I have been admiring professional authors, speakers, consultants, and bloggers for some time now. They all seem to be able to position their company, products, and personal brands successfully. kept asking myself if there was something that they had in common or was their something special about them. came to the realization that their commonality is sharing. They all promoted their brands by sharing some of their expertise. For free. They didn’t share everything otherwise they would have no business model. They share just enough. They do this to gather a large base of followers. MORE >>

Weekly Letter Volume1, Number 3. How often should I write? There is a long answer and a short answer. The short answer is “it depends” The long answer is that you should write and post to your blog (and/or Facebook) often enough that: Your readers come back for more. You can create a conversation and valuable relationship. You and your community know about wins and losses. Everyone feels comfortable sharing. Keeping them coming back for more. And it’s likely that they will tune it out. Here is the full list of topics: Write about your customers. Successes. MORE >>

Early signs of the mass exodus from GoDaddy are already starting to show up and the unofficial Leave GoDaddy Day is still later this week. First, they supported SOPA, the evil bill that would weaken the internet as we know it today. Then, due to a mass uprising by prominent GoDaddy users and attacks coming from prominent social media sites like Reddit , they dropped their support of SOPA and did what they could on Twitter to get the word out. Everything’s better now, right? It may be too late already. Anything short of this and the company will be harmed tremendously over the coming days. MORE >>

Useless means having or being of no use and not able to give service or aid. Being able to comprehend useless means you have to understand useful. Useful means a capable of being put to use, serviceable for an end or purpose, of a valuable or productive kind. Key word here is PRODUCTIVE! Productivity is a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input. Conversations can be productive for numerous reasons. Much depends on the intent of the conversation. The difference between personal and professional productivity is the process and the intent. MORE >>

When you're right, you're a hero. When you take a misstep, you're a goat. There's an often discussed paradox of leadership that attempts to quantify which trait is more important for business: being the first or being the best? It's also easy to be an armchair quarterback. Chris Brogan just launched his latest business book, Google+ For Business - How Google's Social Network Changes Everything. I'm not sure why, but Brogan is a lightning rod for opposing views (maybe it's one of the reasons we like him so much on the Media Hacks Podcast). " Remember: someone needs to be at the edge. gmail. MORE >>