Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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

January 26, 2012

Be Accessible

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 7:42 am

A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

cooltext443809558_authenticity

You must be accessible if you want to build a human-centered enterprise. I recently participated in a Twitter chat hosted by the Association for Women in Communications (#AWCchat) on the subject of web accessibility, and it made a huge impression on me.

Did you know that people with disabilities are 18% of US population with $175 billion in discretionary spending power? Did you know that adults with disabilities spend 2x as much time online as those without disabilities?

Here are some tips on how to ensure that your web presence is inviting and accessible to visitors with challenges:

…and here’s the bonus…almost all of these tweaks have the extra benefit of helping your SEO at the same time!

Big hat tip to #AWCchat (which happens Thursdays at 11:30am CST) and the co-host (and source of the statistics) Glenda Watson Hyatt, who is known as The Left Thumb Blogger. You are vessels for good in the world!

_____

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Twitter as @rhogroupee
_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss


Filed under Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | 3 Comments »


January 25, 2012

Business Travel Set to Take Flight This Year

matt wrote this at 12:06 pm

We all know recent years have not exactly been stellar for the business community, especially many smaller companies who have had to fight tooth and nail to keep their heads above water.

That being said, a recent report from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) indicates that spending for business travel, a portion of which is done through the airlines, is forecast to increase over the next 12 months.

According to the latest Business Travel Quarterly Outlook, spending on business travel is forecast to exceed $263 billion in 2012, a jump of 4.6 percent from a year ago. According to a GBTA spokesman, businesses nationwide have hit the reset button from where it was pre-recession. Essentially, businesses are back to the 2007 level when it comes to spending money for traveling.

 

Travel Expenses, Amount of Trips Prove Impactful

In breaking down the report a little closer, the bulk of the increase is forecast to be derived from growing travel expenses as opposed to an uptick in the number of trips undertaken. Even though the number of trips business travelers participated in last year was up 2.1 percent over the prior year, it is predicted they will post a small drop of 0.8 percent in 2012.

The big factor to remember is that business travelers are at or near the front of the bus when it comes to driving the U.S. economy. If business travel is substantially up, then it is rather safe to say that the health of the nation’s economy is doing pretty good overall.

According to research last fall from Deloitte LLP from 1,000 business travelers, more than 80 percent of them indicated they expected to take the same amount or even more business trips in 2012 as they did in 2011. In breaking down the numbers more closely, 16 percent of respondents ages 45 and older are planning additional trips in 2012, while 27 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 44 planned on traveling for work.

While it is not set in stone, it is genuinely a factor that as businesses start to witness signs of economic growth, they will feel better include to resume sending employees back out on the road.

Meantime, international outbound business travel is forecast to remain doing better than domestic trips.

Over recent quarters, international business travel has done better than domestic given the fact the cost of travel is higher and there has been a steady increase in the number of trips.

While there remains uncertainty about the economies at home and abroad, one thing is for sure. No business will dare give up the competitive advantage of in-person meetings, given the fact that all sales will become even more important.

So, is your business planning on increasing travel, keeping it at much the same level as of 2011, or decreasing such expenditures over the next 12 months?

Photo credit: latierraprometida.net

Dave Thomas, who covers among other items small business loans, writes extensively for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

 


Filed under Business Life | No Comments »


January 24, 2012

Good, Great, and Irresistible Marketing Businesses

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 7:43 am

cooltext443809602_strategy

When I pay attention to your message… when I watch your commercial, read your ad, listen to your presentation, can you assume that you’ve reached me?

Only if you define reach in the most literal sense.

And trust me, you’re reaching to believe if you believe that attention is synonymous with trust.

Trust isn’t a numbers game. Trust takes time to be established — it always did.

Good, Great, and Irresistible Marketing Businesses

We talk with thousands of people throughout our lives. Now that the social web has amplified the speed and reach of communication, it could be argued that some social folks online “talk with” thousands of people in a week. Certainly many businesses talk with thousands of people in a day. Some corporations easily talk with millions in a day. Still the fact remains that the ability to reach millions with our message means hardly anything if those millions don’t trust the people or place the message is coming from. Communication only helps a business when people trust what we’re saying.

The best form of attraction is built on trust — consistently proving that your business does business even better than any customer might think business would be! Business moves faster and with fewer micro-decisions when we can depend on people we trust. With trust like that customers tell your best true story for you.

Reach out to meet needs is not nearly as powerful building values-based relationships. Values-based relationships aren’t nearly as irresistible as the attraction of being a first trusted resource who consistently surpasses the standard.

Have you found your irresistible offer yet?

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.


Filed under Marketing, Successful Blog | 2 Comments »


January 23, 2012

The Top 7 Ways to Motivate Yourself Even on Mondays!

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 7:18 am

How to Own Every Day

I used to not like mornings. Monday mornings were the worst. I liked them so little that I thought of Sunday as the impending doom … that made my weekends even shorter.

One day it dawned on me that if I lived to be 70 holding on to this feeling about Mondays, I’d have discounted 10 whole years of my life. Ten years — 520 Mondays lost, crashed, and burned — due to a bad attitude. I had to find a way to get and stay motivated. I had to get back my Mondays. I was pretty sure that I didn’t have enough future left to be throwing away 10 years like a fool.

Monday mornings made feel like a giraffe — all gawky and spotted, all sleepy eyed and too tired to chew my food. I needed motivation. But I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it. It would take some experimentation. I got down to it.

Who wants to sleepwalk through life? I had things that needed doing.

The Top 7 Ways to Motivate Yourself Even on Mondays!

Motivation, without it, we move slower. We’re susceptible to distraction and procrastination. Inside a company or working from home, what fuels our success is motivation — that reason, that determination to make something good happen.

I figured out early that it wasn’t such fun to be unmotivated. In fact, it was both stressful and boring. I didn’t like myself much and maybe that is what struck that match that got the home fires burning. Once I made it a quest to motivate myself, the rest was mostly easy. Here are 7 ways I found to motivate yourself even on Mondays!

  1. Feel all of your senses with amazing experiences. Give yourself the luxury of time to enjoy your shower. Wear clothes that feel good on your skin. Drink delicious coffee. Eat lovely food that smells good while you’re fixing it. Look at fabulous colors. Listen to amazing music. It’s hard not to feel alive when you put your whole body into the experience. Don’t just bring your head into the day show up with every cell of you. Let your DNA have a chance to be part of what you’re doing.

    It’s no accident nature puts on such a great show at sunrise – it inspires, invigorates, and motivates human beings. Try to see it. Don’t just look at walls, windshields, and buildings.


  2. Live every day as a quest. Work is work, but a quest is valiant and noble. Don’t just brainstorm, conspire. Let your fingers dance on the keyboard as you type. Smile while you think. Enjoy your food. Don’t just walk, stride — feel the ground beneath your feet. When you stop for a break look at the sky. Dare yourself to find everything easier, faster, more fun, and more meaningful.
  3. Work at your best learning level — your challenge sweet spot. Beak down your challenges to meet your skills set. Challenges that are too easy are boring. Challenges that are too hard cause anxiety. Neither state moves to action. Challenges that fall equally between anxiety and boredom inspire us. They catch our attention and feed our need to grow.
  4. Know that almost any work can be motivating. Whether you’re copying documents or cleaning up after a party, devise a way to put the task in your challenge zone. Time it. Measure it. Set a standard for your personal performance. Turn the work itself into art form. Make it a game.
  5. Get curious and confident. It’s hard to think of a knot as a problem when you curious about what holds it together and confident that you’ll find the way to unravel it. Be alert. Be aware. Notice things. People who notice things know more than people who don’t. Then choose the things you notice energize you. Let them fuel your day. Ask new questions. Rather than asking, “What will I do to fix this problem?” try “How can this situation be a strength?” “How can go with it and end up with a better than what I had in mind?”
  6. Stop listening to the voices in your head. Those voices undermine determination and focus. Tell them you might have needed them once, but you know what you’re doing today. Lock them away and get on with being productive. You know how.
  7. Appreciate your ability to choose to be in a good mood AND appreciate the people who respond to that good mood in good ways! You’ll get energy from doing both. Let it fill you up. Be liberal with your smiles and your thank yous. Give a few extra smiles and thank yous to the folks who try to steal energy from you. Be confident that they’ll enjoy their bad moods even more if you leave them alone.

The trick to motivation is knowing that every bit of it is in our control. Even if we start to go off track, we can go back to number 7 and choose again to be in a good mood. Then start all over at Number 1 … No day is lost until we give it up.

It’s your day. It’s your life. You’ve got 7 ways to own every day.
Why would you spend a minute in unmotivated and boring?

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.


Filed under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 8 Comments »


January 22, 2012

How to recognize miracles

molly wrote this at 3:00 am

I blame Charlton Heston.

When I was a little kid, the yearly Easter screening of The Ten Commandments was anticipated in our household for a number of reasons. The first of which was its role as a rite of passage to, if not adulthood, at least Big Kid Status, proved through the ability to stay awake through the entire thing. Alas, for many years, my brothers and I would consistently conk out on the living room floor somewhere around Yul Brenner’s “So let it be written; so let it be done” edict.

We yearned for the year when we could finally last until the second reason: the special effects, chief among them the parting of the Red Sea. THIS was a miracle!! Epic. Sweeping. Monumental. Supernatural. Seeing Chas up there on the rock, serving as the conduit for what God wrought below spoiled me for quite some time where miracles were concerned.

I’m not alone in this misperception, however. Most of the time we need big and flashy, or at least it’s what we’ve come to expect from our miracles. The quiet ones like breathing, flowers blooming or a choice parking spot opening up on a rainy day? Meh.

“Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,” ~ Walt Whitman

Folks who follow my twitter stream will note that I sign off most evenings with #poetry as my #goodnight tweet. One of my favorite poets is Walt Whitman, and this poem is one of the reasons why. The poem lists a number of every day miracles: events, observances and experiences, all of which exist within a confluence of everything: “The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.”

As an example, speaking to the women with children reading this, when you were pregnant, did it seem as though every other woman on the planet was pregnant? This perception grew from your awareness stemming from your own pregnancy. You were attuned to pregnancy and everything that involves bearing a child; hence, you recognized this experience in those who surrounded you.

Same thing with the awareness of miracles. The more you see, the more there are.

“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.” ~Albert Einstein

I like this quote. Although it’s a reconstituted version of Whitman’s more poetic observation, Einstein put it pretty succinctly. And it’s true. Which way would you like to live? Which world would you rather inhabit?

“There is no greater miracle than our conscious efforts to become good human beings.” ~ Sri Chinmoy

As I understand Chinmoy’s quote, this is where we internalize and externalize our worlds; we sync the inner and outer environments. Through the symbiotic action of improving ourselves, we improve our environs by default. In so doing, we effect change and provide the catalyst for miracles.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that miracles are evidence of the Divine. When we take active steps to nurture and develop our higher selves, are we not engaging the divine within? Taken a step farther, by engaging the divine, are we not giving it the opportunity to flex itself and to manifest itself in our lives?

“I am the miracle.” ~ Budda

You are the miracle. DNA, tRNA and other helix models aside, the fact that you DO exist is, in and of itself, a miracle. Your thoughts, desires, mechanical dexterity and talents are all finely orchestrated cellular wonders. You are a carbon-based life form with sentience, a conscience and an ability to decide what your life is going to be. Every morning you have another 24 hours to make something happen.

“So let it be written…” ah…. you know the rest. What miracles would you like to create in your life?

——-

Molly Cantrell-Kraig is a woman with drive. Possessing an innate sense of purpose and a pragmatic, solution-based approach to empowering people, she fused these two traits in order to establish Women With Drive Foundation. Based upon its founder’s personal history, Women With Drive Foundation is a means through which Cantrell-Kraig may effect change on both a micro and macro level. By providing women with something as essential as personal transportation in order to transition them from poverty to prosperity, she, through Women With Drive Foundation, seeks to empower women to help them help themselves. Through this action, the individual applicant benefits, as does society as a whole. Follow Molly on twitter as @mckra1g or @WWDr1ve (Women With Drive Foundation) or “Like” them on facebook.

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

 


Filed under Guest Writer, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 2 Comments »



« go back — keep looking »