The other day I found myself at free credit report dot com, jingle running through my head, hoping I could save my credit from the fate of the poor guy on TV who can’t buy a cool car, has to work at a Renaissance Fair to pay off debts he didn’t know he had and was facing a divorce because he didn’t know his fiance was a financial disaster until after they married.

The commercials are ubiquitous, obnoxious and completely memorable, at least to me. They nagged at me until I took action, and, as such, represent a successful ad campaign. I hate to admit it, but VistaPrint and personalized M&Ms promotions wear me down as well. I have haphazardly spent more than a hundred bucks buying the “FREE PRODUCTS!” from VistaPrint, and I finally broke down and created personalized M&Ms for marketing — I swear they ended up costing me a buck an M.

I’m a certified cheapskate, and I don’t part with my money lightly, so for these ads to work, I know they must be doing something right. A few weeks ago, I wrote about salespeople approaches that turn me off, but these multimedia, passive-aggressive onslaughts of jingles, sales, savings and benefits keep reaching out and tend to work on me.

My question: is it just me, or do you tend to cave after a while? Perhaps you’ve purchased a ShamWow, but you throw rocks at the TV when the free credit report guy starts lipsynching. How do you finally come to the conclusion that you need to contact a certain vendor or service provider to fill a need you have? Or, better yet, under what circumstances do you find a business telling you about a need you didn’t know you had (i.e. — who the hell needs personalized M&Ms?)? And how do we as small business owners replicate these campaigns without becoming obnoxious?

Instead of relentless emails and blinking offers, I tend to send out “Hey, here’s some ideas for your business, and I’m still here!” emails about once every 45 days. I also try to stay active (but not obsessed) with networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, hoping that people will remember my name when an appropriate need arises. So far my approach keeps me pretty busy. Just yesterday a Twitter contact asked for my contact info to give to her team for a possible freelance job. She’s a fellow runner, and she and I exchange hellos now and again. If it pans out, it’ll more than pay for the labor I’ve put into updating Twitter.

You, my readers, are consumers as well as business professionals. What should small business owners like freelancers do?

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One year ago this week I had just finished running the America’s Finest City Half Marathon and had completed several days at a major conference. I was full of confidence and ideas and enthusiasm and ambition. I felt like I couldn’t be stopped… the world was so big, the possibilities so endless, the timing so right.

And then the phone rang.

My father was calm and reserved as he told me the news. A surgeon had called my mom a few nights before to tell her that her cancer was beyond their control. The surgeon had given her two years to live — if she consented to external beam radiation treatments — and that was a big if.

In the minutes it took to complete that phone call, my world shrank to a tiny pinprick of light. Mom was dying. Nothing else mattered. Nothing. Work could wait. Love could wait. Writing books, running marathons, giving speeches… everything could wait. Mom’s life was now a giant clock with hands that were moving way too fast toward a time we couldn’t imagine would ever come.

As a runner for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, we hear lots of stories from cancer patients about what they went through. They say things like, “I went through treatment, and that was really rough.” But it’s hard to imagine what really rough is until you’ve been through it. Mom’s radiation treatments almost killed her. “Really rough” meant throwing up every day, several times a day. “Really rough” was watching her neck turn the color and consistency of raw liver, burned and purple and weeping. Once I moved toward Mom to touch her neck, and she started shaking and burst into tears — sobs, really, whispering, “No, no, no, please please don’t touch me. Please.”

“Really rough” meant phone calls with Papa about how we weren’t sure she would survive the treatment. She lost about 65 pounds, hated food and stopped wanting to get out of bed.

It was perhaps February when we thought she was at her lowest point. She had finished the radiation, but she just didn’t seem to be getting better. She was weaker and weaker, and we were in agony watching her sink. We were all feeling like horrible people because we had pushed her so hard to get the radiation (she REALLY didn’t want treatment!), and now it looked like the radiation was killing her.

Around that time, she received another scan, and WOOHOO! the radiation had worked! The biggest tumor is near her windpipe, and it had shrunk by 50 percent! Other tumors had also shrunk or stopped growing. It was really a best case scenario.

I don’t know if it was the news of her scan or just the timing, but all of a sudden, she started feeling better. She was walking around again. She would eat a little. She resumed Sunday brunch with my sister’s family. She started playing with the grandkids. She was getting better. And better. And better.

Several of you, my readers, have written to ask of news of Mom, and I’ve been hesitant to write about her for fear of jinxing things. But the news continues to be good. We convinced her to enroll in a clinical trial, and she seems to be handling the medication well without many of the bad side effects. The whole famn damily just came for a week-long visit to San Diego, and she walked, ate, laughed, stuck her toes in the sand and had an awesome time. I took her to a local spa for her first spa treatment ever, and she looked beautiful. The picture is Mom and Pop on a ride we all took on The Bahia Belle on Mission Bay. Don’t you love those smiles? These days she is back to enjoying food, and she’s now worried about gaining weight back! What a wonderful problem to worry about.

I called her one day to ask, “What if we decided that you don’t have cancer anymore?” And she laughed. “I live each day, Beth. Each day is a gift. Today I’m alive, and I’m celebrating that.” I am, too, Mom. I am, too.

Life on Avenue Z, like Avenue Z Writing Solutions, is now 2 years old. In the first heady days of my writing career, I wrote at least 5 days a week, and I was building quite a following: perhaps 250 a day were stopping by to share “The Trials and Tribulations of a New Freelance Copywriter.” I adored the interchange, and I was so happy to welcome my readers.

But these days, the statistics tell another story. I still have wonderful, regular readers, but the dropoff has been monumental. Here are the top reasons why…

1. I’m not reading your blogs.
   Oh gosh but we had fun in the old days, visiting each other’s blogs and encouraging, laughing, leaving witty comments. I’d discover and learn to love new blogs from the blog rolls of my favorite blogging friends. But as time wore on and business picked up, I had less and less time to wander the internet for new sites or even stop by my favorites. And in the blogging world, if you don’t give, you don’t get. I miss you guys! I’m so sorry I’ve ceased stopping by.
2. I’m not writing often enough.
   If you don’t write new stuff, people don’t come by as often. If you come by and visit and the same post is up, you move on, and sooner or later, you don’t stop by anymore.
3. I’ve run out of things to say about being a new freelance copywriter.
   These days I wonder if I should rename this blog or simply start a new one. The purpose when I started was to document my first entrepreneurial adventure so others can learn from my mistakes when they start their own business. I’m pretty proud to say that I think I have helped people launch their freelance careers. Even today I get notes from fellow writers who ask questions about how to handle taxes or what I do about business cards or the like. But I’m not really facing new challenges about running my business. And I’m not sure “business as usual” posts are interesting to read.
4. I’ve kind of said it all.
   This is not quite true, but I frequently have ideas about new blog posts on motivation, sticking to a plan, how to be productive, etc. And then I remember that I’ve already covered that in such-and-such a post. And since most of the readers I have today have been with me for quite some time, I have a feeling they’d recognize some of the themes.
5. I’m distracted by other shiny social media toys.
   Facebook. Twitter. Whrrl. I send pictures, messages, posts on the fly. They can be short, and I get instant feedback and lots of it. I designed The Cheapskate Freelancer site so each post is less than 100 words, so it’s easy to churn out a post. It’s hard to get back to writing a daily 500-word post about what I’m doing, since it’s so easy to update the other sites in just a few words.

For all my excuses, I’m truly sad I’m not keeping up any more. I miss interacting and sharing my adventures. My goal is to turn my experiences into a book that will help other budding writers get started as freelancers, and maybe my manuscript is finished.