3. Write up a new ad. Buy space in a couple of ezines for submission of ad. Track these ads, to see which one works best.

4. Design a new theme based web site for one of your affiliate products or services. Optimize site for search engines and submit to them by hand.

5. Send out post cards. Create a new post card for your business. Find a targeted list of 300 contacts in your local area. Send postcards out and track response.

6. Grow your newsletter subscriptions and response rate - research a new topic, incorporate a new service or product to offer to subscribers.

7. Contribute to online forum discussions - spend 1 hour/day on different marketing boards to offer advice. (you can leave a resource box at bottom of each message and people will naturally contact you because of helpful advice and information you gave).

Now take next 10 minutes to write up your own plan of what you WILL DO for next few weeks (you can use above list to get your intellectual juices flowing). Keep it simple.

If you take this proactive approach to market these(or yours)ideas in coming weeks, you will propel your business to success.

I then ask if people have telephones. Everyone raises their hands. I ask if people have ever had a problem with their phone company. Most people keep their hands up! You probably have same experience. Phone companies have bad reputations for customer service.

Good companies create good brands by creating trust.

Do you need a lot of money to create trust?

No way!

Yet hundreds of companies have blown through more than a billion dollars on TV ads during Super Bowl and other major events trying to build a brand image.

I attended a top-level seminar on branding and a venture capitalist on panel said a consumer company must spend $50 million dollars to build a brand identity today.

However, in my seminar on branding at Stanford, I asked participants - all brand managers at major companies, to name 10 search engines, 10 consumer web sites, 3 pet supplies sites and 10 business-to-business web sites.

No one could!

And these are very people who are in industry, and are exposed to millions of dollars of advertising to create brands!

What does this mean?

Buying your way to brand awareness does not work!

The net is littered with those failures: Dr. Koop, Priceline's grocery service and Boo.com stand out as highly publicized failures.

So, as a small company, you don't have to worry about not have a treasure chest full of cash to buy a reputation - because it doesn't work!

How do you create a great brand? That's where brand assets come in to play. Brand assets are your slogans, advertising, publicity, promotions, characters, spokes people, as well as your customer service and sales people! These tools help create a meaningful identity that creates an emotional bond with your audience that compels them to take action - and provides logic that justifies their choices.

The Internet has a treasure chest of tools to create brand awareness, brand identity and brand loyalty including your e-mail address, website name, signature file. You also need to transmit your own personality and identity to create trust.

When you build trust, you build a great brand. If you can do that, then you will build sales and create customers for life!