Many who are starting out in business, or just beginning to do business for themselves, labor under a misconception that ‘branding’ is something you do after you start becoming successful. We are all so used to hearing the term ‘brand’ referring to a large conglomerate or supermarket chain or vacuum cleaner that we tend to allow the idea to remain associated with size and success and not with us and our first, small steps in the business world. It’s a misconception because branding doesn’t only refer to big brands, it is a term and a set of concepts which equally refers to small businesses, one person businesses and individual people. From big brands to small, from corporate brands to personal branding - it’s the brand that’s the key. Who you are, what you stand for, and how that information is communicated to others, as a total identity, is your brand.

The core concept of ‘branding’ is the idea of managing expectations. This is done by developing a set of qualities or characteristics which, together, form the personality of a ‘brand’, much like a fiction writer would create a set of qualities to describe each of the characters in his story. These qualities are known as the ‘brand DNA’ and, figuratively speaking, they together represent the blueprint of the brand; much like DNA establishes the unique characteristics of an organism. Establishing this set of qualities in the minds of customers and managing their expectation s to associate these qualities with the companies products and services is what is known as ‘branding’ - like a hot iron on cow hide.

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Five ways to look like you make a lot of money without spending a lot.
By Scott Gerber

In today’s cluttered, hypercompetitive marketplace your business can’t afford to make a poor first impression. Every touch point that leads to your company needs to impress, motivate and inspire a prospective customer. You may have a great product or service, but to be taken seriously, clients need to believe that you’re on the same playing field as the bigger guys. Even if you’re a consultant that works from a home office, you’ll need to position your company as a polished brand that touts confidence, experience and quality. Fear not. Here are five simple tips for branding your business to create the illusion that it is a global corporation with an army at the ready — all without breaking the bank.

1. Website
   Your website is the center of your brand universe. Simplicity is the key to looking like a big fish. Less is more. A clean, easy-to-navigate two-page site with useful content will make your company look far more established than a cluttered 20-page site with long-winded fluff. Design your site with the needs of your user in mind, not your ego. Sites that try to be everything to everyone will often become nothing to anyone.

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by Travis Campbell

A lot has been made of Twitter as its popularity grows (significantly, I might add), so have the reasons for having a solid Twitter marketing strategy.  In this post you’ll learn the three rules every online and small business entrepreneur should know when using Twitter for business, and why.  Without these in place, your experience with Twitter will be of minimal value, and can even hurt your business altogether.

3 Rules of Using Twitter for Business

Ok, so you have heard of Twitter by now, but many questions remain.  Why should I use this service?  How can it help my business?  Let me encourage you to watch how others are successfully using it and follow their lead.  Here are three things I’ve observed others doing successfully, and am patterning my own profile after as well.  These are general and open ended rules, feel free to comment at the end of the post and add to the conversation.

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by Doriano “Paisano” Carta

One of the most demanded features for Twitter has been the ability to create groups, allowing members to focus on different sets of people they’re following. For example, you could create groups for all of your fantasy league friends, colleagues at work, friends in real life, family members, and so on.

Because Twitter still does not provide any group feature, it has opened the floodgates for countless third party solutions. There are many different ways Twitter members can create virtual groups. Here is a roundup of some of the most popular methods employed today.

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Use Twitter to market your homebased business.

You’ve probably heard of Twitter, even if you aren’t sure what it is. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service–think public instant messenger stream. From your mobile device or computer you send updates called tweets, which are text posts of up to 140 characters. Your tweets can be read by others, and you can sign up to follow the messages others write so that you can get short, quick updates from them.

As a homebased entrepreneur, Twitter gives you an open door to connect not only with other entrepreneurs but also other companies, marketing experts and more. As homebased entrepreneurs, these tips, connections and opportunities can spell great marketing options for you.

The bottom line is Twitter can help you grow your home business.

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by Alexander Moya Barquero of Tecnovits (Spanish). Follow him @twivits.

Image by respres

Twitter tools have emerged all over the web, as this great service offers many ways to get in touch with people that really matter to you. However, safety is another of those things that matter and not all Twitter tools are trustworthy.

But don’t be alarmed, not all the tools out there are after your twitter identity! Let’s have a look at 11 twitter tools that don’t require your password and are still very useful and powerful:

Statistics:

TweetStats: Statistics for your Twitter account, this tool graphs the amount of hourly and monthly tweets of your account, the amount of replies and the interface that you use the most.

TwitterFriends: One of the most complete Twitter statistic tools, with just your twitter username you can find out very impressive statistics, but don’t just take my word for it, Darren wrote a more complete review of this tool: TwitterFriends - A Useful Twitter Metrics Tool

Ranks:

TwitterGrader: If you’re into ranks and grades, TwitterGrader will grade your account from 0 to 100 based on your account’s followers, following and number of tweets. You will also be given a rank, this will measure the impact of your account on the twitter sphere.

Are you in the Twitter Elite for your country? Use the tool and find out!

ReTweetRank: This tool ranks your account based on the number of retweets you get.

Tweeple Discovery:

NearbyTweets: Want to find tweeples near you? This tool finds people who tweeted near you, great tool for discovering new members to follow.

Twubble: Tired of subscribing to other accounts just so they can recommend people to subscribe to? (Yes @mrtweet, I’m talking about you.) By just filling out you twitter username, Twubble recommends user to follow based on your friends following. [Editor's Note: Update - Twubble does indeed ask you to log into Twitter's API with your username and password. - Lara]

Tweeple Unfollowing:

Twitoria: As time passes by and your “following” list becomes longer, there are bound to be a lot of spammy, unwanted, not used accounts, this tool tells your which of the accounts your following hasn’t updated recently in the last week, month or year and other time spans.

Qwitter: Besides having a very funny name, this tool will notify you by email when someone stops following you, and it only requires your username and an email address to send the notifications to (it also has a moving hand, so there’s another reason to use it).

[Editor's Note: Qwitter has been known to be pretty unreliable in terms of timely notifications. People have complained that they hear nothing for weeks or months, and then all of the sudden get 20 or 30 emails all at once, saying someone unfollowed them after their most recent tweet - when in reality, they may have unfollowed weeks ago, after a different one. - Lara]

FriendOrFollow: Find out who isn’t following you back with this tool.

Miscellaneous Fun Tools:

Tweetwasters: How much time do you spend on Twitter? This tool will tell you and only requires your username.

TweetWheel: This tool lets you find out which of your friends know each other, planning a party or going out for a movie? Find out who knows who with tool and avoid awkward moments.

Know other good Twitter tools that don’t require your password? Share them with us!

Get more tips and tutorials like this. Subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

by Mickey Mellen from Mt. Bethel Church of Marietta, GA. Follow him @mickmel.

Many churches and organizations are feeling like they should be on Twitter, but they’re not sure how they can use it for their cause. Here are a few techniques we’re trying at Mt. Bethel that may give you some ideas on how to get started:

• Showcase your staff: On your organization’s “staff” page, give clear links to those that are on Twitter. This is also a good place to link to their profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Here’s ours as an example



• Summarize your staff tweets: Zappos does a great job of showing off their employee tweets. Kent Brewster has a script that can be plugged into almost any site to create a similar thing. To make it work, create a new twitter account and have it follow all of your staff members (and no one else). Plug that new twitter account into the script, and voila!
• Show live chats from events: A simple hash tag can go a long way. At a recent youth event, we enouraged people to use a hash tag when discussing the event, then we pointed parents to the Twitter search results page for that hash. It was very popular, but you run the risk of a bad apple saying some inappropriate things, and it can’t be cleaned up if you’re using this method.
• Find how who else related to your organization is on Twitter: If you have an e-mail database of your users/congregation, you can import that list to a new gmail account, then have Twitter search that account for active members. Follow them to see what’s going on, and many will follow you back.
• Tweet from retreats, events or mission trips: A great way to keep the people at home informed is a Twitter account dedicated to that event (like our current mission trip to Ecuador). The advantage to this over a hash tag is that parents and other concerned parties can subscribe to that user can get updates on their phone.
• Post weather-related news: If you have ongoing weather-sensitive events, such as outdoor sports, create an account dedicated to field conditions. Our recreation update account is often very quiet, but it’s worth gold on rainy Saturdays in the summer. It saves a LOT of phone calls from wondering parents.
  
• Post your blog entries: While the best Twitter interaction is personal, some users are losing interest in RSS feeds and just focusing on Twitter. Point your blog to a Twitter account as an alternative to RSS and e-mail subscriptions (blog to twitter). If you use WordPress, Twitter Tools is an excellent plug-in. If not, then twitterfeed can do the job.
• Always try new things: We created an account that uses sitetweet to post user activity (”user reading xx blog entry”, etc) to a dedicated twitter account. I personally find it a bit overwhelming, but some of the staff (and a few members) think it’s a neat thing to watch.

What other great ways have you found to use Twitter for your church/organization?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

By Steve Wyrostek

As a small business owner, article marketing may be a good approach to establishing yourself as an expert and spreading the word about your business.

Whether you write the articles yourself or have them ghostwritten by a professional web writer, following are a few thoughts you might want to consider:

- Mechanics- Consider writing pieces between 400 and 700 words. That works for search engines as well as reading weary readers.

Write while roaming in the head of your prospect. What words do they use when they search for your product or service?

If you’re writing about exercise equipment does your prospect search for treadmills, weight machines, or exercise equipment? Is your business localized so that prospects search for Chicago treadmills?

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Share information, interact with customers and boost your brand–blogs are the perfect way to keep you on top of your industry.
By Jason R. Rich

If done correctly, a blog can attract a dedicated audience to build upon and share expertise, information, ideas and content, while boosting awareness of your company and brand. If done incorrectly, however, you can leave customers feeling dissatisfied and ready to turn to your competitor. Here are four ways you can leverage a blog:

1. Create friend-sumers.
Promote a company, product or service by creating a blog that features how-to advice, news and other information of interest to customers. Through the blog, visitors can post testimonials, feedback, questions and comments, plus participate in surveys. By taking an informal, non-sales approach, a company can interact with customers, gain useful feedback and build an online audience that can ultimately be directed to the company’s main website or retail store.
2. Provide exceptional customer support.
Supplement a company’s existing technical support and customer service with an online forum for customers to openly post questions. While employees can update and maintain this type of blog, users feed it with comments and also tap the knowledge of other users by reading past questions and interacting on the forum. If done correctly, this type of blogging can dramatically cut the cost of personalized technical support and customer service. Check the comments section for frequent users who can be recruited as bloggers to further increase your blog’s content. They can also be asked to “host” certain threads or wikis to encourage dialogue on topics that need a little TLC.

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by Steve Adams

1. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: Small business owners and entrepreneurs like to jump right in and get started, which is crucial to success, but it’s also important to prepare and plan and set objectives, especially when it comes to email marketing. When you’re getting started with email marketing make sure you step back and think through what you’re trying to accomplish. The best way to do this is to try and see things through your customer’s eyes.

* Ask yourself what type of information would attract attention and get people to open, read and act on your email campaigns.

* Do they want coupons, special offers or promotions?

* Would they respond better to valuable information and practical tips they can use?

* Often the best e-newsletters include a mix of sales with expert opinions and advice.

2. Make a 2009 email marketing plan: Once you’ve established your email marketing objectives, you can build an email marketing plan for the year. Look at the calendar, again from your customer’s perspective.

* Map out promotions, topics and campaigns that will help you reach out to your customers at the right time with the right information.

* It sounds like a challenging task, but you know your customers better than anyone else, so roughing out a flexible plan for the year shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

* Investing planning time up front will dramatically improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns. And your customers will appreciate getting relevant emails right when they want them.

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