I started my business, Hunk-O-Mania, before the era of social media and during the early days of internet marketing. While building my company, I neglected my own personal brand — and in the last few years, I've aimed to make up for it by embracing social media platforms as a way to build my brand outside of my business.

Crafting a strong personal brand on social media can take time, but it can also yield significant benefits. Based on my own experience, here are a few tips on how to build your own authentic brand on social media. 

Winning an entrepreneurial or small business award can help a company gain recognition and credibility, and the benefits don't necessarily stop there. According to a study on U.S. businesses by British Quality Foundation, small award-winning companies experienced a 63 percent increase in operating income and a 39 percent growth in sales compared to non-winners. In other words, it can pay to win ⁠— and you can’t win if you don’t enter.

Bethenny Frankel, Gary Vaynerchuk, and other online sales experts explain how to be part of this trillion-dollar opportunity.

Thinking about starting an online business? It’s a good idea: e-commerce sales are expected to reach $3.45 trillion globally this year.

Self-help ideas can help some people, but they don't always help everyone.

If you’ve ever wondered why self-help works for some, but not for others, especially when one is battling depression, this is essential viewing. In this cinematic video, Entrepreneur Network partner Ben Angel shares his own experience with depression, and why he believes the self-help industry has gotten it seriously wrong.

Delivery service DoorDash suffered a data breach earlier this year that affected the information of 4.9 million users, delivery workers, and restaurants, DoorDash announced Thursday afternoon.

The breach occurred on May 4 and affects people who started using the app before April 5, 2018.

As a result of the breach, an unauthorized third party was able to gain access to users' profile information, including names, email addresses, delivery addresses, order history, and phone numbers.

Do you know the real difference between personal branding and personal marketing? Your personal brand is how you appear to the world, and personal marketing is how you share yourself with the world.

In a digital economy, everyone is competing for clients and customers. The only way to give your company a competitive edge is to become savvy at personal marketing.

Executives from AT&T, Lockheed Martin, Honda and more share leadership insights.

How does a leader manage to harness the talents of a group without letting things descend into chaos? How does a leader give firm direction without stifling creativity and individuality?

In a series of profiles on “Women of The C-Suite”, we spoke with hundreds of female leaders about the most important ideas to keep in mind in order to lead a team. Here are ten great insights from 10 powerful women in tech.

Figuring out which of the four primary leadership styles you follow can enhance your communication skills.

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Mike Phillips discusses four distinct management styles. Each style has its own positive and negative connotations, and of course vary among different personalities. Determining your personal leadership style can clear the pathways for communication with your employees.

Check out these part-time jobs that you can take on during your time in college.

When you’re studying in university, finding a part-time job can feel daunting, as your main priority might be studying, building friendships and relationships, and carving out your bigger picture dreams! Learning to balance a part-time job will not only help you learn work ethic and balance, but it can also give you more financial freedom early on.

With so much noise on Instagram, it’s seemingly becoming harder to gain followers, find new audiences, and create conversations. If you're wondering how to stand out and become discoverable, good news: You’ve come to the right place.

Attend our webinar called How to Use Instagram to Find New Followers, Customers, and Fans to learn how you can leverage Instagram Stories to move your business forward.

Trade-sensitive stocks rally as the trade war with China continues to drive prices this week.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The major stock indexes were down more than two percent last Friday after President Trump threatened to increase tariffs again on Chinese goods, but rallied yesterday after China responded with surprising moderation.

Brands need modern marketing approaches to connect with modern audiences. In a webiner titled , Amy Endemann, the company's vice president of marketing, shares how they meet that challenge through an authentic and multi-dimensional marketing strategy.

No matter how much you bring to the table, whether it’s money, experience or enthusiasm, there’s one lesson every entrepreneur has to learn sooner or later: You can’t do it alone. Visionaries like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might be at the helm of some of the world’s most exciting companies, but Musk isn’t in the production plant assembling Teslas any more than Bezos is fulfilling shipments in an Amazon warehouse. The reality is that it takes a village to get a startup up and running, and while you’re well aware of the genius of your idea, the people around you probably aren’t.

Many small-business owners want to grow their companies, and they want to do it fast. But if you rush into expandsion without a plan, you risk losing everything you’ve worked so hard to build. Take Wise Acre Frozen Treats, which hired too many employees and bought too much equipment before they had the revenue or startup capital they needed; the company went bankrupt in just a few years. 

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Eric Siu offers a few tips on how to make your website rank on Google. Focus on both the design aspect of your site and the power of your company's brand.

From productivity to company morale, here are the many benefits of delegating responsibility.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: You need to delegate if you want to be a more effective leader.

As a digital marketer, I often rub shoulders with e-commerce tacticians lining up the next growth hack designed to undercut the competition and win the customer’s sale. Indeed, e-commerce is an intensely competitive space, where online advertising is auctioned to the highest bidder and conversion optimization is studied strenuously. As a consumer, we have unprecedented access to a global catalogue, complemented by powerful algorithms guaranteeing we only pay the cheapest price. With cut-throat competition and acute price sensitivity, a race to the bottom is in full swing, and I couldn't help but consider the effect on brick-and-mortar businesses. Consequently, I decided to investigate how entrepreneurs running physical stores are staying in the fight. 

How’s this for mad science: Within the next 15 years, people could elect to have their brains “zapped” to boost creativity in the workplace or classroom.

The process -- based on functional MRI studies -- is headed up by Adam Green, director of the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition and president-elect of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity. Green’s team looked at blood flow as a measure of brain cell activity when people were doing creative tasks. The process pointed them to one region of the brain in particular (the frontopolar cortex), so they decided to test whether stimulating the area could make creative thinking easier.

Promotional-only social media, paper-based marketing and poorly produced videos are on the "no-no" list. And who can forget that "Domino's Forever" campaign?

Marketing is complex. With seemingly endless techniques, how do you reach and resonate with your audience? First things first: You need to know what you shouldn’t do. Last year, “Domino’s Forever” was a campaign created by a Russian Domino’s franchise.

Meetings are indispensable, except when they are a complete waste of everyone's time.

Last September, more than 70 employees from Honey Stinger – a sports nutrition brand that makes honey-based products – and its sister companies finished a 740-mile trek.

The simple answer is, we don’t trust salespeople. We love buying things, but we hate being sold to!  When was the last time you met a salesperson who you truly believed was putting your needs ahead of his or her own financial interest?  

As an entrepreneur, you may see a serious dilemma here. To be successful, you have to constantly sell: to customers, investors, strategic partners, employees and new hires. En route, you must figure out how to help each of these constituents embrace your vision, products and business model -- but not come across as “sales-y” in the process.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

We all know the importance of setting goals -- they hold you accountable, tell you what you truly want and help propel you forward. Whether we strive to get started on that new project, spend more time at home, launch a new product or want to lose weight, many of us simply state our goals but fail to set deadlines and track our progress toward achieving them.