StartupNation: Business is at full-throttle. You love your work, which leaves you in an exhilarated, heady mood at the end of a productive day.
But you can have too much of a good thing.
The same tasks that give you a mental buzz can also stress you out if you don’t take a breath and relax now and then. Before you know it, you’re fried to a crisp, which has a number of implications: You’re tired, exhausted, uncreative, unhappy, and maybe even sick.
We don’t want you to lose the fun factor in your work, or your passion for what you do. This is why we strongly feel that it’s critically important for you to take mental time-outs. Even toddlers get a chance to simmer down in time-out, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t revert. Soothe your inner kiddie when things get out of hand. You’ll regain and be able to retain your inner strength and creativity. Work – and life – will be enjoyable again.
Business Growth Strategy – Don’t Go Mental, Take a Break
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Online Marketing Power
Business 2.0: Two years ago the Wellington-based winery Stormhoek hired MacLeod to promote its products on his blog Gapingvoid.com, where he publishes advertising and technology commentaries and stream-of-consciousness cartoons.
CEO Jason Korman had seen the blog and thought targeting MacLeod’s readers, many of them tech geeks, would be a natural: They shared the same single-minded passion as wine enthusiasts.
As Stormhoek’s representative, MacLeod offered a free bottle to any blogger who asked — as long as he or she was of legal drinking age and had been blogging at least three months.
Recipients didn’t have to mention the wine, but many of them did; nearly 100 bloggers posted related items or comments in just six months. MacLeod then used his blog to organize more than 100 “geek dinners” in Britain, France, Spain, and the United States — gatherings of tech workers and influential bloggers who were plied with Stormhoek wine.
A recent dinner in San Francisco, for instance, attracted local technorati like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) and RSS pioneer Dave Winer (Scripting News).
While the blogosphere’s reviews of Stormhoek have been mostly good (“drinkable” and “pleasant,” with the odd “disappointment”), MacLeod’s results have been amazing. Stormhoek sales have jumped nearly sixfold, from 50,000 cases a year worldwide to almost 300,000. The winery expects to sell a million cases annually within three years.
How a small winery found Internet fame [Business 2.0]
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Build a Virtual Store
Inc.com: Small retailers who want to take their companies online can now build a store on the Web for free with a new service from FastCommerce.com. Business owners follow a simple step-by-step process to create a store template, and can have their online businesses up and running in a short amount of time.
FastCommerce.com provides business owners with a fully integrated package on the Web that allows them to run their entire operations — from order processing to sales to inventory control — without purchasing additional computer software. Online businesses can also customize their storefront with other applications available on FastCommerce.com, including order management and customer management, shipping rate calculator for UPS and FedEx shipments, and automatic e-mails for order confirmations.
The service is free for the first 250 products posted.
A One-Stop Shop for Setting Up Your Own Online Shop [Inc.com]
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Tips To Promote Your Blog
CashBulge: 1. Comment on other blogs in your niche.
Probably one of the most powerful ways to get noticed early on and to establish ties & contacts with people that have similar interests. Make sure you post relevant comments.
2. Join forums & communities.
Same as before, join forums and communities that are in your niche. Some useful forums I always reference (for SEO and Marketing) are DigitalPoint and EarnersForum.
3. List your blog in directories and top sites.
BlogFlux is a great blog directory and free to submit to. Start out with this and then expand.
4. Promotion & SEO Blog Plugins.
Depending on which blogging platform you are using you should have an array of tools at your disposal. Get the plug-ins that you need and scrap the ones you don’t.
5. RSS Feed conversion.
Use FeedBurner, its the best in the RSS industry right now and used by all the top bloggers such as ProBlogger and others.
6. Use Technorati.
Technorati is a powerful resource for bloggers. You can see who has linked your story and how powerful your blog is compared to others.
7. Social Bookmarking – your powerhouse.
Getting to that front-page of Digg or Reddit is a gold-mine and will create a tsunami of visitors. A great social bookmarking plug-in is AddThis.
8. Traffic Exchange websites.
Sites like BlogExplosion are a powerful way to drive some new traffic. Basically you browse other bloggers blogs and earn ‘credits’ which you can then redeem for traffic or review posts. It’s good stuff.
9. Linkrolling.
BlogRolling is a link manager service that helps you organize and evolve your list of links. It also makes it easier for people browsing your site to add you with a quick button :).
10. Using Flickr to host your images. Save space.
Well that tag-line basically did it. By using Flickr to host your photos, you can save web space and bandwidth each month and even get a few incoming links depending on how good your photo is.
And many more…
33 Useful Ways to Promote & Improve Your Blog [CashBulge]
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I Am The Brand
Entrepreneur: It’s a brand new work world. And I do mean “brand.”
It used to be that only large businesses worried about branding. To thrive, they had to distinguish their company from the competition. This meant carving out a niche based on competitive advantages and specific corporate attributes. They crafted and maintained a strategic brand–a unique, useful promise to current and prospective customers–to gain brand equity and loyalty. This was business, after all.
But things have changed. The 21st century is the age of free agents and custom ringtones. Nike doesn’t just sponsor Tiger Woods; Tiger Woods sponsors Tiger Woods (check out the personal logo on his cap). Today, branding occurs at the individual level. This is especially noticeable in service industries, but increasingly in others as well. Everything about you, from the type of cell phone you carry and the vocabulary you use, to the brand of coffee you drink, says something about who you are and what you can do for the rest of us.
In business today, your most important job is to promote yourself. You probably won’t work the same job from graduation until retirement. More likely, your future depends on leveraging your strengths along a winding career path ripe with possibilities. To take advantage of these opportunities, you need to stand out in a crowd. You must become your own brand.
Know – and Brand – Thyself [Entrepreneur]