Blog - Page 40 of 43

How To Ask For Feedback… And Get A Decent Answer

August 12, 2014
Small Business Marketing
by Naomi Dunford

How to ask for feedback

I was in a conversation on Facebook recently with a woman I’ve known for a long time.

This lovely lady has a new venture she’s working very hard on, and she’s wondering if she can send it over to get my feedback.

(Incidentally, IttyBiz is on Facebook! Please come and click Like and validate our existence! Ahem. This was done for many reasons, most prominent among them that my mother and my kids have been nagging me for years. You’ll be happy to know that now IttyBiz is on Facebook, they have moved on to nagging me about Pinterest and YouTube, respectively. I believe this has been the plan all along.)

Anyway, feedback.

If you are involved in any type of creative or innovative enterprise, you undoubtedly find yourself in a similar position. We’re all desperate for feedback.

We ask our friends and family but they’re non-commital. Or their answer is so pathetically simpering that it wasn’t worth asking. Or, upon hearing their answer, you realize they were the wrong person to ask because they’re utterly unqualified to even have an opinion.

Or the last time we asked, one of those things happened, and we’re not going to do THAT again, and now we’re in an echo chamber.

We ask critique partners, and colleagues, and mentors, and consistently, we don’t get what we’re looking for, or sometimes, we don’t get anything at all.

In my chat with the lovely lady, I was able to put words to something I’ve been trying to articulate for a long time, and I thought I’d use the power of push button publishing to share it here today. Perhaps it will be useful to you.

10 Perfectly Good Ways to Market Your Business, and What to Do If You Don’t Like Any Of Them

August 4, 2014
Small Business Marketing
by Naomi Dunford

There are a lot of ways to market an Internet business these days. Off the top of my head, here are 10.

(Free cookie to the first person who catches the connecting theme.*)

Serious, very active blogging
Serious, very active video production
Serious, very active podcasts
Serious, very active social media usage
Serious, very active in-person networking
Serious, very active advertising
Serious, very active outreach like guest posting, interviews, etc
Serious, very active PR campaigning
Serious, very active SEO
Serious, very active public speaking

(*It is a virtual cookie. It is a cookie of the mind.)

Now, I have repeatedly said that if anybody says you MUST do any of the above, or any other marketing activity specifically, that you should throw eggs at them. If someone says you MUST blog, or MUST make videos, or you MUST whatever, well, yes. We implement the egg rule. (If you do happen to hate and/or suck at blogging, for instance, we have addressed that topic here.)

But while it is true that there’s nothing we specifically have to do, the one specific thing we have to do is… something.

Write Like It Never Happened

July 26, 2014
Small Business Marketing
by Naomi Dunford

ShareSharePinTweetEmail So I had writers’ block for four years. That is not an exaggeration. There was a week in the summer of 2010 when I had two life-changing conversations. In both of these conversations, each had with different people, and for different reasons, and ostensibly on different topics, the people I was speaking with suggested […]

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys

May 23, 2014
Small Business Marketing
by Naomi Dunford

Let’s talk about drama and distraction. Some examples would be in order.

Example One!

Your seven-year-old is yelling at your five-year-old because he’s hogging all the good toys and why does he always have to be such a pain anyway and doesn’t he know he’s supposed to SHARE and that he should totally get in big trouble, right now …

Example Two!

Your mother is calling to tell you about something your sister did and can you BELIEVE it and Susan can’t always expect Mom to bail her out of yet another situation she shouldn’t have gotten herself into in the first place – and another thing, now that we’re talking about Susan …

Example Three!

Someone on the internet is wrong. Or there’s a big scandal, or some controversial change that Facebook or Twitter or Gmail just made, and HAVEN’T YOU HEARD and it seems like either the sky is falling and this is the biggest deal in the world and requires your immediate and constant attention because EVERYONE is talking about it …

This is what makes people say “Where did the day go? I just got so distracted. It’s like a three-ring circus around here.”

Sound familiar?

6 Easy Steps To Content Marketing Without A Blog

May 1, 2014
Small Business Marketing
by Naomi Dunford

So I got sick. Really sick. The kind of sick where you’re pretty sure that if you lift your arm to move your glasses? Yup, you’re probably going to throw up.

And what do we do when we get that sick?

We read blogs, because books require too much commitment. Even playing Hay Day on one’s phone requires the moving of one’s hands.

Over the last several days I have been reading a lot of new blogs. I have noticed an upsetting trend.