I’m sure I must write about this topic around this time every year.  Why does it take months for some of the stores to pay for the fruitcakes they’ve sold?  It’s really heart-breaking for the small business person, but I have to spend a lot of my time in the early months of the year hounding large stores for payment.

A pox on them, I say.  However I remain optimistic because I can honestly report I’ve never been stiffed by a customer.  I take everyone at their word, and that’s stood me in good stead over time.  I guess there’s always a first time, but so far everyone who’s ordered fruitcake has always paid.

You’ll recall this year I made only one resolution for myself, and that was to say yes where I would normally have said no.  In other words, I want to be open to ideas and suggestions and try new things.  My resolution for the business is to try harder to grow my on-line sales, because of course that’s where I make the most profit.

There’s a great website called www.brighttalk.com, wherein one can take free marketing seminars.  They’ve got great workshops with titles like A Social Media Marketing Strategy in 90 Days, and Three Secrets to Web Marketing Success.  I’m going to force myself to try one on-line marketing strategy a day and see what happens.

It’s laughable, though for me to think of myself conquering ‘social media.’  I’m on Twitter, and forget to tweet.  Then if I go to the site I have no clue how to read messages from anyone, so have no idea who’s even reading my useless tweets.  I’m on Facebook and Linked In, and won’t update either of them.

So I’ll try this computer marketing stuff for a while and keep you posted on any and all progress.  Motivation to start marketing arrived today due to an order for Okanagan Harvest Cakes from a nice person.  It was so much more than just an order for three fruitcakes; it was a big wake-up call for me.

I’ve resolved to be more open to new things and also to try to increase direct sales, yet I was already defeating myself by feeling negative about the idea of being able to market my product outside of the Christmas season.  But this order showed me that I need to try much, much harder with the Okanagan Harvest Cake as a year-round product.

We have to try so hard to stop the negative and limiting self-talk, don’t we?  I found an interesting book called The Power of your Subconscious Mind, and have started to read it.  It’s funny because it was written in the 1960’s and looks pretty much to be the same philosophy of the wildly popular The Secret and The Law of Attraction.

The main messages in these books seem to revolve around getting a grip on your thoughts and focusing all of your attention on your goal.  One is not to be distracted by two litres of milk left out overnight, one’s vehicle being moved out of the garage into the rain so the space can be used for hacky sack, or by one’s tequila being drank once again.