The story so far

Once upon a time, we wrote an e-book called SEO School. Lots of people bought it. (Thank you, lots of people. And if you’re the voyeuristic type and want to know what we mean by “lots of people”, check out the How To Make $12,246 In A Day series. Also helpful for those of you planning to write ebooks one day.)

Anyway, the next thing that everybody said was, “Um, it’s really nice of you to do one on SEO. But, uh, when do we get one about marketing?”

Like, a year and a half passes while I go through an extended vacation to the island of Existential Angst. I finally write the ebook. It comes out on Tuesday. We all ride happily into the sunset in our tricked out El Caminos.

The part you should probably read

If you’ve ever bought SEO School, when you bought it we promised you a discount on Marketing School when it came out. We also promised you early access. But we need to get it to you. The only way to do that is to send you an email. The only email we have for you is the one associated with your PayPal account. And yes, I am completely aware of how lame that is.

My point, and I do have one

1. Keep an eye on that email address today. We’re sending these out manually so they don’t get stuck in spam filters, so they’re not all going out at once. Just keep an eye on it.

2. If you no longer have access to that email address send an email to ninjas [AT] ittybiz [DOT] com (replace the [AT] with @ and the [DOT] with .) saying you needs the code. We’ll get it to you that way. If you put “I need my code” in your subject line, you’ll get it faster.

3. If you got SEO School for free when you bought Thesis you get your code too. Fret not. Watch your email.

4. If you don’t have SEO School and you’re feeling left out you can buy it now and we’ll send you a code too. Because we are givers. Like Santa, but not so chubby. Or old. And we have ninjas while he, silly man, only has elves. So I guess not like Santa at all, really. Just remember, we will be sending these out manually too.

On that note, I’m going to go. I have about 1700 emails to send. Happy Friday, y’all.

For those of you whose bosses don’t let you on Twitter, it read:

Getting ready for a hot bath and glass of wine with @chrisbrogan and @julien. Well, their book, anyway. #illtakewhaticanget

I went. I had my bath. As I was getting ready to go to bed, I remembered I was waiting on something, so I logged back on. I had a handful of DMs from someone I know who didn’t like what I said. Not a troll. Someone I know.

I’m not going to tell you what was said because my mother reads this blog and we’ll leave it at that.

Anti-Social Media

The Social Media Big Shots are out there talking about how fantastic it is to get out there and be social. To connect. To be authentic. To be yourself. To show a human face. And I’m on board. Social media is cool and has real benefits and can connect your business with customers in a way people five years ago couldn’t have dreamed of. Awesome.

But here’s the problem. When the Social Media Big Shots talk about showing the human side of business, what often fails to get translated is that they’re really speaking to Big Business. They’re speaking to businesses that previously did not have a human face.

As an ittybiz owner, you’re all human face. Your human face is all you’ve got.

When Ford gets in the social media game, they meet some of their potential customers on the customers’ home turf, and it’s great. They have very little to lose. Brandon the Intern chills out on Twitter all day, liaising with people, handling customer service issues, maybe messing around with the search function to see who’s talking. He gets to listen in when people say “I love my new F-150” and he gets to murmer sympathetically when they say, “Man, the F-150 is overpriced.”

But if somebody says something really, really awful to Brandon, they’re not saying it to Brandon. They’re saying it to Ford. Brandon is not the business. Brandon gets to go home.

You are your business. You can’t go home from being yourself.

When you get involved in social media, if you do it right, you open up a vein. You become vulnerable. To be authentic, you have to be really authentic.

In this example, I was being exactly who I would be in person. A little silly. Mildly flirtatious. Not quite appropriate. Authentic.

The Big Shots are so busy telling people like you and me about all of the people who are going to love us for being ourselves that they neglect to mention the people who are going to hate us for being ourselves.

When Penelope Trunk tweeted, from a meeting, that she was in the middle of miscarrying an unwanted baby, there was a public outcry. I guess that was a little too authentic.

No time to reflect

With in-person relationships, there’s time to reflect. When people aren’t your Right People, you have the time and the space and the power to get them out of your circle before they can do much damage. Usually, they don’t want to be in your circle in the first place, so you don’t even have to deal with it at all.

Online, where we reply to emails from strangers in a heartbeat and send @ replies on Twitter and “friend” people we couldn’t pick out of a police line-up, there is no time to think. There isn’t enough information to evaluate whether this person is nice or not nice. You can’t do any due diligence. You can’t even read body language.

We have to let people in before we know if it’s safe.

Having people say nasty shit to you sucks. Human psychology does not change just because we’ve found a shiny new medium. It doesn’t matter how much nice stuff people say about you, the bad stuff still really smarts. It’s damn hard to let it roll off my back when someone says something mean in person, and the invention of the internet doesn’t make it any easier.

So what’s the solution?

I don’t know if there is one. Now it’s 305 am. I’m guessing Jack will be up in about half an hour for his standard middle of the night “where the fuck is my mother?” I can’t sleep. I’m not tired. I’m confused. I’m hurt. I’m upset that I’m not saying all this right. But I don’t want to put it off until tomorrow because by tomorrow, I’ll be back to wearing my business hat. I’ll be back to saying don’t feed the trolls and telling myself to keep a tight budget on my emotional currency.

But right now, I’m feeling like I’m standing here shouting all alone.

I feel like our colleagues have abandoned us. (Not Scott and Elizabeth, from above. At least they’re talking about it.) I feel like, in order to look strong, they’re not telling the whole truth. I feel like the Big Shots stop listening when it stops being Kumbaya and unicorns. I feel like my fellow bloggers aren’t talking because they don’t want to appear weak.

The public rule for the nasty comment or wall post or tweet or DM is “don’t get riled up” and “don’t let it bother you”. OK. I’m okay with that. It’s good advice, as far as it goes. But it’s in line with the weight loss article that says, “to lose weight, eat less food”. Gee. Thanks.

Basically, I think there’s something missing in this whole authenticity thing.

If we were REALLY being authentic, we’d admit it hurts like hell.

Pick 25-50 questions.

Answer them as honestly and expansively as you can.

Follow your intuition. Trust the answers to lead you to make the right decisions.

Come back in three months and do it again, with the same or different questions.

Do that and you’ll have a better marketing plan than anybody I know. Including me.

1. What do I love to do so much that it doesn’t feel like work?

2. What parts of that activity are my favorite parts?

3. Is there anybody else on earth who might really dig doing the parts I don’t really dig?

4. Why are you different than all the other bozos who do stuff sort of similar to what you do?

5. Why are you BETTER than all the other bozos who do stuff sort of similar to what you do?

6. What’s wrong with your industry?

7. Can you fix it, even in a little way, even for only a handful of people?

8. Who really, really needs my product or service?

9. Who really, really WANTS my product or service?

10. What kind of person would I absolutely love to help?

11. How is that person different from the other people who are sort of similar to that person? (On this blog, I help people with really small businesses, yes. But I really help people with really small businesses who are bored out of their heads by normal small business blogs. Names withheld to protect the guilty.)

12. How are the other bozos failing this person?

13. What, specifically, could I make or do that would blow this person’s mind?

14. More specifically, what would be their definition of perfection?

15. How could I let them know about it?

16. How can I offer it in a way they’d be crazy to refuse? How can I position what I’m offering concretely, so they know EXACTLY how their life will be better once they’ve sent me some money?

17. What could I write in my subject line that would make that person desperate to open my email?

18. What could I write in my signature line that would make that person desperate to click my link or call my
number?

19. What very, very thoughtful thing could I do for that person to let them know I really like them? (Hint: contact management software comes in really handy here.)

20. What kind of sale could I offer that would make that person stop and pay attention? (Hint: Think of both the details of the sale — 50% off leather corsets until Thursday only — and the reason for the sale. My husband’s birthday sale was a lot more popular than my Black Friday one.)

21. What people could help me reach the people that I help?

22. What might people be typing into Google if they were looking for someone like me. (Hint: If you don’t know, find out. Start with SEO School.)

23. What might people be typing into Google if they didn’t know they were looking for somebody like me? (People who need marketing consultants rarely know they want one until they meet one they like.)

24. What personality traits do I have going for me in my quest to help my right people?

25. What human resources do I have that will help me in my quest to help my right people?

26. What assets do I have that will help me in my quest to find my right people?

27. Where do my right people hang out online?

28. Where do my right people hang out offline?

29. What nice stuff might other people say about me if only I asked them to say it? (Hint: You’ll get more testimonials if you ask for them.)

30. What could I do for the people who already dig me so that they’ll tell their friends about me? (Hint: Forget about money. Think niceness. And gestures.)

31. How could I use coupons for my product or service?

32. How could I use a time sensitive offer for my product or service?

33. How could I incorporate some kind of “buy one, get one” offer for my product or service? (Hint: It doesn’t have to be “buy Y, get another Y”. It can be “buy Y, get (much cheaper) X”.)

34. How could I say thank you to my buyers, referrers and chief champions?

35. Who could I team up with to create even more awesome stuff?

36. What can I give away for free that will make me look like the rockstar I am? (Hint: Think stuff you do on the internet AND stuff you can hold in your hands.)

37. How can I get the people I’ve already got more involved in the process? (Maybe they’ll retweet you. Maybe they’ll stay up all night stuffing envelopes. You never know until you try.)

38. How can I improve my website so people will be more likely to go where I’d like them to go instead of wandering around aimlessly?

39. What could I do to be interesting to the media? (Hint: you’re probably already doing it. You just have to position it right.)

40. How can I encourage my current customers/clients/tribe members to give me their suggestions? (They’re really smart. Ask them stuff.)

41. How can I make my touch more personal? (Handwriting instead of photocopying. Custom instead of auto DMs.)

42. How can I show everyone they’re important to me? (You know the dude with three Twitter followers? His money’s as good as anybody’s.)

43. What can I do now to get ready for the next 6-12 months? (It’s never too early to start thinking of your Boxing Day Sale.)

44. Where can I free up a little bit of money so I can put it back into marketing my ittybiz?

45. Why might my right people be afraid to buy what I sell?

46. Why might my right people be afraid to buy FROM ME?

47. What can I do to ease their fears?

48. What is my customer thinking about? (Hint: it’s probably not you. It’s probably whether they look good in that color of lip gloss or whether the funeral home will let them split the cost of their father’s wake over two credit cards.)

49. What is my customer worried about?

50. What does someone get when they buy from me? (Like, what do they actually get? Physically. In the box. Or the download. Or the consultation.)

51. What does that thing give them emotionally?

52. What does that something give them quantifiably?

53. How can I add to my product lineup so I can start offering products or services that are cheaper than my current ones?

54. How can I add to my product lineup so I can start offering products or services that are pricier than my current ones?

55. What other stuff could I offer to make me a one-stop-shop of awesome?

56. Is there anything about my buying process that’s a pain in the ass?

57. Is there anything about my lead generation process that’s a pain in the ass?

58. Is there anything about the actual exchange that’s a pain in the ass?

59. Is there anything about my after-sale process that’s a pain in the ass?

60. How can I make it even clearer how to buy from me?

61. How can I make it even clearer what customers or clients can expect?

62. How can I make my refund or exchange process even clearer?

63. How can I give a guarantee that makes my potential clients and customers feel completely safe?

64. Do I have too few options?

65. Do I have too many options?

66. What would make a really great bonus for my buyers? Blog readers? Referrers?

67. How can I suggest my customer or client buy something a little extra?

68. Can I afford to raise my price, even a little bit?

69. How could I give existing customers and clients a great deal on something extra?

70. What could I do to get over my fear of promoting myself and my awesome stuff?

71. What would I have to do to make my perfect customer say, “Holy shit, that was awesome service”?

72. How could I help out more in social media?

73. How can I make myself an indispensable resource?

74. What can I do that will make my perfect people want to thank me by buying my stuff?

75. How can I change my copy to make me a little more human?

76. What one thing could I do today to make one person like me more?

77. What mentor or peer could I thank today? Could I do it publicly?

78. Where can I eavesdrop to find out what problems my people might have that I could solve? (Hint: forums, blogs and magazines are good places to start.)

79. How can I make sure people don’t forget me? (Hint: People aren’t reading all your emails, direct mail pieces or tweets. Nothing wrong with saying it again.)

80. Where do the people I haven’t even thought of hang out? (Hint: Not everyone’s on Twitter or Facebook. Lots of people check the Yellow Pages still.)

81. Can I steal some tricks from my competition? (If the have a Boxing Day Sale, you might want to have a Valentine’s Day Sale. If they keep doing it, it’s probably working.)

82. Can I steal some tricks from businesses that AREN’T my competition? (Marketing and sales are marketing and sales. The person buying shoes is the same person who buys copywriting.)

83. What could my customer mean when they say they don’t have the money? (Hint: Just because they don’t have it now doesn’t mean they won’t have it later.)

84. Are there other methods of payment I could use to make buying easier? (PayPal. Credit cards. Checks. Dirty, filthy cash in an envelope. Payment plans. Discounts for not using payment plans.)

85. What’s the best thing I’m doing now, in terms of getting new leads, clients, or customers? Could I maybe be doing a little more of it?

86. What other groups of people might be interested in buying my stuff? (Ittybiz owners buy my books. So do my competitors. I make sure to market to both.)

87. Who has the money? (Hint: It’s just as easy to sell to rich people as it is to poor people.)

88. How can I make myself easier to get ahold of? (Hint: Not everybody likes email.)

89. How can I establish my expertise? (Hint: Think online AND offline.)

90. How can I stay in contact with my people more frequently without pissing them off? (A really, really good newsletter full of stuff they’re going to love is a nice choice here.)

91. How can I make my communication more personal? (Hint: People never want to be part of a group. Even in bulk mail, you can still write as if you’re only writing to one person.)

92. How can I make life easier for my customers?

93. Can I keep making their life easier, even after the sale?

94. What boring stuff haven’t I done yet? (Join the Chamber of Commerce or Small Business Association. Gone to a Meetup group. Put up flyers.)

95. How can I reduce my turnaround time? (This applies to shipping and deadlines, yes. It also applies to email and direct messages.)

96. What do I want to do by the end of today? This week? This month? This year? (Knowing what the hell you’re trying to do increases your chance of doing it, at least marginally?)

97. Is there anyone who could look over my marketing materials so I can get a second set of eyes without having to pay a pro?

98. Am I worth talking about?

99. What am I doing today that sabotages my success tomorrow? (There’s probably something you could be doing right now. Like, say, signing up for one of our free marketing lessons?)

100. Are my colors, images and branding choices really doing their job? (It’s awful easy to go with pink just because you like it, but do your customers?)

101. How can I show my potential customers that other people dig me? (Social proof is good. It’s social. And proofy. Think: comments, testimonials, a high number of Twitter followers.)

102. How can I give people more than I promised?

What to do right now

A lot of people who read impossible-to-consume-all-in-one-chunk articles like these like to bookmark them so they can come back later. It’s not like you’re going to ask all 102 questions today, right? So don’t lose them!

Also, if you know anybody who’s thinking about starting a business or has a business but doesn’t really like the marketing part, forward this on to them. It might just unlock something for them that changes everything.

Twitter is a social media site. The people who choose to be alerted to your updates (tweets) are called followers. For a long time, your worth as a human being was calculated by subtracting the amount of people you follow from the number of people who follow you.

This little junior high clique-stravaganza was ruined when some enterprising people discovered that, with most Twitter users, if you follow them, they’ll follow you back. So I could wreck the whole hierarchy by following 10,000 people, getting followed back by 7,000, drop all my original 10,000 except for 16, and look like a celebrity. (7,000 people deem me worth listening to, but I only return the favor to a very special 16. Aren’t I elite?)

All this bullshit made Twitter look lame, and it resulted in people following WAY more people than they could ever reasonably connect with. How can you track 10,000 people? You can’t.

Now, in the last several days, Twitter has rolled out a new function called lists. Lists allow you to… make lists.

You could have lists of fellow Etsy sellers or tech geeks or comedians or Torontonians. You could also have lists called A Listers, My Heroes, or Rockstars.

This is about where everybody’s shit got tragically lost. Most people voiced their opinions in the 140 characters Twitter allows for their updates, but a few people have written some interesting blog posts.

Chris Brogan doesn’t dig lists because they’re inherently exclusionary. He’s right. He’s a celebrity in his niche and including Dude A but excluding Dude B puts him in the position of making a statement he doesn’t want to make. If he participates at all, he’s going to hurt some feelings and he’s a nice guy who doesn’t want to do that.

Robert Scoble thinks Chris Brogan is being Mr. Namby Pamby Pants. He says lists are functional sorting tools and if people want to sit in the corner and pout because they didn’t make a Big Shot list, well, man the fuck up. He is also right, except for the Mr. Namby Pamby Pants Thing. (Have you met Chris Brogan? I have, and the man is built like a brick shit house.)

Dave Troy says that lists have permanently changed the economics of Twitter, and has questions about how Twitter is going to deal with derogatory lists (Top 50 Douchebags In Social Media or Worst Fucking Posers In The NHL) and the effect this might have on what people are willing to do to “get listed”.

Ryan Rancatore thinks lists are the bomb because they allow us to follow everyone who follows us. Cause you don’t have to read the tweets, see? You just put everybody you WANT to hear from on a list (public or private) and then you can safely ignore the noise from everybody else. Everybody gets to feel good because you followed them. There’s some merit here, although following everybody who follows you gets you more spam than an Okinawa mess hall.

Here’s what you need to know and it has nothing to do with Twitter

If you sell anything, you are a marketer. And marketers are very, very concerned with social proof.

As human beings, we operate on two levels, the ape level and the Homo sapiens level. The ape lives in a group and has a difficult time functioning outside the alpha beta hierarchy. The Homo sapiens learns how to count before he’s three. Given those two factors, is it any wonder we really dig things like lists?

We need a framework. We need to know where we stand. We need to know where we fit in relation to everybody else. Numbers are a handy way to do that.

More importantly, YOUR CUSTOMERS need a framework. YOUR CUSTOMERS need to know where you stand. YOUR CUSTOMERS need to know where you fit in relation to everybody else. Numbers are a handy way to do that.

When Shoemoney first showed a photograph of himself with his $132,994.97 Adsense check, people went nutso. Much more nutso than they would have had he said, “I support myself and my family quite comfortably with Google Adsense ads.” When Darren Rowse calls himself a problogger, you believe him when you see he has 129,000 RSS subscribers. And when I put that big shiny number in the top right of your screen, I got 4,000 new readers in a month. I guess I get to be taken seriously now that the writing’s on the proverbial wall.

People really like social proof. The social media consultant with 112 Twitter followers and 9 Facebook fans dies broke. Doesn’t matter that she’s actually just above this petty cliquishness. Doesn’t matter that she really knows her shit. The public cares about her numbers and if she wants to eat, she has to care too.

Should we act this way? Should we judge people like this? Should we assign such a high value to arbitrary numbers?

It doesn’t fucking matter what we SHOULD do. As a marketer, ALL you care about is what we DO.

SHOULD we decide not to date a guy because he lives with his mother? SHOULD we reject a job applicant because they smell like dog food? SHOULD we balk when our daughter’s new boyfriend shows up with hair down to his ass and a face full of tattoos?

Irrelevant. We do. And that’s all that matters.

Am I in favor of lists? It doesn’t matter. They’re here, and people are going to use them as another measure of your (and my) success. If we didn’t use lists as a metric, we’d find something else.

People like numbers. Get used to it.

Be honest… how many e-books and e-courses have you bought that are languishing un-opened on your computer right now?

Search your harddrive and inbox, and you’ll probably be shocked to find e-books and e-courses that you don’t even remember buying or downloading and a membership site or two that you haven’t logged into for months. And for the few information products that you have actually read cover to cover, ask yourself, “How much of it have I actively applied?”

Why do we spend our hard-earned, precious ittybiz money and then sabotage our own efforts by not mining the value out of the information products we buy? From my own experience as an ittybiz, and chatting with other ittybz owners, I suspect it’s down to two things:

Sneaky resistance

As an ittybiz, pretty much everything is on your shoulders, so investing in your own development is crucial, but it’s easy to get stuck in perpetual research and overwhelm as you buy one course after the other in the hope that the next course will give you the information that’ll make you feel confident enough to move your business to the next level.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that investing in more training can be a sneaky form of resistance, a way to kid yourself that you’re being productive and doing something to move your business forward while you’re actually just avoiding having to do the stuff that really scares you – the stuff that would grow you and your business. Sound familiar?

Learning how to learn

Online learning has the benefits of offering much greater choice and flexibility in what, when, where and how you learn, but to get the value out of the online learning programs you buy, you need to know how to do self-directed learning.

As a perpetual learner and ittybiz in the sort of industry where it’s crucial that I invest in my own learning on an ongoing basis, I learnt the hard way that, if you’re reading too widely, and trying to take in too much information, all that information won’t make a difference because you’re too overwhelmed to know where to start using it. The real challenge of this high-information era is to know how to cut through all the noise, find the high-leverage ideas and tools and start using them to to get the results you want. My life is less stressful, my thinking so much clearer, I’m more productive, and my business is moving forward more smoothly since I learned how to do self-directed learning, and that’s why I’m helping people to do this with their personal development learning through the Bottom-line Bookclub.

So here’s how to stop collecting more information and overwhelming yourself, and start using the information products you buy to create the business and lifestyle you want:

1.) Become a sniper

As a small business with stretched resources, you’re probably busy and stressed, and not taking the time to think about what you want and need, so when it comes to investing in your development, you’re grabbing at anything and everything you can lay your hands on, in the hope that, if you learn enough or follow the latest trends, you’ll find what you need to progress your business.

Stop taking a shotgun approach and shooting in every direction in the hope that if you shoot enough bullets, you’re bound to hit something worthwhile. As an ittybiz, you can’t afford to squander your precious time or money with a shotgun approach. If you’re not using the ideas in the e-courses and membership programs you buy, you’re wasting your time and money and you’re only going to increase your frustration and stress levels as you sit further down the road with no progress and even less time and money than when you started.

So stop for a moment and get clear on what you want for your business. What direction would you like to take your business in? Decide your target and take a sniper approach, investing your time and money in just a few courses that’ll help you hit your target.

2.) Embrace Fear

At this point, if you’ve articulated your business direction and goals clearly, you’ll probably feel your anxiety soar. Fear is an indicator that you’ve gotten in touch with what’s really important to you, because you wouldn’t feel afraid if that stuff wasn’t important to you. Our minds and bodies are committed to safety and self-preservation and as soon as you step out of your comfort zone and start growing, your body generates fear to give you a heightened awareness and make you proceed with caution as you move into new and unfamiliar territory. So fear is also a confirmation that you’ve already started to grow.

If you want to be a growing, thriving ittybiz, fear will be with you everyday because you’ll be moving into new territory everyday, so make friends with your fear early on and realize that the only way to build solid skills and real confidence is through the scary step of taking action and using what you’ve learned in the real world.

2.) Program your mind

The unconscious mind hates an unanswered question. When you articulate a question, you build creative tension and your unconscious mind is compelled to search for an answer to your question. Questions also shape how we filter reality and what information we notice, so articulating clear questions will help your mind to be more efficient in paying attention to relevant information and finding the answers you need. Some people call this the law of attraction, because after articulating your question it seems like suddenly answers magically start popping up around you, but actually the only magic is that you’ve programmed your mind to look for specific types of information and so you start noticing relevant information that was always there.

Considering the direction you want to take your business in, what are the questions you have that, if answered, would allow you to take your ittybiz in the direction you want to go?

3.) Learn like you brush your teeth: everyday

If you’re anything like me, you probably have a bunch of ittybiz tasks demanding your attention each day, and it’s easy to forget about the stuff that isn’t being loud and demanding. Are you so busy putting out fires that you only focus on learning and changing when the shit hits the fan and you’re forced to do something to get yourself out of trouble? Setting aside time to proactively use the information products you buy will help you learn and grow out of inspiration, rather than desperation – a much better experience!

4.) Cultivate selective ignorance

You’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle – the idea that 80% of your results are created by 20% of your efforts, so to work smarter instead of harder, just focus on the high-leverage 20% that’ll make a difference to your results. The problem is that most people don’t know how to figure out what information is high-leverage and relevant.

Value has nothing to do with the quantity of information you got for your money and everything to do with the degree to which the information helped you to change your results. And because time is such a precious resource for an ittybiz, you’re actually getting greater value for money if you can get the changes you want more quickly with less information.

So give yourself permission to ignore most of the information and then, as you’re going through an information product, hold your business direction and questions in mind and you’ll easily be able to determine what information to prioritize and what chapters to skim over or even skip altogether.

5.) Bag the beast

You won’t change your results by just listening to an audio or skim-reading a pdf. Two ingredients are crucial to learning and the development of new skills: engagement and repetition.

To engage your mind and learn, rather than just being entertained, build some sort of capturing method your learning process. You can jot down notes as you listen to an audio, highlight the high-leverage and relevant ideas as you work through a pdf, or create a mindmap of the information that’s relevant to your business direction and questions. Capturing keeps your attention from wandering, affirms what you’re learning, allows you to easily and efficiently review and repeat your exposure to the most important information, and forms the basis for your action plan for applying the information to your own business.

6.) Get off your ass

Information isn’t valuable in and of itself. Information only becomes valuable when you use it and it helps you to get what’s important to you – better business results, good health, fulfilling relationships, reduced stress, and whatever else you want. So the most important step in successful self-directed learning is the part where you take action.

At the end of each learning session, ask yourself, “What have I learned that I can use now, to progress my business in the direction I want to go?” Write down specific action steps that you need to take to apply what you’ve learned and take your business in the direction you want to go and schedule deadlines for taking action so that you stay focused.

And then, as Naomi would say, “get off your ass” and go and do those things that scare the shit out of you so you can build real skills and confidence and take your business to the next level.

Through projects like The Bottom-line Bookclub, Cath is helping people to be more agile and to learn and change more easily and elegantly… so they can thrive in these fast-paced, high-information, high-change times. Cath blogs at Mine Your Resources and you can connect with her on Twitter.

And let’s be honest. What’s the point in being internet famous if you can’t pass your email forwards on to 20,000 people?

Now, we at IttyBiz have our own definition of marketing, and it is better than this one because it has a swear word in it. But this one isn’t bad. Also, as an email forward, it doesn’t have to adhere to the stringent publishing standards of, say, a blog post.

Therefore, with that caveat in place, I give you… the definition of marketing:

“The buzz word in today’s business world is MARKETING.

However, most people often ask for a simple explanation of Marketing.

Here it is:

You’re a woman and you see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and say, “I’m fantastic in bed.” That’s Marketing.

You’re at a party with a bunch of friends and see a handsome guy. One of your friends goes up to him and pointing at you says, “She’s fantastic in bed.” That’s Advertising.

You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and get his telephone number. The next day you call and say, “Hi, I’m fantastic in bed.” That’s Telemarketing.

You see a guy at a party, you straighten your dress. You walk up to him and pour him a drink. You say, “May I?” and reach up to straighten his tie brushing your breast lightly against his arm, and then say, “By the way, I’m fantastic in bed.” That’s Public Relations.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. He walks up to you and says, “I hear you’re fantastic in bed,” That’s Brand Recognition.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. You talk him into going home with your friend. That’s a Sales Rep.

Your friend can’t satisfy him so he calls you. That’s Tech Support.

You’re on your way to a party when you realize that there could be handsome men in all these houses you’re passing. So you climb onto the roof of one situated toward the center and shout at the top of your lungs, “I’m fantastic in bed!” That’s Junk Mail.”

I only have one issue with this little allegory. What happened to referrals?

When I started my first blog just over a year ago, I spent forever tweaking it and trying to make it perfect. Eventually I just launched the damn thing, but there were plenty of aspects of the site that I didn’t like: The sidebars didn’t have all of my best “callout” items in them, so that people would be certain to see them. My newsletter subscription offer wasn’t strong enough. It took me forever to make the background look right and match perfectly where it met the footer, and I never did get it right. I didn’t like my old “Hire Johnny” page, and I had meant to organize my categories better.

Of course, none of that matters now, because that site — TheEconomyIsntHappening.com — is gone. I consolidated the content from the old TEIH and combined it with the content from the site I launched while IttyBiz watched, which was LearnToBeYourOwnVA.com. That site is gone now too, and both live harmoniously under the new umbrella of JohnnyBTruant.com.

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting lately (and by the way, there’s plenty I don’t like about that page, too — it makes it look like I only consult about technology, which isn’t true), and one thing I keep running into are people like me — people who are creating something and want it to be perfect right out of the starting gate. I try to explain what I can’t even make myself believe, but it’s a hard thing to put into words. Why shouldn’t you make your site perfect, after all?

But Charlie nailed it. He said that no matter what you’re doing online, it’ll be obsolete in a few months. Not obsolete in the way VHS tapes are obsolete, but obsolete because you’ve changed. Your business has changed; your voice has changed; your whole “thing” online has evolved. And that’s exactly what happened to me, and it’s why those little imperfections on the old TheEconomyIsntHappening.com ended up not mattering.

What was more important was to soldier on imperfectly, rather than to wait for everything to be “just right.”

Let me put this another way: In my experience, if you want to do business online, you’re going to have to be willing to do your thing to the best of your ability even if it doesn’t feel like you’ve defined yourself and your value proposition and your website perfectly enough yet. You’re going to have to accept that the way you’re doing things in six months may well be totally different from the way you’re doing them now. You’ll need to realize that just because you’re writing about how much you love explosive pies today, you may be organizing courses to train explosive pie disposal units in half a year. That has to be okay with you. You have to go with your gut, and go where the market seems to be taking you. You have to let your voice and your method of operation evolve with time.

What Charlie was suggesting is that there’s no point in trying to be perfect because “YOU” online is sort of a moving target anyway. That’s what I try to tell my clients who want to spend three months crafting the perfect look for their first website. Especially when starting out, YOU don’t know who YOU are anyway. You’ll create this perfect, expensive, time-consuming site to match who you think you are online, and a few months later you’ll realize you were wrong, and your site doesn’t match who you’ve become.

I figured it might make sense to talk about why I ditched my old websites and launched the new one, since this series is supposed to be about how a n00b online businessman grew his business. So here’s that story.

When you first met me, I had TheEconomyIsntHappening.com. For all intents and purposes, it was a strict humor blog. Humor sucks as a profession. You get to spend a ton of time crafting perfect copy, and if you’re lucky, you can make upwards of five dollars a month doing it. I then created TheDiabeticWeightlifter.com as my IttyBiz project (still live, but hasn’t been updated in forever), but then quickly decided to launch LearnToBeYourOwnVA.com when, during the course of explaining how I launched the weightlifter site, a bunch of people said they wanted to know about how to launch sites.

That felt like as good of a quorum as any. So I wrote my free eBook, took off on the V.A. site, filled it with tips, tutorials, and an initial round of webinars, and decided I’d found my niche, which I could ride and build forever. For kicks, I kept writing my humor blog as well.

Then Charlie’s “few months later” hit, and I realized that both of those sites were outdated. I wasn’t going in the correct direction for either of them anymore.

For one, I’d started writing a lot for other blogs. IttyBiz was one, but Copyblogger and Problogger were two more. I wrote a few times for Tim Brownson, and got involved with Project Mojave. I started to get into this Third Tribe mindset, and things like ethical business and trust were on my mind all the time. Where was I supposed to write about those things? On my “technical tips” blog? Or on my humor blog?

I asked my readers what they thought. I weighed it all long and hard in my own mind. And eventually I could only throw my hands in the air and decide to ditch both the tech tips direction and the pure humor direction, and see if “Johnny B. Truant” was strong enough yet to fly as a brand on its own.

And so here I am, less than a year after making my first cent in an online business, and I’ve already changed my business model a few times. I’ve already scrapped two sites and forged a third. I’ve already had to figure out whether “humor” or “building websites” or “Johnny B. Truant” was a better horse to put my money on.

So I guess the takeaway is, Don’t get too wedded to your current way of doing business. Don’t wait until you have everything perfect before you start your site, because you’re chasing something that’s evolving. Just get going. Just launch already, and clean up the loose ends, and accept that you may have to completely re-do all of it a few months down the road anyway. The nature of the Net is that you’ll try one thing, listen to your audience’s response, and subtly adjust. You may think you know exactly what you’re going to do, but you may not. Your voice will change; your specialty will change; your style will change. You’ll start by offering X, but then discover that Y fits you better and is an easier sale anyway.

And by the way, I doubt I’ve figured it all out now. I’ll bet that in another six months, JohnnyBTruant.com will get a serious overhaul. I’ll bet I’ll be doing things then that I can’t predict today.

So don’t wait to perfect what you’re about to do. Do it now, imperfectly. And once you’ve done it, don’t be rigid and wedded to it. Accept that it will evolve, and change, and grow.

I know it’s all very confusing by nature, but the way you’re supposed to reframe that is as an adventure. So just keep telling yourself that.

—-

Want more Charlie? Charlie Gilkey and I are launching a twice-monthly call series called The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions, which will debut shortly. One of us will try to be drunk most times, or to get our guests drunk.

1. First of all, I shouldn’t even really be saying anything today since it is not a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, as Jonathan Fields rightly points out in 97 Ways To Build Traffic Without Resorting To Dumbass List Posts. As I will be resorting to a dumbass list post myself very soon, I found this fascinating.

While it’s all good, I think my favourite is probably the first line. Delicious.

2. Mark Silver, a man who has single-handedly stopped me from quitting business forever on far more than one occasion, wrote a really beautiful piece called An Ode To Diapers in which he compares business to – wait for it! – a poopy diaper. He tackles the passion issue head on.

What passion issue? It’s that whole What If I Want An Ittybiz But I Can’t Think Of Anything That Makes Me So Excited That It Kind Of Burns A Little When I Pee? question that nobody seems to have a decent stance on. Nobody except Mark, that is.

3. The inimitable (and fellow disturbingly attractive Torontonian marketing professional) Scott Stratten says what everybody in marketing means to say and then forgets. (Or, in my case, we sort of say it and then promptly admit to doing Skype consults topless and everybody else forgets.) He has also assured that I’m staying at the Wynn from now on with The Three Billion Dollar Cleaning Man.

Marketing is not a task.
Marketing is not a department.
Marketing is not a job.
Marketing happens every time you engage (or not) with your past/present/potential customers.

Which I guess means the topless Skype thing can be forgiven as a marketing initiative. Thanks, Scott.

4. I can’t tell you how much it hurts me inside to read a great post on Copyblogger and then find out Johnny Truant wrote it. My mother is going to be devastated. It’s about writing ethical sales copy, and it’s fab, but comments 39 and 40 (left by Daniel the Poet and Johnny, respectively, in case there’s some comment weirdness between now and then) just about did me in.

Johnny, you know all those times I told you I was firing you? For at least the next 24 hours, I take it all back.

5. So, I’m trying to decide if I should go to Charlie’s Work Party but I don’t want to tell him that I’m trying to decide because that might be awkward. And you know that point in the conversation when somebody says they’re trying to decide, and the other person says “how can I help you make your decision?” and you’re like, “well, you could shut the fuck up, for starters”? Yeah, I didn’t want to do that.

Anyway, Colleen’s comment on this page — and the fact that he chose to share it — rocked my moccasins. (Note to self: Ask Megan and Dave why we’re not having Colleen write all of our copy. Also have them ask Charlie how he manages to sell a teleclass about work in a blog post called How Vegas Is Like The Holidays. Only on Charlie’s blog does that sort of thing happen.)

6. Speaking of Colleen, I am never going on Twitter ever again until I can come up with something as good as this.

7. Last, a little story. I was trying to round this post out so there would be seven items. I figured Seth Godin is always good for a quote, so I went to my shiny new Google Chrome address bar and start typing his name. (The suggestion tool is pretty spiffy.)

I start typing s-e-t-h and expect to stop typing because he’ll be in my little drop down list of choices. Nu-uh. I get Seth Rogen and Seth Green. He wasn’t even in the dropdown! It’s hard for me to explain how much this messed me up.

For a brief moment of lucidity, it made me realize how incredibly small this little cyberbiz world really is. Seth is, well, Seth. But according to Google, a person is more likely to be searching for the new Butterfinger spokesperson than Mr. Purple Cow himself.

I was talking to Sonia about this during the election, about this idea that the people we know (or know about) are the only people who are statistically relevant. Like urban democrats who say, “McCain will never win. Every single person I know is voting Obama.”

Well, maybe none of your friends live in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona or Alaska.

(She also noted that most of the people in our little techno-intellectual sphere would be pretty surprised to know that 45% of American adults watched a Nascar event in its entirety in the last year. “But NOBODY watches Nascar!” As long as you don’t count that pesky 100 million, you’re so right.)

How much marketing are you not doing because you think that anybody who’s going to buy from you has already heard of you?

How much of the world doesn’t have a clue who the fuck you are?

The enterprising Megan Morris would, and did, bless her little heart.

So, simply because there are no lengths to which I will not go to ensure you learn everything you need to know about marketing, I studied it. (Aside: If I had studied in school the way I studied this pamphlet, my mother would probably love me more.)

In a sea of probably 100 simple photo ads with no text, one ad stands out:

“I’m Amanda and I specialize in entertaining couples.”

(I made that nice and big so your coworkers will look at you funny. I told you, if you quit your fucking day job already, that wouldn’t be an issue, would it?)

Let’s channel our inner Jill From Poughkeepsie, shall we? Jill has been married to Dan for eight or nine years — God, who can remember anymore? — and their sex life has gotten stale. They have the opportunity to go to Vegas for a few days to get away from little Hunter and Mackenzie for a while.

After seeing the souvenir cups at the bar outside the Paris casino, Jill gets it in her head that she wants both the Eiffel Tower glass and the balloon glass, and sagely decides that, hell, this is Vegas. She’s going to get a pina colada AND a strawberry margarita. Jill is a racy little tramp. Dan encourages this because there’s an outside chance he might get laid for the first time in four months.

The result of all of this rampant debauchery is a marked decrease in Jill’s inhibitions. She’s heard that boys like girls who fuck girls. Maybe a call girl is just the thing for Dan’s flagging libido.

(Not that she likes women. Except that teeny tiny crush on Jennifer in college, but that totally wasn’t a CRUSH crush. She just really thought Jennifer was pretty and smart and funny and and really fun to hang out with but that Jason guy TOTALLY wasn’t good enough for her. But it’s not like she wanted to kiss her or anything. Eew.)

Jill boldly takes one of the proffered brochures and looks through it on the sly. What does she see?

Random girl with fake tits and stars on her nipples.

Random girl with fake tits and stars on her nipples.

Random girl with fake tits and stars on her nipples.

Amanda, using a headshot instead of a Look At My Ankles Behind My Head shot, who specializes in entertaining couples.

Who gets the call? Amanda gets the call.

Why? A few reasons:

1. Her USP. Amanda specializes. She will understand the unique needs of Jill and Dan, likely better than Random Girl With Fake Tits #346 will.

2. She is noticeable because she’s different. This is similar to number one, but not quite the same. If Amanda had said “I’m Amanda and I have brown hair” she would STILL get more calls because she differentiated herself. Not by having brown hair, but by USING WORDS.

3. Most importantly, Amanda is SAFE.

Let’s explore that last one for a minute.

I don’t know a lot about the demographics of the average bachelor party call girl patron. But I know a lot about differentiating yourself to appeal to the outlying 10 percent. In this case, the outlying 10% consists of people like Jill and Dan. They’re not different because they’re couples. They’re different because they’re shit scared.

Jill (and Dan, although he’s not going to admit it) is terrified.

She is terrified because she’s never read a blog article about the appropriate etiquette when hiring a call girl.

She is afraid she will make a terrible faux pas.

She doesn’t know how you order a call girl.

Do you pay with a credit card or cash?

Does the call girl stay for an hour or till you’re done?

Do you pay overtime?

What’s allowed and what’s not allowed?

What does she do if she’s uncomfortable?

She and Dan haven’t used condoms in 10 years – what the hell do you do about those?

Most of all, she is scared that the worldly and sophisticated call girl will think she’s an inexperienced loser from Poughkeepsie who’s only slept with four people.

Amanda looks like she won’t mind all that.

Amanda looks like she’ll be nice to Jill and Dan.

Amanda looks like she will understand.

Amanda gets to send her five illegitimate but adorable children to Yale.

Because, well, hey. If you’re going to be in Vegas anyway…

Being a call girl in Vegas is different from being one anywhere else in America. For one, you’re not breaking the law, which is nice. (Edited to add: I’m told by the comments and Wikipedia that prostitution is in fact illegal in Las Vegas. Somehow, it makes this even cooler. Weirder, but cooler.) But you also have a shit ton more competition. (I guess they’re not breaking the law either, which lowers the barrier to entry a bit.)

In Toronto or Philadelphia or Flint, call girls have to be really, really quiet about what they do. But in Vegas, they can shout it from the rooftops. (And often do. Although billboards on the backs of pickup trucks seem to be more popular than actual shouting.)

Anyway, the pamphlet people. They stand there, COMPLETELY silent in a city where nothing is silent, and they smack their hands and wrists with their little stacks of pamphlets. All you can hear is the pamphlets and it sounds like video game gunfire. Three to five smacks at a time. SMACKSMACKSMACK, and then they stick it out in front for you to take.

They come so close to you that it borders on assault, and you wonder, “What in God’s name would possess anybody to take one of these pamphlets?” You think that if one wanted a hooker so badly, one could check the phone book. Or Google. Or the nearest F-150.

But people do take these pamphlets. Lots and lots and lots of people take them. And I have a theory as to why.

Every one of these pamphlet people is wearing a (shockingly) bright t-shirt. Red, yellow, blue, purple, green, pink. Bright beyond bright, and in Vegas, that’s saying something. And on each of their shirts are the same words in the same huge text:

Girls Direct To You In 20 Minutes

Now, this is the kind of blog where we could have a LOT to say about that particular little ditty, but we’re going to have a little bit of taste for once and not get into that side of things. Basically, we will concede that it’s the perfect USP and leave it at that.

But why are hundreds of people taking pamphlets that, statistically speaking, they’re unlikely to want, from the skeeziest looking human beings in an already skeezy looking state? It’s not like your average housewife from Cincinnati (hi Fabeku!) is interested in the services of a 20 minute call girl. Why is she taking the pamphlet?

You could argue that it’s because she’s had it thrust in her face.

You could argue that it’s easier to take it and keep walking than trying and dodge out of the way.

You could argue that she didn’t know what she was taking, even.

Good reasons. But the BIG reason she took it is that she’s not confused.

We might find prostitution reprehensible or disgusting or dirty or maybe-before-the-kids-were-born or giggly-gosh-gee-not-for-me, but we get it. We understand it. The concept of selling sex is one that we comprehend at such a fundamental level that it doesn’t need explaining.

In seven words, these guys have explained to every literate person on the Strip exactly what you get and how. When asked what they sell, they don’t say, “it’s complicated” or “oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that” or “it’s so hard to explain what I do because I do SO MANY THINGS for SO MANY PEOPLE!”

(I don’t care who you are, you don’t do more shit for more people than a hooker in Vegas, honey.)

Far below the conscious level, we are about a trillion and a half times more receptive to things that we understand. As soon as we’re confused, you’ve lost us. That split second “huh?” is all it takes to lose us FOREVER.

Not always, sure. But enough people are walking away from your business saying “I don’t get it” that you can’t afford to hire 100 Mexicans to hand out flyers for you on the Strip.

Now go find seven words that explain exactly what you do and why it’s better than what everybody else does.