

After some wine thought, I figured that it would be really cool to offer support for the book so that when people had questions I could, you know, answer them. Instead of saying, “Of course I can answer your question IF YOU HIRE ME AS A CONSULTANT BWAHAHA!”

So I wrote a little book and sold it and it was all cool.

After a while, I realized that my readership was growing. I knew I wouldn’t be able to support new buyers in perpetuity, so I figured I’d stop selling it. I knew that when I took the book off the shelves, there would be a small spike in sales. I figured it would be nice to take it off the market BEFORE I hit my limit, thereby insuring the small spike in sales didn’t put me over capacity and render the support thing a big, fat lie.

So I put it out on the blog that in a few weeks, the book would no longer be for sale. I got the small spike in sales and I got on with my life.

Then Mr. Copyblogger himself picked up the story and compared me to Aaron Wall and the shit hit the fan.

Now I’m “dirty”. I’m a “typical fucking marketer”. I’m “totally dishonest”. Oh, and let’s not forget that I’m “raping my readers”. People I have never heard of in my life were emailing me telling me that they didn’t appreciate my scarcity tactics. That I was depriving people of information.

It’s not food. It’s not shelter. It’s a 52 page ebook that starts by telling readers to take off their pants.

Mark and I were on Twitter, and he voiced his thoughts very well:

“Very interesting, Naomi. I’ve always had a very different strategy with product releases… It seems the demand is frothed up now.”

We talked about this separately, but for everyone else, here’s something to think about:

Taking it off the market didn’t froth up demand. Brian Clark telling 40,000 people I was taking it off the market frothed up demand. I didn’t know he was going to do it. It was no great strategy. It wasn’t the Marketing Master Plan. Yes, I AM a marketing genius, but some things really are just luck.

So now I have a bunch of strangers telling me they want the book, support or no support. I have a bunch of other strangers telling me that threatening to take my book off the shelves was filthy.

I figure I have two options:

1. Keep the book off the shelves, disappointing group A and leaving money on the table.

2. Put the book back on the shelves without support, thoroughly convincing group B that I am indeed a dirty, filthy marketer who only said it was coming off the shelves to sell a few more books.

I figure I’m basically fucked no matter what I do, so I may as well let you guys tell me what you think. This ain’t a vote, and I’ve never been known for following advice, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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.)

If you want to buy it, do so here.

So there. That’s it. My big ass push for my book. It’s like anti-marketing.

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.

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

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.

So, without any further ado, let’s get to it. The title of this piece is “Why I like My Wife”, and it will be about exactly that. Oh, and for the record I am stone cold sober right now. Not that that should be surprising or anything.

She doesn’t let me get away with any crap.

Out of all my friends and family, Naomi knows me the best. She knows me better than I know myself. This is awesome because whenever I am in a quandary she can tell me exactly what I should do. Not in a bad, domineering way, but in a “If you don’t do x you will be really pissed off with yourself”, and she is always right. Always. It’s kinda scary.

She lets me try anything.

When I had a job I really didn’t like, she was the first one to tell me to leave. Even though it was her turn to stop working and stay at home, she surprised me at work on my lunch hour one day and said to me “Guess what? I got a job. Now you can go quit yours.” I did, that afternoon. We hadn’t even really spoken about me quitting, she just knew how much I didn’t like going to work in the morning. When I wanted to try out going back to school, she was behind me all the way. When school didn’t work out, she didn’t blame me or complain about the wasted tuition money. She simply told me that school wasn’t working, it was worth a try but it was time to move on to other and better things.

She is patient.

For the last 7 months or so I have been at home and watching over Jack. She has seen me struggle at times trying to take care of our son but never once has she tried to tell me the “right” way to do it (unless of course I asked her to). She has always let me find my own way to do things and my relationship thus far with our son has been awesome because of it.

There are a lot more reasons but I am not the writer Naomi is and I won’t bother you nice people any longer. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. Oh, BTW- if you happen to be in the London Ontario area anytime after Tues, April 8th be sure to stop by and visit me at Victoria Hospital, which is where I’ll be once Naomi has read this. She does not like surprises.

Thanks again!
Jamie

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