What if every time you posted an update that was not relevant to your followers reasons for following your brand in the first place, you lost a follower. These days, it is all too common that people suffer from information overload. And we are all culpable of trimming the fat when it comes to limiting our exposure to irrelevant subject matter. I know from my own personal practice, if I get three consecutive updates from the same source that don't hit home in some relevant way, I simply unsubscribe. I was thinking about how that same mentality is likely held by a good majority of the population. I mean who wants to know about anything they have no interest in? Do you want to know about what I had for lunch today? That is exactly why you need to be exceptional in everything you post to your social media.

Arguably 2011 has been an interesting year in the ‘Chinese’ curse sense of the word. First there was that uncertainly about the stability of the Eurozone, then the planet seemed to overheat as natural disasters struck some of the world’s largest economic zones and, to top it all off, the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan went into near meltdown.

Online Business is, arguably, one of the toughest environments to compete in. Not only is the global market one which makes it hard to target customers due to cultural and national differences but it is also one which is crowded with many operators which, in our field, range from students working out of Bangladesh to companies working in low-cost economies like Thailand.

Starting and keeping an online business is no different to any other type of business. You do not work in a vacuum and the success of your online venture, whether it is a business or a blog website or the promotion of an eBook or a proper print book you need to market, depends on the ability of your potential customers to spend money.

In the corporate world careers are won or lost by one’s ability to hide who they are and, in the process, they often forget that the best commodity to use in order to get where they want is honesty. We have, in the world of business, become so good at hiding our true selves that polymetric tests and personality-stress questions, the old tools of headhunters and HR executives have become a little passé as we have become adept at guessing what the right answer might be and then providing the expected question.