OK. I’m not totally drunk. I have had about two glasses of wine. Well, I’ve had them recently and in fairly rapid succession, sure. But it’s not like I’m loaded.

This is obviously a highly relative statement considering I just spent the weekend in Dublin. I have not been in Ireland since 1989, when I was eight. I would like to tell you, as an aside, that EVERY SINGLE THING you’ve heard about Ireland is true. I stepped off the plane at 8:50 in the morning and the very first thing I saw, before customs, before the little “do you have anything to declare?”, before THE BATHROOMS was a pub.

In the airport. A fully operational pub. Before nine o’clock in the morning.

And who was in the pub? I’m glad you asked. A full team of rugby players — maybe 30 of them? — all in uniform and all drinking Guinness.

(I then saw four separate nuns, but that has nothing to do with alcohol. Fuck, I hope it has nothing to do with alcohol.)

Anyway, moving on to marketing. I got an email today from someone I know. This person has bought IttyBiz stuff before and I like her very much. (Not because she buys my stuff. I like her AND she buys my stuff. It’s not causal.)

She is considering taking Marketing 101 and she had a question. The question was about the course but it is so much more super importanter than just the course. It’s vital — please read it and my response.

“I don’t think of my thing as an online-business. I’ve been running it for almost 4 years earning about 30k a year without any online presence whatsoever. I am now in the process of getting a website organized AND shifting some things about how I do what I do that will involve a few more online things but I think my marketing strategy is going to be a lot more old-fashioned.

On top of that, I’m not sure how online-savvy my target market are or at least how much they use the internet for anything other than work. I had a client recently who sent me a cheque by Canada Post because she had never heard of PayPal. Note, not because she had some weird issues with PayPal. She had never heard of it.

So, sometimes I think your thing is really the online whatnot and that scares the crap out of me because I feel like a dolt and don’t do facebook (or Ravelry which is facebook for knitters, and thus much more likely) or Twitter or any of that. I like e-mail lists and blogs and Havi’s kitchen table is the first forum thing I’ve participated in ever.

So what do you think? Is this course going to help anyway? (that question about fine tuning the target market sure sounds helpful) Or is it really for someone else?”

(I’ve taken out all the personal advice I gave her that’s course specific because that’s boring. What’s below is what’s important for you to read.)

Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you how excited I am to be answering this question. Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous but most of what I say sounds ridiculous so everybody should be used to it by now.

I hate, hate, hate that people think I’m an internet marketing consultant. I am a marketing consultant with a considerable online presence, and a higher than usual percentage of my clients run online businesses. (This is because people who run online businesses are more likely to read business blogs than people who don’t, but that’s where the connection ends.)

But I have ZERO time for Facebook et al and I was dragged into Twitter kicking and screaming. And those are the two least trendy ones there are! (For the record, I love Twitter. But my sum total marketing advice for Twitter users is “Be cool, make lots of friends, and every now and again you might want to subtly encourage them to buy your stuff”. It’s fucking LIFE advice, not Twitter advice.)

Come to think of it, even Online Business School was only half about stuff that was by necessity online. Service businesses, product businesses, coaching and consulting — none of those even need a website! And the damn thing’s called ONLINE Business School!

The theory (warning: soapbox ahead) behind everything I do at IttyBiz is that I want to teach people how to THINK marketing. Once you know how to think like a marketer, the details of what kind of business you have or how you run it or whether you’re online or offline or whatever become insanely easy, and therefore the kind of thing you can figure out yourself without having to pay someone to do it for you.

The idea is that once you know what triggers the buying process, how the buying process works, what kind of stuff encourages sales and what kind of stuff discourages sales — all that is universally applicable. That’s why I can do what I do — I don’t know specific markets better than other people. I know how to make people buy stuff better than other people.

You don’t have to know a market to tell a person how they can better sell in it. You just have to think like a marketer and then add common sense.

That’s what I do on my consults. We talk about what the person’s trying to sell and we think, “Hmm. Out of all the people in the world, who do we think would like to buy this?” And if we’ve already nailed that then we start playing imagination games. “I wonder what they would like to buy. I wonder how they would feel if we did this. What do you imagine would happen if we did that?”

It’s educated daydreaming, for God’s sake.

So, no, please don’t worry about the online thing.

(And if you ever, ever, EVER catch me selling a product about marketing through any kind of social networking website you have permission to take me out to the back and shoot me. Sure, I have thoughts on those things. But I’m not going to make people pay money for them.)