Today’s Brief: ‘Why You Should Get a Free Gravatar’Gravatars help you brand yourself and your blog.  They’re free and easy to create using the Gravatar.com site.Get your Gravatar (FREE) today!

Today’s Brief: Finding Your Great Work! Michael Bungay Stanier of BoxOfCrayons has released a book called Finding Your Great Work.I downloaded the first three chapters today.  Michael does it the right way unlike the other example of a few days ago.He’s even got this great 8-minute mini-film that you can view right now for free. It’s thought provoking and it made me wonder about the value of right livelihood and doing great work.

Yaro Starak is one of the most influential bloggers out on the scene today.  For a few years now, he’s been dominating the blog how-to market with his Entrepreneur’s-Journey.com site.Yaro’s posts and thorough and loaded with gems of advice and recommendations for up and coming bloggers.  He built his business on perseverance, testing and soaking up as much knowledge as he could along the way.

Today’s Brief: ‘The 10 Commandments of Brand Religions’Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro, a search engine marketing firm, posted this regarding brand religions.  Interesting reading.Read the post here!

God love ‘em, they’re crazy about you and your blog!They’d walk up to a perfect stranger and tell them to walk, no…RUN..RIGHT NOW…to a WiFi spot and surf over to your blog.They comment on every post.They can’t wait for your next product or service to be released and often are the first to buy when you put up a pre-relase sales page.

Let’s say you and I meet in a bar. We make small talk and I learn you’re a cartoonist. Ultra-cool, man!Now, I’m mad about good cartoons.  I especially love the cartoons I see each day in my daily desk calendar from The New Yorker magazine. But I digress.We talk about classic cartoons…Calvin and Hobbes…The Far Side….you get the picture.

It’s tough out there…Blogging isn’t all glamour and riches…as you’ve found out.Building a blog-religion is even tougher.In fact, it can be downright impossible at times what with the responsibilities for… creating fresh content updating blog design and related infrastructure issues responding to comments tracking newsletter subscriptions, RSS, email subs brainstorming your next product or service offer lining up and editing guest posts both inbound and outboud .

Let’s play some word association, shall we?I say “Expert.”  You say: ___________?I say “Friend.”  You say: ___________?Here’s how I completed this exercise.Expert: AuthorityFriend: TrustWhat’s the point?I was reading Mark Silver’s Heart of Business Blog this morning.  (Check it out here.) In this post on the expert v. friend role of the the blogger/business owner, he says the following: “When someone is hurting, it’s easy to go into “expert” mode to try to fix them, because *you* are uncomfortable with their struggle.

Here’s proof that you can approach anything from a religious point of view.Jeff Lubell loves wearing jeans. He eats, sleeps and breathes denim. But not just any denim as he explains on the TrueReligionBrandJeans.com website:”Jeffrey Lubell founded True Religion in 2002 with the intention of redefining premium denim. His vision was to make quality, American-made, authentic, timeless, great fitting, 1970’s inspired jeans wear, with a trendsetting appeal for today’s consumer.

For Christians, it’s the Bible. For Jews, it’s their Torah. For Muslims, the Koran; Taoists, the Tao Te Ching. It’s their source of comfort, their tangible talisman linking them to the greater good.It their ultimate resourceAll popular religions have one.  It serves as the ultimate resource for their followers. A place to turn for answers or at least the promise of answers.