Welcome to my personal blog and home of Business Development In Context. This resource has been specifically created to teach you how to develop your small business and yourself, through Social Media Literacy.
I have learned these lessons “on the job” and it is time for me to pay it forward -to tell you what I did, show you the steps I took, and work with you as your business grows.

Take action on what you learn here and you will take your business to the next level.

• Learn how to use a blog and other Social Media tools to communicate with your customers, your competitors, and other members of your strategic alliance.
• Learn how to get away from “marketing messages” and have real conversations with your social media communities.
• Polish and perfect the leadership skills that you need in order to communicate and implement your vision for your business.
• Discover the power of the Long Tail, and how marketing now means selling more of less.
• Create a powerful personal network of real friends and business advisers that you can collaborate and innovate with to take your personal development to the next level and beyond.

Getting Started

This site is set up a little differently from many of the blogs and media sites that you may be familiar with. I recognize that all of you reading this are at different points on your development curve. Some of you may already be excellent marketers, but you are looking for ways to lead and engage your employees.

Some of you may have a successful business and want to learn how to reach out to your customers on the internet and extend the reach of your brand. Therefore, each category is in its own “channel”, where you can follow the topics that you are most interested in. You can also subscribe to the main RSS feed in order to get all of the content. Your method of learning, your pace of learning is up to you.

The primary categories that we will be addressing are:

Blogging for your business

Conversations with your market

Leadership in the New Media world

Marketing to the Long Tail, and the Head

Networking for success through Social Media

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Each article, or post, will also be tagged with a more specific topic name. In this way you can not only just read posts about Blogging, for example, but you can read all of the posts that are tagged “customer service” or whatever topic you wish to develop today.

Click on the Category links above to learn more about each specific category, or choose a subscription option here .