The following is excerpted from Trust Agents: Using The Web To Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith Jeff Pulver knows a thing or two about dial tone. A while back, he cofounded Vonage, the voice-over-IP telephone network that took on all the major telephone companies in the late 1990s. He continues to be a visionary, usually discovering key trends years before…
Author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform & Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform (Writer’s Digest Books). She started her platform “for fun” seven years ago and ended up on “Good Morning…
By Jennifer Kushell, co-founder YSN.com “Your Success Network” This may sound a bit trite, and it’s certainly cliché, but if your goal is to build a business that’s not only successful, but powerful and impactful, it seriously helps to know the right people. At the helm of your company, your ability to make smart decisions, learn from leading experts, surround yourself with savvy people, and have access to…
Building your brand means growing consumers dedicated to the success of your company; people who have a vested interest in your products and services. These are your evangelists, your biggest fans, your mavens. If you want people to shout from the rooftops about your company you’ll have to start forming community. Look at Harley riders, Mac geeks and the Red Sox–people are absolutely obsessed. They have meetups, wait…
Building a brand is all about getting the word out. It doesn’t matter if you have the most fabulous product or service if nobody knows about it. If you want more people to hear about your company you need to start telling you story as often as possible. Make your story compelling enough and people might just tell their friends. Start with a Problem Great companies solve a…
10 Things to Improve Your Small Business Marketing Results
by / ⠀Finding Customers• Startup Advice / July 23, 20091. Marketing is as much an art as it is a science. Plan, test, execute, and measure, but never be surprised by uncertainty and change. In our eagerness to measure and declare return on investment for all marketing spends, we often forget that humans are unpredictable. As such, we can’t always predict a market reaction or group think. Testing helps minimize the chances of this but historically it…
How to Make a Competitive Business by Being Unique
by / ⠀Finding Customers• Startup Advice / July 15, 2009Throughout our lives, we’re told that in order to be successful, we have to be the best. In order to make something of ourselves we have to stand above all the rest. We measure success on how we stack up to the competition – the same goes with failure. Failure is defined by our lack to meet said expectations. Falling short of a desired goal. I’m here to…