After yesterday's painful database dilemma here on the blog, it was hard to work up the energy to post something new and helpful about small business marketing for you, my valued readers.

What if I spend a lot of time on a new post, only to find that the database problem -- which is supposed to be fixed now -- comes back, deleting the small business marketing tip I had planned to enter?

What if the subject I choose isn't as helpful to my readers as I hope for it to be?

What if ... Forget it, this "what if" business could go on all day.

I generally think of marketing of any kind as a calculated risk. Going in to literally any project, you know that some of your promotions won't reach their target, some won't be taken seriously by the folks you're trying to reach and you will get a few negative responses to anything you do.

I talked myself out of my little blogging "pity party" by reminding myself that I chose a profession that relies on rejection to gain knowledge. :) And sometimes bad things happen, like blogs dying, mailings not getting sent on time, printers botching print jobs, etc.

It's a rough road to travel sometimes, but then, running your own small business is always tough, and marketing that small business is just a part of it (a big part of it, but still ...).

In your own business, you may get discouraged by exactly the same frustrations that I named above -- fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of something going wrong that you can't plan for. But the fact is that for every small business marketing campaign that goes awry, you have the amazing opportunity to learn something new.

In what other part of your life could you take rejection as a positive? If I send out an e-mail campaign that gets a lower response than I originally expect, there's a good reason for it, and one that I may not have considered in advance. If you run a special that your prospects don't respond to, well, you now have a "control" by which to judge the performance of future campaign.

And yes, sadly, sometimes lousy stuff happens, like my blog dying right before my very eyes. Even sadder, a wildly expensive set of brochures (due to the vast quantity, not the cost per brochure) that I once developed for a huge client turned up in the back of a storage facility months after the initial launch, ruined due to poor climate control and carelessness on the part of another vendor.

And yet the beat goes on. Even when there are setbacks, we must move forward.

Sorry to get so philosophical today, folks, but I thought my initial sad sentiments might resonate with some of you who've had a bad time at some point with your own small business marketing. I always try to see the positive, however, and I know from experience that if you apply knowledge gained from lousy experiences into your next small business marketing campaign, more likely than not, you'll see greater success the next go-round. Chin up! I'll do the same.