Yesterday we blogged for the first time in almost a year, it felt great. You know when you work out for the first time in awhile, and you get out of the gym feeling like a million bucks, well that’s how I feel right now. I feel like a new man.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and I thought to myself, I haven’t given enough credit to the Entrepreneur Magazine’s Winning Strategies for Success Conference yesterday. It was a real eye opener. Even though we’re a strategic online marketing firm, and we’re focused on providing the best results and the highest ROI for our clients, we tend to forget about how important the basics really are. Blogging, for example, is so easy to do, and so great for SEO. Our blog post from yesterday was already crawled by google, and SproutStart.com even received a significant bump in online traffic. This stuff works.

I was hesitant yesterday morning driving up to Long Beach in the rain for an event I knew little about. As Travis and I arrived we saw a double rainbow , and realized how good of a day it was going to be… jk jk. Seriously though, we walked into the main room and found 100’s of people wanting to learn. Everyone was trying to find how social marketing, SEO, and todays top technologies can help advance their businesses. It was great to see all these people trying to figure out how to utilizes these strategies to grow there businesses, strategies we use on a daily basis to help our clients.

One of the sessions, taught by Susan Gunellus – Build Your Brand, Build Your Business, was primarily focused on how to use social media to boost your business. Some of the take aways that we thought were really important for people thinking about using social media marketing were: Choosing which social media accounts to be on, and the importance of conveying your personality through your social networking. With 100’s and potentially 1000’s of social media outlets out there, which ones should you use? Start with what you’re comfortable with. If you have experience with Twitter or Facebook, start there. Build up your followers/friends based on relevancy, you don’t just want to add thousands of randome people. Next, really think about where your customers hang out. For example, with You Rock Guitar, many musicians are still on MySpace even though activity on MySpace has really dropped off over the past few years. Another example for them is YouTube. Videos are on of the the BEST ways to spread content on the internet and to teach people things as well. Make sure your posts are not all self promoting, you really should be using the 80/20 rule, 80% or more posting relevant content for your user base, and the other 20% or less promoting your brand.

Another focal point was on my favorite subject – Branding. What is a brand? You logo, or product, maybe your website? No. A brand is your mission, a brand is a promise that you fulfill on a daily basis. What do you think of when you think Kia - inexpensive… or Toyota – quality (even with their debacle earlier this year). What about Apple – Innovation? I just saw the Social Network – What do you guys think of when you think of Facebook?

A brand is not something you can have be successful within a few days of throwing up a logo and website, a brand takes years to build and years to prove value.