Done anything to help your offline brand lately? We’re all talking about ways to improve our online brand. Here are five ways to improve your offline brand, as well. Remember – the two are connected. 5) Meet three new people a day, offline. Learn how to talk to people. Introduce yourself to people in your office, at a party, at a reception Make the connection. When we meet people, the majority of us listen just long enough to find an entry point for us to talk about ourselves. (I’m guilty of this, as well.) A better thing to do, however, is to listen – actually listen – to the other person, and make neural connections in your brain. They’re huge [...]

Have you seen something like this floating through your social media data stream recently? “Who wants to sponsor me to go to Overrated Conference 2011?” “I need a sponsor for my blog. Anyone?” “Who wants to send me to ABC for the WXY meetup?” Just look around. They’re everywhere. Seems that everyone with any social media presence, no matter now small, has glommed onto the “Sponsor me!” bandwagon. Unfortunately, 99.9% of those requests won’t ever get looked at, let alone acted on. Why? It’s simple, really. You want to be sponsored? You better damn well be sponsorable. What does that mean? What do you mean “I’d better be sponsorable? That’s not even a real word, Peter!” It’s a real word, [...]

One line takeaway: Productivity is available to you 24 hours a day. Don’t stifle it by not having the right tools at any given moment in time. Additionally, with the exception of being on the advisory board of the ScotteVest, I have no financial relationship with any of the products I mention below. Over the past 60 days, I’ve figured out how to increase my productivity by over 25% with a smart series of moves that I’ll share below. Before I go into it, I should thank Adam Boettiger. He’s like a time-saving savant, offering me several of the tips below, and I want to publicly say thank you. I recommend following him if you’re looking for good tidbits on [...]

By now, most of you know that I’m a super-early riser. If you do some homework on the subject, you’ll find that many successful CEOs are, as well. It’s simply ingrained into us – If we want to be successful, we need to be working when others are not. It’s like the classic running quote: “Somewhere, right now, someone is training while you are not. When you race him, he will win.” So I get up early because I believe it’s worth it. Here’s some of the benefits you can get from doing it, and as a bonus, here’s how to actually do it! Top ten reasons to get up early every day: 10) Learn! You can browse seven websites [...]

One of my biggest problems is figuring out how much to charge, whether it be for speaking, consulting, or any of my services. I suspect a lot of us have that problem. We don’t want to overcharge, lest we don’t get the client/gig/project, but then, we don’t want to undercharge, hating ourselves while we’re doing it, knowing that the client would have easily paid more. I used to err on the side of undercharging, and I hated myself for it. I still do, sometimes. It’s frustrating. I’ve seen it happen out of business situations, as well – Paying six dollars for that trinket in Thailand, knowing that I probably could have negotiated my way down to four. It’s really a [...]