Current Posts |  RSS Feed

Marketing Your Small Business (Grael’s book entry 5)

July 02, 2010 by Grael Norton, Acquisitions Manager

Note: this is the fifth post in Grael's book-writing series. For a quick explanation about what this series is all about, please visit this post.

Now that we've taken care of our tagging and categorizing, and settled on a new shorthand way of referring to this book ("Marketing Your Small Business"), it's time to get started developing the actual content.

So let's begin:

Introduction: The Harsh Reality About Owning a Small Business Today

a. The dream of owning your very own small business

Any project about small business, for me, starts with my dad. He's been a small business owner (specifically, a freelance writer), his entire working life. I think he had a desk job in an office once sometime during the mid-nineties; I'm pretty sure he disliked it and left after about six months.

He's had a prolific career as a writer. During the last 25 years or so, during which his specialty was travel writing, he's authored no less than 10 guidebooks on destinations ranging from Alaska to the Dominican Republic, and on subjects ranging from traveling California with children to driving New York to watch the leaves change.

During that time, he published 300 articles in newspapers and magazines while visiting 125 countries. Not a bad life.

Meanwhile, his only son grew up during the age of the personal computer, which soon developed into the Internet age. I remember working on a custom-built Windows-based 486 machine in 1993.

My dad had scored a coveted email address on AOL, at the time by far the most popular ISP (Internet Service Provider.) The email address, "TravelWriting@aol.com", once received about two messages a day. Today, it receives two hundred.

Although I was a teenager at the time--and therefore, generally disagreeable--there was one thing my dad and I agreed on: this Internet thing was going to be big. Already, the first dot-com millionaires were being minted, and we were at the center of it all: San Francisco, California--the home of Wired magazine and just a short drive away from Silicon Valley.

Where was our fortune to be made, we wondered? Buying and selling domain names? Creating some hot fad, then bailing out after a lavish IPO?

In the end, we launched our first business together in 2005.

I had spent the previous couple of years studying internet marketing as the independent film company I worked for saw the video industry--once their bread-and-butter--evaporate almost overnight. Small-budget independent film content had gone from making a little money from cable TV, foreign TV rights, and DVD sales to no money from anywhere.

So when my dad and I launched our online niche-information publishing business, I was a neophyte businessman, but knowledgeable about the technology and the processes we would use to run the business.

- why people start small businesses (the Internet, freedom, no boss, etc.)

In our case, launching our business was long in the making. We'd been talking about it for years and the time had simply arrived. I'd finished college and--although I was marginally employed by the film company--I was not excited by the prospect of getting a "real job."

Today, a little older and wiser, I see how lucky I was to have that opportunity: to start a business while young, without any dependents--without even a wife to question the wisdom of what we were doing. (My dad, still being married to my mom after 30 years, would not escape the same fate.)

- many people start a small business after a layoff

As I write this, the US ecomony is in "recovery" from the greatest recession of my lifetime. (I don't remember much about the last great recession of the late 1970's.) Many people were laid off in the last few years--unemployment nationwide threatened to top 10% of the workforce at the height of the recession, and many observers think a more accurate assessment would have been 20%-- and only some of them have returned to work.

Many people are still unemployed, while others are underemployed, or in jobs they dislike. A great many of those people will start their own small business this year, either out of choice, or necessity.

In fact, 1,477,893 new businesses launched in the United States in 2008.

I hope every single one of their proprietors was as excited to launch their small business as my dad and I were in the fall of 2005.

Tags: writing, business, graels book, media
Filed Under: Marketing, Writing & Editing

Comments

Post Your Comment

Name:

Email:

Website: (optional)

Remember my personal information
Email me when someone responds

Please enter the word you see in the image below: