If you own a business, there is no such thing as an “out of office” autoresponder. You know, that little message you can set up that bounces back to people when they try to email you and you are on vacation?

If you own a business, I hate to break it to you, but there is no such thing as a vacation. Ok, maybe that’s a bit harsh. I take vacations. Actually, I get to travel quite a bit and love doing so. However, as a business owner there is no such thing as leaving the laptop at home or putting down the “crackberry.” You need to watch your business like a hawk. I must get at least 30 emails per day from people inquiring about this and that. A lot of these emails need to be fielded and forwarded to employees. You can’t stop being the quarterback. I just figured out that I get about 200 emails per day (including spam). If I go three days without checking email, that is 600 emails! There is no way I can just create my “out of the office” autoresponder and worry about emails when I get home.

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In this vlog, I talk about my blogging schedule and why it is so important to grow your database, especially in a recession.

Here is the 3rd episode of the show. I do a great job in making a fool out of myself when I do a rap, but it’s the ridiculous stuff that gets views right? Bad press is still press right? Here important rules I follow when creating these videos:

1. I will not be afraid to take risks
2. I will be as confident as I can at all times
3. I will take constructive criticism as something constructive
4. I will always make fun of myself
5. I will stick to a rigorous schedule and always hit my deadlines. Persistence is the key to success!

Sorry people, between having a newborn and launching my new weekly Internet show “Outside the Inbox”, I have let my blogging schedule for jaredreitzin.com go by the wayside. I didn’t leave ya! I still plan to continue to address important situations and subjects that all of us budding entrepreneurs must face. This week I want to talk about delegation. As easy as it sometimes seems to just say, “Hey, John, I want you to take this project over,” it’s not. Here are the four main reasons why this isn’t as easy as it seems:

Scenario 1: If you are a business owner, you realize that nobody in your company can do a job as well as you can. As a result, you never delegate and will always assign yourself the task at hand.

Scenario 2: You are so busy that you don’t have time to train someone to do it, and because of your attitude (see #1 above), you would just rather get it done quickly by yourself.

Scenario 3: You don’t have any project management procedures in place, coupled with follow-through habits, so even if you delegate a task to someone, you haven’t put any milestones or deadlines in place, and things will eventually slip through the cracks.

Scenario 4: You don’t have a lot of people you can delegate to because you are small and are just starting out.

Scenario 5: Is there a 5th one you can think of?

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I finally got my act together and created a weekly Internet show. Think Daily Show meets Talk soup, but about all things digital marketing, and no where near the production quality. Course we are all about doing things guerilla style. I would love to get your feedback. Any thing you want me to discuss? Any ideas you have to make it better? Wanna come on the show for an interview? Send me your thoughts, I am all ears.

We outdid ourselves. Check out commercial 3 of 3 promoting our upcoming white paper “Digital Messaging Best Practices for Geniuses” and tell me what you think. I would love your feedback.

Check out commercial 2 of 3 promoting our upcoming white paper “Digital Marketing Best Practices for Geniuses” and tell me what you think. I would love your feedback.

I believe the future of the Internet is video. More and more people are starting to come online with broadband, both in the U.S. and abroad. To answer this exploding medium I started mobileStorm Productions, a unit of mobileStorm dedicated to creating cool video content for prospects, customers, employees and partners. Check out commercial 1 of 3 promoting our upcoming white paper “Digital Marketing Best Practices for Geniuses” and tell me what you think. I would love your feedback.

With a growing business, it’s so easy to allow things to slip through the cracks. I have lost clients because of promises that were not kept due to the fact that somebody forgot to do something. I have seen invoices which were never sent and thousands of dollars not collected because someone simply forgot to follow up.

I believe there are two types of “to dos” in business–tasks and projects. Projects are large and have multiple dependencies and milestones. With tasks, there is usually just one thing you need to do and when that one task is done, you can cross it off your list. I highly recommend using a good project management system for your larger projects, especially if you are doing any sort of software development. However, this article is about making sure tasks don’t slip through the cracks.

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Dr. Martin Luther King is one of my heroes. Imagine for a second that you knew you could be assassinated if you continued to purse a cause that you knew was right and just. Could you continue to stand up for what you believe in? I think about this often, and I realize that there are very few people on this earth who could. Does this story remind you of any other historical figure?

MLK was a very selfless man. He realized that segregation would affect generations of people long after he was gone. He saw a window of opportunity to change that while he was alive on this earth and he took it. It amazes me to think that only 40 years ago, African Americans, and other minorities, were not allowed to go to the same schools as Whites, drink at the same fountains, or sit at the front of a bus. We have come a long way to make equality work, and thanks to Dr. King, “little black boys and black girls are able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

If you have a moment today, go to AmericanHetoric.com and either listen to or read his famous speech. It’s impossible not to get goose bump. This man is spitting fire.