How to Set Your Brand Up For Success

The following is the sixth in the series "Live Your Brand" in which branding expert Melanie Spring takes us along on her three-week road trip across the country to meet innovative entrepreneurs whose experiences offer lessons learned to businesses big and small.

5 Keys to Great Nonverbal Communication

Clear and effective communication is essential during presentations, whether for board rooms full of executives, auditoriums at conferences, or classrooms full of students.

Verbal information is vital, but how we present that information can determine how much an audience remembers. Researchers Allan and Barbara Pease found that 83 percent of communication is nonverbal, but I wanted to know what impact it had on audience recall.

8 Questions to Ask Now and to Keep Asking in the Year Ahead

You either love or hate “end of the year” articles that talk about evaluating the past year and planning for the coming year. I have mixed emotions about them: psychologically the end of the year is an important milestone but, pragmatically, nothing really starts or stops abruptly except your bookkeeping, depending on your fiscal year.

Lots of pundits will make predictions about the coming year and a few might even be correct. “What might happen?” is an interesting question. “What will you make happen?” is the essential question.

Toward that end, you need to wring every lesson out of the past 12 months and keep learning like a sponge in the year ahead. So why not ask some important questions now about the year gone by but continue to ask them in the year ahead?

Here are eight questions to get your creative and strategic juices flowing:

When Planning for the Future, Keep Your Past in Perspective

One of the pieces of advice I give new clients always surprises them. "Look at your failures and non-starters," I say in the beginning of any meeting, "and let's find some great ideas."

This scares some of them since most people want to move on from failures or what they perceive to be false starts. But the big surprise is that the best innovations aren't based on the unknown or yet to be discovered. They are grounded in an understanding of the past, of ingrained cultural habits and behavior patterns, and making informed decisions based on that knowledge.

Tax Tips: 5 Rules for Deducting Business Meals

Like most business owners, you probably incur costs on wining and dining customers or clients. You’d think that this is an easy tax deduction, but you’d be wrong. The tax law is peppered with rules and limitations that curtail or prevent you from deducting meal costs you’d think would be a legitimate write off.

Here are five rules you need to know to optimize your deductions.

5 Steps to Supercharging Engagement on Twitter

Twitter engagement is not an easy task. Instead of simply broadcasting news and other details about your company you need to engage your followers and give them reason to read every post you tweet.

Increasing engagement on Twitter requires constant care and great attention to detail. From your bio to the type of content that you tweet each day, the way to engage people is by constantly creating and sharing relevant, interesting and uplifting content that people will want to comment on and share.

In order to increase your company's engagement factor on Twitter, follow these five important steps:

Meet the Company Creating Jobs for Former Gang Members

At the two-story Los Angeles headquarters of Homeboy Industries, one of the country's largest gang intervention programs, you can purchase pastries, sandwiches, coffee mugs, T-shirts, onesies, freshly baked bread and much more. But the biggest item Homeboy Industries sells is hope.