Have you ever had the experience of driving along, paying attention to something off in the horizon and next thing you know, you’ve driven to that spot? And it wasn’t where you meant to go? The same phenomenon can happen in your business. Most business owners I met pay a lot of attention to what their competition is doing. We definitely need to keep an eye on the competitive landscape. But there’s a very fine line. The danger in keeping track of the other guys is that you lose track of your own path. We tend to move towards what…

Even if you’re a friendly individual who has good relationships with people, you might still be an introvert who has trouble networking. In today’s business world, communicating and making contacts is everything, and just about everybody has to do it. Below are five tips on how to get connected to the right people: Networking Tip #1: Make a List of Everybody You Know Everyone you know who is relevant to your professional life, that is. Keep an alphabetical record of their names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails. Every few weeks, randomly select one of these names and make contact with…

So you’ve decided to to start taking a serious look at your corporate brand and you are left with the task of assembling your branding team. Your branding team is a group of individuals pulled from your brand’s stakeholders. They would be gleamed from the three essential groups: employees, suppliers and customers. One of the issues you will have at the end of your branding process is buy-in among employees. Stand back and take a visual on your employee group. Most are your garden-variety employee, but a few, while good workers are out-spoken and quick to judge. Other employees look…

This guest post today is by Tom Marquardt, The Profit Repairman. Stop The “What Ifs” For Your Small Business Today! Start taking responsibility for your own actions in all situations, even the ones that you cannot totally control. Do you think Tiger at the US Open blamed anybody for his mistakes (missed swings) to win on Sunday? No, he took responsibility about his business of playing Golf and became a winner today in a Sudden Death Playoff Challenge. You need to take this level of action thinking when it comes down to your small business today! If it happened to…

I can remember being a little kid and going with my mom as she changed from one bank to another. There was a display table in the lobby covered with stadium blankets, an AM/FM radio/alarm clock, an umbrella, a camping flashlight and a bunch of other cool stuff. Free gifts or incentives for changing banks. Back in the early 70’s, banking was pretty simple. Conveniences like payroll direct deposits, ACH auto payments, recurring payments and online banking hadn’t even been conceived. So, it was pretty easy to lure a customer to your bank. Offer to deposit $5 to a new…

If there is one thing that many small businesses love to mess with, it is their brand image. Perhaps it is their chance to get creative, in an otherwise numbers oriented existence. It is also the one area that gets the greatest abuse in regard to the “holy Grail” of brand – CONSISTENCY. One area I’d like to address is your web presence. Does your website reflect your brand accurately? Let’s take a look at 5 cyber-consistency challenges: ONE: Over-all brand image of your website. If I met you at a networking event and you passed your card on to…

Have you ever come across a website or business blog and have wanted to print out an article or blog post but find that there is no print icon on the web page or blog site? I always think that we need to make it as easy as possible for people to access our content from our websites so one of the things I did some time ago on my main blog was to add some plugins so that people could then print a blog article or email articles to others. However I recently came across a service that enables…

GUEST AUTHORS Now that the design process is complete for Small Business Branding, I’ll be phasing in some new goodies for you. The first of those goodies is to give you a spot to become a Guest Author. We are looking for individuals that are passionate about small business to add some flare to our site. As a guest blogger you will receive a link to your site or blog at the top of each of your posts. Along with a small bio at the end of each article you submit. Just contact me here to let me know you’d…

“Word of mouth is the most powerful form of communication and marketing out there.” – Mark Hughes Word of mouth marketing is often confused. It all boils down to getting people to talk about your company. It’s the water cooler chatter over that great new Amazon.com product, the after the Super Bowl blogging about which company created the best commercial or worst case scenario…how you spent an hour on hold with ABC company and they still refuse to solve the problem. Word of mouth marketing is so important to the reputation of a company and the success of a brand,…

When were kids every day was an adventure. The neighbourhood was filled with other kids our age and we played different games all the time. We climbed trees, ran short-cuts through other properties, raided fruit trees – all kinds of kid things. One thing that was consistent was our reliance on one another. There was a kid’s code on everything. How we shared and how we helped one another. One area that strikes me as a great lesson that I took into adulthood was boosting. When ever us kids found it hard to shimmy up a tree, or found the…