Just as surely as building a powerful brand is the key to differentiating a product in the marketplace and thus building a successful business, so creating a strong personal brand is the key to differentiating yourself from your competitors, thereby ensuring your own success as well as that of your business. Your personal brand determines how people respond to you, whether they listen to you, buy from you, how much they buy, what they are willing to pay, and so on.

By Maya Bailey, Ph.D. -- Why do most business owners fail to achieve their dreams and reach their financial goals? Is it a lack of motivation, a lack of drive or a lack of business know how? In my 12 years of coaching business owners to double and triple their incomes, I have found that none of the above is the reason they fail. Instead, it is the presence of self-limiting beliefs, many of which are hidden, that stop business owners in their tracks.

What does a hero look like for you? Is it the burly firefighter running into burning buildings to save lives, the girl with a crippling disease who somehow manages to complete her first 10k walk, or the Red Cross, helping people across the globe get the care they need? Most of us don't think of ourselves as a hero but that's where we're missing out, not seeing how, in fact, we have the opportunity every day to be a hero on behalf of our clients.

I have become an avid fan of systems. I used to be rebellious of systems as though they would take away all my creativity and spontaneity. What I have found is that they give me the freedom to be creative, enjoy life and it keep me enjoying my business! Nothing is worse than waking up one day and realizing that you've created a successful business but it's over taken your life and you are afraid you can't maintain all these great marketing vehicles.

With all the news and media talking about how the sky is falling over and over again, it's vital that you protect your energy. Keeping your spirits up is a simple way of calling you forth to notice your beliefs that you think about over and over. This one area alone will impact the actions you take - or don't take in your business. Don't fall victim to being unconscious about your runaway thoughts and go into constricted scarcity thinking about what's not possible. Now it's imperative that you surround yourself with possiblity thinkers and notice where you get stuck in your money mindset beliefs.

The most important quality for success in entrepreneurship and in life is the quality of optimism. Optimism is a wonderful quality as long as you have it under control. In order to be successful in business, and in any activity where your money is involved, you must temper your optimism with negativism. You must be enthusiastic about the possible upside of the investment but you must be skeptical, critical, suspicious and demanding about all the different ways that your money can be lost.

The alarm clock jars you awake at some insanely early hour. As you hit the snooze button you think, "there's gotta be a better way to make a living." As someone who rolled out of bed this morning at 8:30, I'm here to deliver the good news: there is.

Who is the most famous entrepreneur? That is a matter of opinion, of course, but here are some quotes from some of the most well-known and successful entrepreneurs.

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world - reporters and experts - and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).... I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.