Basic Rules of Branding: Crafting Your Image in the Public Mind

A lot of people spend time merely trying to mimic the business models and ad campaigns of iconic brands without really looking deeper into what makes those brands stick. Whether you’re putting together a new brand for your start-up idea or you’re conducting a brand refresh to focus your messaging after major market shifts or…

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Things You Should Never Say Out Loud at Work

Depending on where you work, a day at the office could sometimes be compared to a zoo or even a WWE cage fight. (If so, you have my sympathies.) You may have to contend with difficult clients, strange co-worker personalities or even a demanding and unreasonable boss. Everyone has to deal with politics in the…

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Focus on Recruitment Strategies that Really Attract Talent

It should be continually astonishing to anyone paying attention the way that many HR departments and hiring managers operate when trying to fill key positions. It takes way too long, often happens rapidly or not at all, and displays a large degree of incompetence all around. This is a serious vulnerability that a lot of…

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How to Diffuse Online Criticism of Your Business

Have you ever looked up a business online and some other site is outranking their homepage for their brand name in the search results? I see it pretty frequently while researching companies that come across my path, and frequently those other results are bad reviews, negative blog posts or other mentions of the company that…

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What is Your Company Culture?

Experts claim that company culture can have a huge impact on the success of a business. A healthy, vibrant company culture makes for better employee performance and satisfaction. But, what makes company “culture” and how do you create one that is enjoyable? What Makes Up a Company’s Culture? Vision – A company mission or vision…

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Stop Using the Marketing Buzzwords, I Beg of You

Clichés are like roadblocks of thought, meant to prevent you from reaching some real thinking. They’re mental shortcuts, often used in propaganda of one sort or another to get the audience to agree and nod their heads without saying anything of substance whatsoever. And just like politics, the business and marketing world is full of…

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How to Know Your Business Idea isn’t Ready for Prime Time

The odds are against any given idea for a product or service actually succeeding. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and common business mistakes sink new businesses even before they really get rolling. Assuming you have your wits about you, and you’ve learned from experience what mistakes not to make, how…

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Why You Should Publish a Corporate Blog

The benefits of having a corporate blog are countless. Among them are the advantages of building corporate brand, enhancing customer loyalty, getting customer feedback, accumulating an email list for a newsletter, fresh content that generates link love for SEO purposes, crisis management and even the cultivation of your internal corporate culture. Having this type of…

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Real-world Entrepreneurship: Why Hard Work isn’t Enough

A lot of people find refuge in buckling down and getting busy with a project. They’re often called “workaholics,” lumped in with the passionate, the driven and the desperate souls who populate the entrepreneurial landscape. There’s a mental kind of release in feeling like you’re actually getting something done. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t…

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3 Business Tips for Success in 2013

By now you should know that there’s no magic bullet for succeeding in business; every industry is different and you have to find your niche. The only keys to business success you’ll find are sound principles that you can learn to apply in your daily life as an entrepreneur and professional. As we lay 2012…

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