As small business owners, we tend to make things so much more complex than they need to be.

Think about it. If you run a small business, where do you usually put the majority of your focus? Marketing? generating revenue? Your work with you clients? Things like this?

So often the question you have about your small business deal with how or what, right? You know - how do I generate more revenue or what do I need to do to get more from my marketing? Aren’t these the questions you most often find yourself asking?

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Want to learn how to write with confidence?

Well my friend and fellow blogger, Joanna Young, is back! Where’d she go? Well, first she moved her blog from TypePad to WordPress - a move that I fully support and applaud her for. Then, she took a week off from writing to move into her new home. Can you imagine….not blogging for a whole week? I recently did it a couple of times and it wasn’t that bad - though I did miss writing.

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Running is a small business is as much an art as it is a skill - perhaps even more so.

Certainly you can approach your business as though it’s a set of skills you learn and then implement. Yet I’ve found, for myself at least, that running my business like this has no life. You can create success and make tons of money, but what’s the end game?

For me, having my own business is about living life. I utilize my business to aid me in creating the lifestyle I want. My life is not, however, my business just as my business is not my life. What my business gets me is an opportunity to live the life that I - and my family - want. And for us, that’s the end game.

So I tend to approach business as being from part of my lifestyle. Which means I bring everything I know into my business. Certainly that includes marketing strategy, business development, and sales. Yet it also means I look at business with an eye toward spirituality, life purpose and philosophy.

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I’ve always been a do-it-yourselfer. I’ve taught myself a great many things by taking this attitude.

When I bought my first house, I completely gutted it - down to the timbers in most rooms. In other places, we removed and moved walls. For instance, I created a large, walk-in closet in our huge bedroom where there was once a little coat room.

When it came to moving plumbing, rerouting and adding electrical, drywall, replacing subfloor, moving my toilets and bathtub drains - I basically did it all. And in most cases, I took to each project never having done it before.

But at some point, you have to live in  your house. And that means it has to get done - as my wife might say, “be livable.”

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Is it really possible to create a viral marketing effect?

Sure, it’s possible to create a viral marketing strategy. And it’s certainly possible to know what viral marketing is and, theoretically, how to use it.

But can you just simply create a viral response in some formulated or calculated way? Or is viral marketing something that happens as a result of a little solid word-of-mouth marketing and a little luck?

Well, according to Ze Frank, we don’t just go get ourselves a viral marketing experience. Rather it’s something that sort of organically happens based on, first, word-of-mouth marketing and then, second, by way of having chosen the right thing at the right time with the right audience. In other words, viral is not something we can just go get.

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We all want to talk about success in our small business, don’t we? How we overcame this obstacle to come out the other end successful. Or how we fought for our vision to create the business we want. The media is filled with stories of how ‘one man (or woman) beat the odds and became success.’

Yet what we seldom hear about are the business lessons that led to that success. Lessons that weren’t born from knowing exactly what to do and succeeding. But business lessons that were forged out of trying something and having it not go the way you want. Business lessons that come out of failure.

Failure provides an immense opportunity. Sure, success provides opportunity as well. But I’ll venture to guess that if you consider the most valuable lessons you’ve learned in your business, they come from things that didn’t work. Or at least didn’t work the way you expected.

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Is your business feeling the crunch of a slow economy?

Last week a client of mine, Kim (name changed to protect the innocent) told me that her business had slowed almost 40% over the past 18 months. As we talked, she explained that she’s doing nothing different with her advertising and marketing - “what worked 18 months ago just isn’t working as well now,” she said.

The reason, Kim felt, is that people have less money to spend.

That certainly makes sense. All our living expenses are on the rise. Groceries cost more, utility bills have increased - in some places dramatically - and the price of a gallon of gas is through the roof. So it only makes sense that consumers have less to spend on what they may perceive as ‘non-essential’ services.

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