How to win the ‘branding marathon’

Someone once pulled me aside after a three-hour workshop and told me he was rooting for me as I traveled down a dark path not everyone wanted to follow.

But here we are, five years later. This Internet thing isn’t a fad, nor is social media. In fact, social media is becoming more about how you share information, how customers engage with you, and how prospects find you.

Many organizations aren’t yet taking advantage of what the Web has to offer them for business growth, and at this point it seems overwhelming to many.

So how do you build your brand when you’re first starting out and it seems like you’ll never get the business where it needs to be online?

Baby steps.

It’s not a sprint

When you run a marathon, you don’t go out and buy new shoes, shorts, and a wicking shirt and then run 26.2 miles. You buy new shoes and you begin to train. You break in your shoes. You start off by running (or sometimes walk/running as I did) three miles. Then you add a mile or two every weekend until you’ve worked yourself up to 22 miles (which is the most you run before you participate in the race).

To go from couch to marathon easily takes three or four months. It’s impossible to run a marathon without that kind of training.