Blogging can be an insanely powerful tool in the business world today. As a human face for a company, a blogger,  armed with a unique and engaging voice, brings a built-in customer base who are already in love with the brand.

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Q: What do landing the perfect job, finding your ideal mate, and winning friends all have in common?

A: They all require you to know how to market yourself.

Yes, it’s the reason people sweat interviews (and first dates), spend hours drafting cover letters, and even pay others to assemble their résumés — we don’t always know the best way to sell ourselves. Marketing yourself is an essential skill to get where you want to go, but the process is often easier said than done.

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Disclaimer: I’ve never been skydiving.

The first step of blogging, like skydiving, is making the commitment to do it. Once you’ve decided you’re going to skydive, you’ve got to decide on a method for your jump. Are you going in tandem? How about an accelerated free fall? Or should you static line that bad boy?

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One of the most internationally ubiquitous weapons, the Russian AK-47, has undergone a little makeover. The assault rifle was developed in the 1940s in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died almost exactly one year ago. Prior to his death, the weapons engineer wrote of his “spiritual pain” in wondering if the AK-47 has done more harm than good. Although Kalashnikov’s intentions to invent a weapon of defense may have been noble, it’s impossible to determine if the weapon has wrought more destruction than it has ever defended, given the AK-47’s uncontrolled global distribution.

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Branding Experts: No High Fructose Corn Syrup ’til You Right Your Creepy Courses!

With October 31^st around the corner, it’s the perfect time to discuss a subject that’s near and dear to my heart: What happened to the apostrophe that used to live in Hallowe’en? And how long has it been missing?

For years, I thought I’d never find that charming throwback to Ye Olde Worlde punctuation, but then I’ll be darned if it didn’t turn up the other day gratuitously tacked on to the title of the Lands’ End catalog. At least, I think that’s the same one. Or maybe the Lands’ End bonus apostrophe is the rogue migrant that’s missing from Maurices clothing chain store, and has nothing to do with Hallowe’en at all. 

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Everywhere you look, advice on SEO marketing and increasing site traffic are all “blah blah blah” about the all-powerful content. How to improve your content. How to create engaging content. How what you thought was good content at one time is now no longer acceptable because of reasons. (And, on a related note, how to spiff up existing content.)

At the frontline of content creation stands blogging. Blogs started out as the business equivalent of a “Dear Readers,” but let’s be honest: most blog posts these days have almost nothing to do with actual writing anymore. They’re all about cross-marketing and the multimedia experience, or how many images to include and at what resolution and which designer can hook you up with a really swell infographic.

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Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in the day-to-day tasks of running a business that you forget to take a step back and view it all with a critical eye. Do my customers see what I think they see? What do complete strangers think when they come across my website? Are my employees in line with my vision for the company? Do they even know what my vision is? Depending on the answers to these questions, you may have some work in store for you to improve your company’s image. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

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