Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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Reach Out and Touch Someone with Your Company’s Blog

Filed Under Content, Design, Strategy, Successful Blog | 5 Comments

In the small business blogging world, there are good blogs and there are not so good blogs. That being said, how would you rate your blog?

As a small business, what is your goal behind having a blog in the first place? Do you use it as an opportunity to promote your company’s products and services? Is it more of a forum for you to get things off your chest or talk to other business owners? Or is it just something you felt you had to have given your competitors have one?

Like many small businesses that sport blogs, the initiative to grow the blog is often there, but the time doesn’t seem to be. What ends up happening is the blog takes a back seat to other more important matters, the content becomes stale, and next thing you know you have a blog whose hits become less and less.

 

Growth is Possible

If your company’s blog is collecting dust on the Internet, there are means by which to grow it and enhance your company’s online profile.

Among the initiatives to employ are:

 

While these are just a few of the areas you should zero in on, remember, YOU control the look and sound of your company’s blog.

Don’t expect the company blog to itself bring in a ton of revenue, but look at it more as a component of your overall strategy to reach out and touch someone, in this case, customers.

Photo credit: thefosburyflop.com

Dave Thomas is an expert writer based in San Diego, California.  He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

Be Irresistible: THE 7 Key Steps to Becoming Your Own Boss

Filed Under Marketing, Strategy, Successful Blog | 6 Comments

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I woke early Sunday morning. I beat the sun again. I started the coffee; turned on the computer; and while they fired up, I cleaned up and fired up myself. After I poured that first cup of coffee, I sat down to see what was happening on Twitter and one interesting Tweet from @WamdaME timed at 03:49a.m. was waiting for me.

After another tweet or two, we established that WamdaME was asking about “starting your own company,” so I sent the following stream of tweets to her under the hashtag #owningit and favorited them too.

It seemed a good idea to share them here too.

THE 7 Key Steps to Becoming Your Own Boss

The seven steps I tweeted might seem to have come easily at 4:00 a.m. that morning. But every success is build on our skill set and talents — what we’re good at — and experience. Strategy and strategic thinking come naturally to me. However, I learned this strategic process by testing it constantly and doing it wrong until I found the way to “right.” After the experience of building a conference business from a blog post and a consulting business from that, I can tell you this is what works.

  1. Look over your successes to find what they have in common.
  2. Recognize the skill sets and experience that you’ve already acquired.
  3. Name the values that define you.
  4. Know how to recognize the people who believe in those same values.
  5. Get to know the people who share your values and understand their goals, dreams, and problems better than your own.
  6. Identify a problem that you enjoy solving at the crossroads of your success skill set and your values.
  7. Build a strategy to serve the people who share your values and the problem you solve for them.
    • Make it your mission to be mission critical to the mission of the people you serve.
    • Understand your position – how your size, skills, visibility, competitive place, and relationships offer opportunity.
    • Leverage conditions – find the opportunity inside every trend, cycle, shift, change in power, etc.
    • Make command decisions – commit to where you’re going, persuade the right people to help, focus on the things that move you forward.
    • Build Networks and Systems – Connect the people who help you thrive. Have an ever simpler process for serving them.

    And the most critical …

  8. Be in with your head, heart, hands, and both feet.

Offer those ideal customers (the people who share your values) the solution to the problem (something that makes their life easier, simpler, or more meaningful) and make that offer everywhere they gather in ways that are easy for them to say yes. And keep listening to their responses , tweaking your offers, and practicing your craft to give the people who love what you do more of what they love, less of what they don’t like, and something uniquely surprising and valuable that only you can bring.

Success in establishing a business grows from what has always has always made us successful — those talents and gifts that define us expressed in the ways that only we can bring them to the world — and such a deep seated commitment to an idea, a quest, a goal that we’re willing to focus all we are to make it real.

It takes commitment to become your own boss — a commitment to yourself, to the people you serve, and to the value of what you offer.

That commitment has been in every success you’ve won.
Make the commitment and you’ll become an irresistible force.

Ever had an experience like that?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

PetCareRx Offers Advice for Online Success

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Guest Post
by Riley Kissel

The survival rate of any business is fairly low. Only 1 out of every 10 succeeds in the first five years. With the popularity of online businesses growing daily, the success rates of these types of businesses is even lower. However, one online giant, PetCareRx () has endured and continue to succeed in spite of the odds, and the company’s COO, Blake Brossman, is more than willing to offer 5 great tips for success in the online business world. In order for a business to succeed, Brossman believe every company needs:

Passion

Always choose to start a business that revolves around something that you are passionate about. When business becomes difficult, when the long hours and seemingly endless marketing becomes too much, it will be your passion that gets your through. Brossman became determined to offer great pharmacy services to pet owners after having to deal with his own Rottweiler’s expensive medications. “I looked around the vet office and saw all the helpless people spending astronomical sums of money to treat their pets,” Brossman recalls.” I wanted to give these people the opportunity to treat their pets without breaking the bank!”

A Great Business Plan

PetCareRx was started during the dot-com hype of the late 90s, and was able to survive when the bubble burst during the early 2000s, and they credit their success to the company’s solid business model. “The 2000 bubble was caused due to incessant hype, and weak business models with high investments,” stated Brossman. PetCareRx new the products and type of service it wanted to offer, wrote it down in their business plan with precise goals, and stuck to it. Now they are an industry leader.

Excellent Customer Service

PetCareRx reviews couldn’t be better. The online pet pharmacy has been a hot spot for pet owners for years, and has built incredible company loyalty. “At PetCareRX, the customer always comes first,” stated Brossman. “PetCareRx, built a strong foundation around every pet parent’s requirement, backed by a great product line and the highest level of service and convenience. This helped us survive and grow over the years.”

Social Media

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are great ways to spread word about your online company, and a great way to allow patrons a way to create a community, without having to spend anything. They are also a great way to offer special discounts to Fans or Followers to add to increase company loyalty. PetCareRx can be found on both Facebook and Twitter, and frequently offers fans great discounts to use on a variety of store items.

Show Your Credentials

Many online businesses fail because they don’t convey that they are trustworthy. People don’t want to purchase a product or service from a website that doesn’t look secure or isn’t backed by prominent watch groups. PetCareRx has made it a top priority to be licensed in every state and to make sure their customers are aware of this. However, other less successful pet pharmacies don’t take the same precautions which can easily put a pet at risk. “Visitors should be skeptical of ordering medications or any products from any non Vet-VIPPS certified pharmacies,” stated Brossman.

Starting an online business is difficult. Succeeding with an online business is even more difficult and requires time, dedication, and perseverance. However, the rewards can easily prove to be worth the hours and energy poured into it.
————————————

Riley Kissel is a freelance writer who covers many industries with style. You can find out more about him at RileyKissel.com

Thanks, Riley, for simply showing how great thinking has built great success.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

30 Blog Posts to Get Strategy and Celebration Back into Your Business and Your Life

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That Fireworks Feeling of Celebration!

Remember when you first were going to see the fireworks? It wasn’t that different from the first day of school or the first day of that new fabulous job! And if you’ve ever started your own business, the first day you’ve got things in order to launch is certainly a time worth celebrating with fireworks!

Then come the days that follow that often get filled with more work and a little less of that brand-new feeling that made everything easy at that very first. I’ve been taken by the thought of how much fun it is when we get back with our heads, hearts and our hands in our business and everything once again works.

Here are 30 blog posts based on solid strategy — a realistic plan that moves you forward over time by taking advantage of the opportunities that are uniquely yours.

These five strategic steps and the blog posts that explain them are yours for building the kind of business that feels great every day when you walk into work. So get ready to strategize some, to make some plans, to explode your business and then once again you can celebrate!

Be of the Right Mind

  1. The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life Life either happens to us, or we take hold of life and live it. Here are 10 Ways to get a life and start living it.
  2. 5 Ways to Take the Work Out of Work and Connect with Life Ever notice that some of us live, some of work to live, some of us live to work … and one or two of us seem to BE a piece of work?

Stating Your Mission and Sharing the Vision

  1. Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps? Why should anyone believe the shoemaker makes fabulous shoes if his own shoes are ratty?
  2. Is Your Strategy About Winning Opportunities?Tactics are interesting. The accomplishments they bring can be thrilling. But the bigger picture that a strategic mission lays out is powerful and amazing thinking.
  3. How to Make Your Dream Come True — Thought, Strategy, Action You can wonder. You can wish. You can wait for help. Say that you will, or say that you can’t right now. The most important key to a dream come true is personal investment
  4. How to Share the Vision and the Plan with a Business-Building Community We have to be able to explain — what we’re building and what roles others might play.
  5. WHY Doing What We Love Is Solid Business Thinking Because it’s how we’re wired as humans. We bring our best to whatever challenge we face. We’re better when we’re inspired by deep feeling.

Seeing and Leverage Your Unique Position

Position is the unique combination of where you stand in your field and what you bring to it.

  1. Are You Seeing So Much That You’re Blind? With or without a real itinerary, traveling too fast made see so much I was blind to the people around me.
  2. 8 Powerfully Subtle Ways to Let Your Work Show Your Expertise To be recognized as a expert requires communication skills and social skills as well as technical expertise.
  3. Marketing Strategy ala Mickey Mouse Eisner didn’t make random decisions. He followed solid business strategy. Anyone can use these strategic principles for success in any enterprise from a service business to a blog.
  4. Checklist: Opportunity Is Knowing Your Position on the Playing Field Think through where your brand and your business is right now.

  5. Personal Branding: Strengths Assessment Tool     Here’s a tool to help you assess what you have to work with.

Find Opportunities in Changing Conditions

Every business faces change in cycles, climates, and shifts. That change holds opportunities that are fit our unique position and skills. Working with change grows a business.

  1. Change As Influence: How to Get the Attention of Deniers, Followers, Dreamers, and Leaders? Every now and then, something happens that pulls the rug out from under us …
  2. How to Claim Your Ground and Own It It was still the 20th Century when someone told me that I could count on these four words to always be true … This too will change.
  3. Do You Sleep in the Freeze or Invest in the Spring? The sailors who love sailing know just saw it as part of the yearly progress of the sailing “routine.”
  4. Stop Thinking Poor – Start Irresistibly Growing Your Business Something negative happens. People hit a wall with their business. They pull back, retreat to safer ground to protect what they have.
  5. The 5 Step Strategy that Saved a Company Can Also Get You to Your Dream Working with strategy of any kind, it comes with the territory to know that, the minute a strategy is worked out, it is outdated. That’s because the information on which the strategy is based has already moved and changed.

Bring Leadership to Decisions

Making command decisions is about understanding the role of a leader and the people who can help a business thrive.

  1. Leaders and Higher Ground There’s not a person on the planet
    who has not been a jerk.
  2. How Do You Recognize and Attract Heroes and Champions for Your Brand? Before you try to create evangelists why not reach out the ones you already know?
  3. Strategy: All of the Information Available Strategy is setting a vision, making a path, knowing what we can know, and planning for the variables. To know what we know . . . That means having command of the information available.
  4. Have You Tried the DO Strategy of Social Business Success? People who succeed DO what the work to get themselves where they want to be.

  5. Money Strategy, a Dead Horse, and Folks     The key here is whether the new upgrade will pay for itself in productivity, quality of life, or other tangible or intangible benefits. In circumstances such as this, here are some of the “go or no go” questions.

Build Networks and Systems

Networks and communities are the people who help the business thrive. Systems and processes are the ways of doing things that support the work people are doing.

  1. The 5-Point Strategy to a Powerful Network Networks of people can be powerful influencers. A network of influencers expands our knowledge and our reach by engaging the power of “WE.” The problem is that networks take time to build and require attention.
  2. How Do You Get a Community to Help Build Your Business? The beauty of enlisting a social media community from the start is that communities only have time for ideas that will work.
  3. A Barn Raisers Guide: 7 Ways to Leave the Field of Dreams to Build a Thriving Reality Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.
  4. Where Would a 30-Minute Strike Force Strategy Increase Your Productivity? When the piles start to slow down progress try this 30-minute strategy to get back to a Command Center that works for you and your productivity.

  5. Building A Powerful Personal Developmental Network – Is Your Next Teacher on Twitter?     Whether we’re a company or an individual, it’s easy to find reasons that we made our successes, but that our failures were due to other circumstances. That’s where a powerful personal developmental network can keep things real.

The Challenge

Leave hesitation behind. go for the win and claim your successes.

  1. Extreme Hesitation and Extreme Strategy: Are You Willing to Own Your Life? Because deeply knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.
  2. How to Turn a #Fail Position into a #Win Then it struck me that how I was looking at the problem was what was keeping it a problem.
  3. Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done? We’re great about learning from our losses. We’re not so great a learning from our success.

It’s a true calling that allows to serve other people by providing a service that make’s other folks lives easier, faster, and more meaningful. That kind of calling is worth celebrating because it makes us all feel more alive. Other people find a living soul irresistible, fascinating, and attractive. They come to see what makes a person so engaged, directed, energetic, and calm. The best part of bringing that kind of true strategy to work is that it is contagious and explodes into that a fireworks feeling that we all can paint the sky with light!

It took a few years to write the blog posts I gathered here for my birthday. It took a lifetime to learn what they say … what will you do with them?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

What George S. Patton Said That’s Crucial to Your Business

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A Historically Relevant Guest Post
by Terry Crenshaw

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Historically Relevant

Generally speaking, it’s probably fair to say that the principles of success possess a kind of across-the-board relevance, an applicability to most any endeavor you could mention; while the particular precepts of success may vary from one enterprise to the next, the universal concepts are basically the same. Maybe it’s for this reason the business world is one so pregnant with analogies. Sports metaphors come into play in the business world all the time, but even more prevalent might be military analogies – metaphors suggesting that the very traits that make for a successful general might also yield an effective business owner.

Loyalty

In that spirit, there’s a familiar quotation from General George S. Patton that’s worth mentioning in the context of business success. The war hero once famously said,

“There’s a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates.”

Loyalty – not from an employee to the company, but from the company itself to the employees. What a novel concept.

I can’t help but think of this principle as I consider the examples of businesses such as Whole Foods – a company that is consistently voted one of the Top 100 best places to work, and a company that performs well against its many competitors. There’s something to be said for Patton’s philosophy, and it seems like no big stretch to say that it’s applicable to companies like this; could the fact that it’s both a highly profitable business and a business that treats its employees well truly be a coincidence?

I doubt it. At any rate, the factors that could be at play here are numerous, and while they’re not particularly obscure or hard to deduce with the simple tools of common sense, they might warrant a brief repetition. For starters, there are some obvious financial considerations to be made here. We know that happy employees are more likely to stick it out with their jobs rather than go looking for employment elsewhere; less turnover means less time wasted on the recruiting and training of new employees. It means a more streamlined and efficient business in general, even.

And if you think that loyalty is the only military virtue that translates into a business setting, just consider these further examples – historically relevant business strategies that resonate even today.

Adaptability

For one, we could champion the virtue of adaptability. This is obviously a crucial military trait; a strategy must be altered to fit the nature of the enemy forces, and even the terrain on which the battle is being fought. In much the same way, a business has to adapt to the times, and to its competitors. We have seen airlines adapt to the changing demands of air travel – in particular, we’ve seen Southwest abandon the hub-and-spoke model, and they should at least be given credit for trying to change with the times. On the flipside, we’ve seen McDonald’s adapt to the changing needs of consumers, and to new economic realities; they’ve cashed in on the premium coffee and smoothie trends furthered by companies like Panera, but also ensured that these products are priced to meet the budgets of recession-affected diners.

Strategizing

We could go on. What about strategizing – the importance of long-term thinking about the future? Barnes and Noble did it with the introduction of their E-Reader, the Nook. They saw where technology and reading were headed and jumped on the bandwagon – leaving companies like Borders to flounder

Expansion

And what about expansion? The history of military conquest is one of empires gradually expanding their domain, in much the same way that Amazon steadily grew from a bookseller into a merchant of just about anything you could name.

These are all companies that have learned from the military – and more broadly, from history in general. And what they have to show us is that changing with the times – strategizing, planning, adapting – is important, but there’s also something to be said for time-honored principles. This fine line is tough to walk, but of course, we can always look to the past for sterling examples of how it is done.

What have you learned from history?

——

Terry Crenshaw covers economic trends in the United States and writes for www.peterorszagsite.com. Terry is especially interested in tracking the ideas of Peter Orszag and other economic experts as the economy attempts to recover from the recent recession.

Thanks, Terry, for the reminder that great thinking has always been what wins the day.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.
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