In an earlier post, I wrote about the foundational platforms you must put in place to build your expertise-driven business. Of those platforms, the first and, perhaps, the most important platform for building a sustainable business is your brand. And, for long-term success, your brand must be memorable as well as trustworthy.

Branding is all encompassing - who and what your brand represents and how it is positioned in the marketplace. Branding includes every aspect of how you are represented from your visual presentation to the feeling you want to invoke about you, yourself and your products. Your brand must appeal to your prospects and clients through the five human senses - sight, hearing, taste smell and touch. The more visceral your brand is the more memorable it will be.

To build a long-term, sustainable business, your brand must be have three core components I call The Branding ACT:

• Authenticity - Being the authentic you in all actions related to your brand

• Credibility - as you build your reputation and deliver on promises, credibility becomes part of the fabric of your brand. As you expand your circles of influence and increase your visibility, your credibility is further enhanced.

• Transparency - being transparent in all of your business activities is the fastest way to raise the 'know, like and trust' factor.

If you have questions about the branding process, enter your questions in the comment box below - I will be covering The Branding Act in an upcoming Strategy Talk.

There are a handful of internet marketers that I look to for guidance and one of those gurus is Armand Morin. He is always on the cutting edge of what's next in internet marketing and often personally leads major shifts in the industry. So when he rolls out a new product, it is something that I recommend taking a close look at.

This week, he is launching a new program - Marketing Tutorials. As part of this launch, he is conducting an exclusive webinar this week just for the people who are on the early-bird list. And, best of all, it is free.

So, click here right now to get on the webinar list. You don't have to buy a thing - just listen to what he has to say. And, come back here to leave comments about the webinar.

After watching a segment on CBS Sunday Morning about Tina Brown and her new venture The Daily Beast, I headed over for a quick visit.

The site is a refreshing take on a news and media site. Considering what Tina Brown did at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, The Daily Beast should quickly evolve into one of the web's foremost power media sites. It is always interesting to see how an expert from the traditional media world approaches the online media world. As I've said before - it's all just media.

Hey, the publicity on Sunday Morning certainly helped to raise awareness of the site. It is a beautiful thing when the online world and offline media worlds collide. Don't you think?

If you haven't checked this site out, click here to go there now. Meanwhile, good luck to Tina Brown and her team.

Living in Clarity, the newest book in the best-selling series Wake Up…Live the Live You Love is set to launch next week. I am honored to be among the esteemed authors of this book including Dr. Wayne Dyer, Alex Mandossian, Janet Bray Attwood, and Anthony Robbins.

A recent reviewer said that reading this book was like reading 41 little books - each an inspiring story. I hope you will order a copy from Barnes and Noble on Tuesday, October 28.

When your book arrives, grab a glass of tea, sit in your favorite spot and enjoy reading these heart-centered stories. Then, come back here and let me know what you think.

If you have not yet found BrainyQuote, you are missing out on a free resource that offers a vast and comprehensive set of quotations by topic, type of author or by the name of the author - contemporary as well as those who are long gone.

In addition to quotes, it gives a list of famous people who's birthday is the day you visit. The site also provides interesting bits of information about quoted authors.

And, you can get a "quote of the day" downloaded to your blog or site.

There are other quote services online but BrainyQuote is in my opinion the best and easiest to use. So the next time you need a quote for your book, seminar, workshop, report, teleseminar, article or speech; spend some time at BrainyQuote.

In closing I leave you with this quote:

"No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit"…Andrew Carnegie