Boy, that’s an exciting headline, huh? What could possibly be the most important thing you could be doing to market your coaching or consulting business?

Most marketing experts will tell you it’s clearly branding your business or creating your comprehensive marketing plan. Both those are certainly important.

But according to 19 year-old entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, founder of Comcate and author of My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley, the most important thing you can do when starting a business is “harbor a bias towards action.”

If you want a successful business, any successful business, you have to take action. Don’t just think or talk about your ideas; actually put them into action. Successful business owners actually implement their ideas. They let themselves make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and keep growing. Action is what makes a business successful.

If you’re a coach or consultant, you’re paid to think, to talk, to be an expert. Yet to be successful in your business you’ll need to go beyond just thoughts and conversation. You’ll need to actually implement them.

How? Action steps

• Write it down
  When you have an idea around your business, write it down (take action). Writing it down makes it a bit more real. If your thought in your mind, it’s likely to get jumbled up with the thousands of other thoughts you have each day.
• Brainstorm
  After you take the action of writing down your idea, brainstorm it. You can do this in as little as 2-3 minutes. Take longer if you have But get your thoughts about the idea on paper while their fresh. You’ll be surprised what this can lead too.
• Action Steps
  At the end of your mini brainstorming session, write at least one thing you can do in the next 48 hours that will help in the development of your idea. AND DO IT!
• Do It
  I put this twice on purpose. It’s in the action of doing that you’ll find success. Creating action steps that you don’t take action on are useless. So honor yourself and your ideas by following through on your action steps.
• Get Help
  If you find you’re having trouble implementing your ideas, get help. There are plenty of coaches and consultants who can help you take action. Generally, consultants are great for ideas and training while coaches tend to be better at keeping you on task and helping with follow through.

Believe it or not, this is how almost every successful business gets launched. You have an idea and you put it into action. So today, how can you take a single step toward implementing your best idea? Think about it - then act. First with your comments below.

Thanks to Wendy Piersall for asking me to write for her Second ‘How To’ Group Research Project. There’s a number of great posts people have put up on various topics around blogging and business. Check some of them out:

• Mr Flexibility: finding work-life balance
• How to start a company and a family at the same time
• How to cross-market your blog and your business, promoting each to each other’s audience
• Increase your blog’s stickiness
• Google Sitemaps: get found faster
• Countermeasures to combat Google Page Rank leak
• Non-techie intro to SEO
• The how and why you should start leveraging video
• 3 huge steps on how to leap from the business security of a job to a home business
• Beyond Adsense, how to attract independent advertisers to your blog
• How to get your Google Adsense account banned
• How do you get your home business setup right?
• Moving to another domain, what I’ve learned so far, part 1
• Recognition, reaching out, & beyond
• The ultimate guide to where the moms are online
• Safely move your blog
• Protecting forms from spam
• What is Reddit and how can I use it to promote and market my blog posts?
• Web 101, the three-column CSS layout
• CSS for beginners - changing the fonts
• Quick guide to Google Analytics for bloggers
• Statcounter.com and how you can make it work for you
• How to start an online store

These are all good reads, so check them out. But not before you join the conversation below.

As I’m restructuring my business offers, I’ve been struggling a bit with branding. Though I help my clients with this all the time, it’s seems hard to help myself. No worries, I do have some excellent brand experts in my corner.

While branding was fresh on my mind the other day, I stumbled across a video on Phil Gerbysak’s site. The video, put together by ZeFrank, brings branding down to a simple concept:

A brand is an emotional aftertaste that’s conjured up by, but not necessarily dependent on, a series of experiences.

…Everything has an emotional aftertaste. And everything’s a potential brand.

The short video is definitely worth the watch. Just be ware that ZeFrank does use a few expletives in getting his point across.

Thoughts?

There I was sitting at SOBCon07 over the weekend enjoying the speakers and the conversations they started. Soaking in all kinds of great ideas for taking my blog the conversation (and my business) to the next level.

Then, out of nowhere he said it…what’s been on my mind since I began writing publicly. The meaning in the question I asked weeks back.

“Stop calling yourself a blogger,” proclaimed David Armano.

“Blogging is a commodity. Anyone can do it. We are human beings with passions and interests that come out in our blogs—not the other way around. Stop calling yourself a blogger. You are a… (designer, businessperson, marketer, artist, baker, mother, grandfather, etc). Calling ourselves bloggers takes away from what makes us unique.”

The reactions in the room were interesting. Everything from gasps to confusion to euphoria. Okay, so maybe euphoria is a bit overstated. But that’s close to how I felt. Finally, someone was saying it - stop limiting yourself as just being a blogger.

David wasn’t advocating that we stop identifying ourselves as bloggers with our blogging circles. What he was suggesting is that we stop referring to ourselves as bloggers to the outside world.

And I agree.

It seems that these words - blog, blogging, blogger, blogosphere, etc - stand in the way of people participating in a new, interactive internet. I hear it from clients all the time, “…isn’t blogging just a journal?,” “I don’t want to have to write so much,” or my ever favorite, “my son/daughter has a blog they talk to their friends with…it’s sort of silly.”

The truth is, this medium is incredibly powerful at reaching an audience. Yet if we only speak in our jargon, we’re effectively alienating a huge population of people who aren’t blogging. Many of those are potential clients and customers.

David said in a post on Monday:

…my theory is that focusing on the passion more so than the medium (blogging) will lead to a better personal brand.

…Being a blogger doesn’t make us unique. Our individual talents, passions and personality does. This is the stuff brands are built from—and blogs, despite all of the baggage that comes along with the word is an extension of our brands, whether it be personal or business.

Again, I couldn’t agree with him more. That’s part of why his presentation was so refreshing for me. He, in part, said what I’ve been chewing on for months.

So if we’re not going to call ourselves bloggers, what do we call ourselves? Do we need to call ourselves anything? Let’s start a conversation…