Growing your business with marketing, week 43: Odds and ends

This is Week 43 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. Armed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I’m applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week here, on the podcast, and at the Marketing Mix blog.

A big trip involving lots of networking tends to wipe me out, and my trip to BlogWorld Expo mopped the floor with me.

It was all good, long car ride there and back included. (I hate driving generally, but enjoy distance driving on highways, which tends to jog loose all kinds of weird ideas from my brain.) But it was a lot, especially on top of the Biznik meetup I co-host the night before. On the phone the morning I was to leave for Vegas, I whined a bit to my accountability partner about how tired I was, and how many people were getting sick, and how maybe it was a better idea to just stay home and rest.

Fortunately, he talked me out of it, by throwing my own methodology back in my face: “Go,” he said, “and just do your SXSW thing, where you dip into activities as you feel like it, and spend the rest of the time relaxing by the pool.”

I didn’t do any pool time, but neither did I push myself. I got to sleep early both nights, and didn’t schedule any early breakfasts the next day. I barely partied, much less drank. (I did have one forbidden—and DELICIOUS—Coca-Cola off the gun at the Las Vegas Hilton. Yum yum yum.) I got a good, daily walk in. And I left more rested than I came. This never happens! I think I may have turned a corner, maturity-wise.

On the other hand, when I got back to L.A., I decided to opt out of Le Web—even though it’s in Paris, even though I was one of a special cadre of bloggers given a free pass to live-blog the event. (I guess my entry about writing marketing poetry piqued their curiosity.) I’d be coming off of a three-week trip to Portland and Seattle, and I have two huge projects I need to put to bed by the end of this year, so something had to give. Fortunately, they were lovely enough to assure me that this wouldn’t be some big, black mark against me should I decide to go for it in the future.

I will, on the other hand, be presenting at my very first Ignite event in Portland this November! I was selected as one of 20 lucky people to give a little talk in the strict 20-slides-in-five-minutes format required (plus 15 seconds to hustle your ass onstage and grab the mic from the last guy). I’m wildly excited and terrified and pleased; if you’re in the PDX area, I hope you’ll come to the event on November 19th to hear me talk about the intersection between bloody poop and happiness. Yes, really.

Finally, the decluttering continues at full force. It finally occurred to me (on the road, no less) that maybe it was time to start applying some of these fine principles to my own website. So I did—just a little (tweaks are good, so you can track what kind of difference they make.) I wonder if you can even tell what I’ve changed on the home page. I can’t believe how I agonized over it: now that it’s done, I have to remind myself of what I took out!

xxx
c

Marketing round-up for this week:

• 8 blog posts (seven at the main blog, one here)
• wrote actor marketing column
• recorded last week’s GYBWM podcast
• more work dreaming up promotion ideas for upcoming Pam Slim seminar
• major hang-out time at BlogWorld Expo
• did an interview for a very interesting project (although I’m not sure if it’s marketing, exactly)
• minor blog page tweaks (see if you can see what they are!)
• email! email! email!
• morning and afternoon checkins with Facebook and Twitter