“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it” – Goethe Here’s a five step strategy on how to create your own business, illustrated by a personal example. 1. Set a Goal: It was July 1991 and I was sitting at the dining room table in my parents house. I’d read about goal setting and the power of writing goals down. For a few years I’d been thinking about starting my own business. I opened a page in my diary and wrote my goal “In April 1992 I will have my own business”. 2. Believe in YourSelf -…

Regardless of your role within your business, you have goals. You may own the place and set them yourself or you may have a boss that walked in and laid them out for you. Either way, there are things that need to be accomplished before year’s end or within a few years. Reaching some goals is pretty easy so I’m not going to talk about low hanging fruit here. I’m going to talk about a goal that either scares you to death or exhilarates you. Take a moment to think about that big goal and answer these questions: What would…

What is it they say – “If it wasn’t for the customers, business would be a joyous thing!” Have you ever wondered what your customers think of you and thus by extension -your brand? If you are addressing your brand strategy correctly, you are striving to build strong relationships with your customers. You are probably doing your utmost to make sure that their every touch point with your company is a good experience. Do you have processes in place that addresses any problems that may arise? You don’t want your customer to dance around voice mail hell or get the…

Ok you may remember in Part 1, how I told you all about how through hard work you would make a success of business and that no business – no matter how easy the owner makes it look has ever had an easy ride of things. Well, here in Part 2 I’m going to let you into another dirty little secret of business that the business world will never really own up to. So what’s the big secret? It’s simple… Whilst you may make a bit of money in a self employed business you will never make any major money…

If you’ve followed my writing or blog at all, you know that I am a big believer in having a plan. Strategy is king. Today’s marketing dollars are too scarce to be wasted. The 4th quarter and early January seems to have most marketers knee-deep in research, budgets, what if scenarios and gantt charts. All of that is well and good. And important. But there is a serious danger that you can get paralyzed in your planning. Smart is good. Perfect is paralysis. Marketing is a healthy mix of art and science. Exacting precision is for engineers and surgeons, not…

I came across and interesting new blog called, W Revenue Dot Com. The author is guy called Scott Wainner. What I like about this guy’s opinion is his straight forward attitude. I’ve read countless articles and opinion on making money on the web and frankly his is a breath of fresh air. There isn’t a lot of hype and he shares a great deal of knowledge. Most other blogs tease a great deal, and are essentially excuses to sell something. They brag a lot about themsleves and don’t share ideas. Scott does not share these shortcomings. If you are researching…

On a daily basis I read articles on blogs and forums on branding, marketing and sales. I check keywords and general discussions to see why so many people are out here searching. What is it we are looking for? I recently launched my first eStore and I’m building traffic. Other readers are looking for ways to increase their sales as well. We all know that the web is an incredible source for gaining knowledge on any topic. Every week, I submit an article to Small Business Branding on topics relevant to the site. We (the writers) all know the site…

When I was in college I took a journalism course called Editing. The key nuance of the class was that your grade on any writing assignment weighed heavily on how error-free your work was. For ever misspelled word or grammatical error, you lost 25% of your score. This is the true point in my life when I decided it made no sense to write anything at all that was overtly incorrect in any manner. I’m not one of those people that write personal emails to family and friends and don’t even take the time to press the “shift” key to…

We humans are an amazing species and Western civilization in particular, having embraced capitalism, spends every waking hour in the pursuit of achievement. We are always trying to improve our lot in life and to accomplish this goal, we rely on advertising. We are all familiar with traditional forms of advertising such as Newspaper, magazines, radio, TV, adwords, email and direct mail. What intrigued me this week, was more unconventional forms. The “what will they think of next” form of promotion. I’ve heard critics say that ads are appearing in way to many locations and there is a need to…

Ok, so let’s assume that you are at the start of your business journey and dealing with the media is something that you have just never done before. It’s a little bit scary right? You’ve heard all these rumours about how journalists are out to “get the story” and would sell their Granny in order to get it. They’re a vicious mob to be approached with caution…a little like a sleeping dragon. Right? Wrong! Providing you know what you are doing and how to do it the journalist and the media can very much become a friendly face and not…