Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

Thinking, writing, business ideas … You’re only a stranger once.

Announcing the SOB Directory

Filed Under Audience, Community, Marketing, SOB Business, Successful Blog | 5 Comments

To All SOBs and All SO-Wanna-Bs

Successful Blog is not just getting a new design. It’s changing to become even more focused on success, community, and our readers. That means you’ll be seeing content changes and new content features as well as spiffy new design and production values.

I’m prepared to announce the first change right this minute.

Though the old Successful and Outstanding Blogger page is still under cover. It’s now also undergoing a change of it’s own. No longer will it just carry a simple list of links as an honor roll.

Announcing the SOB Directory

As a service to our readers and our community, we’re turning this page into a directory. Each Successful and Outstanding Blogger’s link will expand to carry both the blog logo and a description of the content readers will find when they visit your blog. So the SOB directory entry for my business blog would look like this.

LMB logo

ME Strauss skews the world wondering about crayons, conformity,heroes, yo-yos, idiosyncrasies, and that person reading the paper at Starbucks. Enjoy storytelling that brings back memories.

What to Do

If you’re already an SOB, send me your blog description. I’m happy to do the rest. You surely have one that you’ve used for some directory listing hiding on your computer somewhere. Take it out and dust it off. No worries about your logo. Unless you want to switch the one I have. (The logo restriction is 60 pixels high.) Then e-mail me at lizsun2@gmail.com.

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, take a post home with you to share Successful-Blog ideas with your readers.
Just link to that post on this blog and write your own insights to “add value” to the conversation.
Then e-mail me at lizsun2@gmail.com with a link to your post.

That’s all there is to it. I’ll feature your logo with a link and you’ll get your SOB badge for your blog. Then your logo will be part of our new directory.

OR contribute an outstanding idea about how we might add value for readers to Successful- Blog.

Even more exciting changes that serve your needs are sitting right there on the horizon. Can you see them yet?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
What Makes a Great SOB?!

Google Zeitgeist–Will Make ME Millions

Filed Under Audience, Content, Great Finds, Marketing, SEO, Strategy, Successful Blog | 9 Comments

Think everyone’s in a foul mood?
Check Google Zeitgeist it could be true.

googleblog_blogspot.com Zeitgeist

The word Zeitgeist refers to the intellectual, cultural and moral climate of an era. It’s the taste, the outlook, the spirit of the times, so to speak. I think you can have a personal Zeitgeist as well. My own has been suffering from karma-skew all through 2005. I hope to master it in 2006, and I’m looking for every tool to do so. I think Google Zeitgeist might do the trick.

Every month Google interprets the latest search data it has collected for trends, bits of information, and patterns in user searches to make a statistical snapshot in the form of a report called Zeitgeist Watch. You can find it on the Google Blog. The information gathered by Google Zeitgeist isn’t particularly new, but where they take it is. The way they’ve thought-through Zeitgeist makes it a pleasure to behold and a joy to use. Despite my wariness of big conglomerates getting bigger, I just can’t turn up my nose at this one. It’s too much fun for a strategy fanatic like me.

Basically Google Zeitgeist lets you into the minds of Google searchers–our readers. Others attempt to do that, but Google performs it in a visually-friendly, intuitive fashion. They didn’t get to be Google, after all, by making things harder, now did they? Rather than just stopping with an alphabetical list of tags, they’ve analyzed the list into patterns of like-minded choices. This makes the bigger picture stand out.

As shown above, the Zeitgeist categories for October 2005 include

  1. Look It Up
  2. Popular Brick and Mortar Companies
  3. Popular Solo Singers
  4. What Else to Do On Line

The popular search term categories for October 2005 include

  1. Top Worries
  2. Popular Sports
  3. Popular Newsmakers
  4. Tabloid Fodder

The popular Image search categoriess for October 2005 include

  1. Popular Cars
  2. Popular Wizards and Superheroes
  3. Popular Bands
  4. Tabloid Concepts

Just by checking those three lists, we have a sense of what our readers might be thinking, and what topics might be hot. Look a little further, and find that Zeitgeist covers no less than 23 other countries beyond the US. As a person who is curious and fascinated by human behavior, this is like a major Christmas toy. It’s been out for a while now. So if you’ve not played with it yet, it’s time you give Zeitgeist a try. I can see posts in the lists for almost any blog.

But first I’m going to use Google Zeitgeist to invent a Television Game Show. It will have a 20-second song for the final round question like the one that Merv Griffin did for Jeopardy. That’s how I’m going to make millions.

Heck I bet after that the famousblog read by royalty, tycoons, and the rich and famous–Blogebrity–will move me from the C List up to the prestigious A List. Then it will be Veuvre Champagne for everyone in the Signature Room at the top of the John Hancock in Chicago. I’ll be buying and flying you all in. Which might be too nice and thereby force Blogebrity to push me back to the C List again. Oh well, I was only getting 15 minutes of fame to start with.

It’s the money I need desperately. I’ve got a kid in college you know. So the millions will come in handy. My son will use them to graduate from Georgetown. One day he will be a famous CEO of a mega corporation and maybe take of his mom in her doting old age and deterioration.

Thanks for these things will be due to Google and their Zeitgeist Watch lists–the little analysis program that made all of my dreams come true. :)

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Great Find: Lifehacker on Comments and More

Filed Under Audience, Comments, Great Finds, Successful Blog | Leave a Comment

Before you close the drawer on that comments file, there’s more you need to complete the set.

Lifehacker eform image

Apparentely the fact that lifehacker ran this piece wasn’t enough for one publisher that picked it up. If you access the document from EServer TC Library, the document comes with a lovely cover sheet like this which asks you to rate the quality of the work for the purpose of helping future readers. Gee, I thought lifehacker already did that before they ran it.

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Great Find: Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments by Gina Trapani
Type of Article: How-to and Informational
Permalink: Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments

Content: A popular document that describes the basic points of commenting on a blog.

Gina Trapani’s explanations are well-written and clear. Worth the time it takes to read them. I call the post popular because both Darren Rowse at Problogger and Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion both basically picked-up Gina’s list, each adding only one sentence to it. They were among almost 200 others who did much the same thing.

Congratulations Gina for outstanding work.

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Another document you might find useful is Gizmodo’s Comments FAQ. This one is a great model that addresses Cas’s questions yesterday as to how you might handle a comment policy without feeling like you are insulting your readers’ better nature.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Blog Basics 1: Comments and Comment Policies
Great Find: Commenting on CTBIZBlogs

Great Find: Blogs about Blogging

Filed Under Audience, Blog Review, Great Finds, Marketing, Successful Blog | 10 Comments

blogging_wurk_net Blogs about Blogging

Great Find: Blogs about blogs, blogger, and blogging by Barry Bell
Permalink: Blogging/wurk.net/
Target Audience: Anyone interested in Blogs about blogging

Content: Somtimes you can read someone’s writing and know you’d have a fun time at dinner with him. That’s how I feel about Barry Bell. In this, what amounts to his Top Nine blogs about bloggers and blogging he gives a tongue-in-cheek review of who should be reading each blog and why they should read it.

Included are Problogger, Jack of All Blogs. Blogebrity, Workboxers, Performancing, Successful Blog, Blogherald, Blog Network Watch, and Pajamas Media. In it he says things that I realize I’ve known unconsciously, but never actually put the words into a thought of my own. One or two of the descriptions were so perfect, they made me laugh out loud with their honesty.

For new bloggers, especially those who’ve not taken a course in marketing this review shows fine examples of product differentiation. All of these blogs basically “sell” the same thing. However, each has chosen to serve a differerent market niche and has developed their blog to that audience with that purpose in mind. The product differentiation is so clear that Barry Bell as a reader can state in a few words who each blog is meant for and what purpose it serves.

Barry has nailed it, and done so in a post that is an easy, fun read. Seven of the eight of the judges give Barry a ten and pass this one into the gold medal final round. The judge from New Zealand, who’s still sleeping–he phoned in a 9.9. The NZ judge does that sometimes.)

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SOB Buttons Are Here!

Filed Under Audience, Business Life, Community, Successful Blog | 29 Comments

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It is with great dignity and pride
that I announce and present
the official badge of achievement
of SOB to all who have been named

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers.

Original SOB Button

They take conversations here back to their readers.
I invite them to take this badge of achievement
back to their blog and to display it with pride.

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For the complete honor roll and details on becoming an SOB, see the Successful & Outstanding Bloggers page.

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