Successful Blog

Beach Notes: Waiting

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

It might not look like it from this picture but there is a big surf running here at world famous Snapper Rocks. Usually we see the surfers just plunging straight in and paddling out to the waves. On this day, we noticed everybody waiting, waiting: nobody was trying to get out to the break until they could see a short respite in the pounding surf. A little while later they had all paddled out, but for those few minutes as we were walking by there was obviously a collective “let’s all not do anything stupid here” experience.

Fortune may favor the bold but sometimes it’s really smart to wait till the right moment, not just dive in.

Map http://bit.ly/fqMlzC

waiting990

-Suzie and Des

Open Letter to Entrepreneurs: You Don’t Hold a Monopoly on the Right Answers

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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You want a new Web site. You’re the boss and the company needs a new site. The existing one is home to static and dated talking points and lately you’ve begun to suspect that it is shouting at visitors and is thus, not developed with an evolving 2.0 culture in mind. There’s nothing, you conclude, social about. Your wife, mother-in-law and golf buddies all agree. You’re the boss and this is your mandate.

You want the thing redone and you want it redone now. Details are someone else’s problem. That’s what you pay the worker bees to do. You make the demand, they make it happen. You don’t care how; you just want the darn thing done and done well. You assign a small gaggle of your most qualified people to the task and they immediately spring into action. At the outset however, you make it clear that you want every phase of the project to pass through you before moving through each milestone. You’re Teddy Roosevelt. That’s just the way it is.

The talented group you’ve assembled begin doing all the heavy lifting as you expect it to be done. They do the research. They poll the best resources. They draft the Gantt charts and project time lines that denote, in graphically rich detail, the mile markers that will comprise the job’s lifespan. They have drawn up the wire frames, and the site map too. Nothing is left to guesswork. Your people got it right the first time. And you insist on being involved in every discussion.

The presentation

You call a meeting to review the team’s progress. The team sits down with you and proposes the solution as outlined in the project management materials and research data they’ve spent the previous week developing. The team is pumped. They know they nailed this thing and confidently cannot wait to see your reaction. Your project lead places the plan in front of you and you dig in, allowing her no opportunity to present. You give the proposal a flagrantly cursory look and are quickly ready to respond.

Here’s your appraisal:

The wire frames are bland and unsexy and the sitemap is nothing more than a confusing bunch of boxes with if statements peppered throughout.

Hmmm. The timeline calls for a 12-week project lifespan. 12 weeks, you exclaim, seems an excessive period of time to launch a new Web site. You have no prior experience launching Web sites, but that doesn’t stop you from being thoroughly convinced that you’re right to expect and demand it be done faster.

You don’t known what the terms, CMS, 301, 401 or Gantt all mean and that frustrates you. Instead of learning however, you use your entrepreneurial brawn to deliver a brief and condescending lecture to the lead on why spelling things out in plain English was not achieved and time, consequently, has been wasted. Your untrusted lead cautions you that these materials are internal project guides, intended for the technical eyes of the team and not necessarily a high level presentation meant for non-technical leadership. As the lead, you assure the boss that you’re trying to explain things in digestible terms, but the boss filibusters time and again and silences you’re every effort to simplify the conversation.

Intimidated further by your lead’s sensible rebuttals, you’re the big cheese you recall. So you dig your increasingly fragile heels in and quickly, loudly move on, even more confused now than you were before your initial objection to the amount of nerdy mumbo jumbo in the plan.

Suddenly it dawns on you.

Where’s the layout concept? “What’s this thing going to look like?”, you ask the team. The lead explains that this is a planning meeting and in the timeline spreadsheet, all of these milestones are addressed in their logical order. This frustrates you even more and you again explain to the team that you think 12 weeks is excessive and you now begin to suspect why. All this planning. All these spreadsheets (one in total, mind you). All these wire frames are giving you a headache. There’s no fun in any of this! You insist on seeing ‘something’ (a layout) within the week.

The team lead tries again to explain that designing the creative at this stage puts the sensible order of milestones grossly out of sequence and thus, hinders the team’s ability to get things right. You scoff and launch into a less-than succinct rant about how you built the company and how you met deadlines and adapted to ungodly pressures in far less time than this project asks for. The team tunes you out and, one by one, slowly begin to accept that you don’t give a darn about their expertise in designing and developing great Web sites. You don’t notice, of course, that your team has abandoned you, because you are too busy being certain that this situation is not unlike any other professional crisis you’ve experienced and in each of those, you were 100% in the right. You merely want to control every facet of the job and consequently grant no one beneath you the authority to succeed on terms unfamiliar to you.

10 Months Later…

The site was designed according to your project management sensibilities. It possesses all of the social channels you demanded it possess. It even went live ahead of that senseless 12 week calendar your former team lead recommended. Oh yeah, she quit like six months ago. If you had listened to her, you ponder, you might still be waiting for a site to go live. Your wife and golf buddies think it rocks and while you now have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube profiles, you have no qualified traffic hitting your pages and you’ve ultimately learned nothing from the exercise.

Two Years Later…

You’re broke and out of business. You’re getting older and you haven’t the fundamental computer savvy to impress interviewers. You have enormous debts and the culture that rewarded your business ideologies so many years earlier has now made you virtually unhirable. Humility sets in if you’re lucky and it is then, if you’re luckier, that it dawns on you that you don’t possess a monopoly on the right answers.

That’s when you learn to listen again.
Listening leads to life-long learning.
It’s your chance to start over.

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Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: bkang83

Thanks, Scott!

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

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Everybody Pick Your Bloggin’ Buddy

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By Jael Strong

When I was a teenager, I spent every Saturday with my Nonna.  Her Italian feasts were a family delight, and I had a front row seat to the creative process. Unfortunately, I was a stupid kid and didn’t pay enough attention.  I recognize now that I should have been her avid student, but alas my opportunity to learn the great recipes has passed. 

It wasn’t a total loss though.  I did spend time with her bonding and learning about life, if not about cooking.  I have fond memories mixed with regrets.  This was real one-on-one time, a necessity to productive community.

The online community is missing…

Community! I know we have forums, comments, social networking, etc. Since the Internet is a relatively new venue, mankind has done its best to fabricate a real society designed to fill the human need in the cyber world. These are synthetic atmospheres at best.

Am I making this up? No. There is more to community than verbal communication. Emoticons can’t even begin to convey the gamut of human emotion. There is no place in the cyber world for human touch. Then there is the exchange of chemicals, imperceptible hormones exchanged between humans leading to feelings of empathy, contentment, and compassion.
 

We have to compensate

It is presently impossible to synthetically compose the type of environment I shared with my grandmother on Saturdays. However, in order to build a truly productive online community with other bloggers we have to compensate for the inadequacies of a fabricated world.

How can this be accomplished? Science will have to work on the intricacies. We have to focus on the social aspects that we can control. A primary component of a literal community is mentoring. It isn’t always labeled as such, but the time I spent with my grandmother could be called mentoring. For our purposes, we’ll call our mentoring process “Bloggin’ Buddies.”

How can you find a blggin’ buddy?

The first step is to identify where you fall in the program. Do you have years of experience as a blogger? Are you prolific in your writing? Are you an acknowledged success story? If so, then you would be a perfect mentor!

On the other hand, you may be a fledgling writer. Perhaps your experience is limited. Maybe you have been blogging for a while now, but with limited success. It could even be that you just don’t feel comfortable in the mentoring role, but could use some helpful advice from time to time. You could use a mentor.

Those who fall under the perfect mentor category should seek to help beginning bloggers. I know you’re busy! Consider it a community service. By making yourself available to other bloggers, you are helping to build that community. I know a lot of bloggers that do this, and fledgling bloggers are truly grateful for the help experienced bloggers are willing to offer.

On the other hand, if you are one of those inexperienced bloggers, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Dig for advice. Request opportunities to guest post. Observe the habits of successful bloggers. Don’t pass up the opportunity to learn from a great the way that I did!

Talk to us! What success have you had in building the blogging community through mentoring?

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Jael Strong writes for TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility.  She has written both fiction and non-fiction pieces for print and online publications.  She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas .

Thanks, Jael

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

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Beach Notes: Did Santa Surf Here?

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

We saw this Santa hat on the beach at world famous surfing spot Snapper Rocks. The amusing thought of a portly Santa on a short board was quickly dispelled by realising it was probably just a leftover from a Christmas Day lunch.

Strange as it may seem to those who live where Christmas means cold and maybe snow and ice, in Australia it is the height of summer. On Christmas Day on the beach here it is not unusual to see people having a family picnic, celebrating in swimsuits, sunburn cream and Santa hats.

-Suzie and Des

What “Julie and Julia” Taught Me About Reaching Goals

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By Terez Howard

During a recent night of Netflix searching, my husband and I watched the movie Julie and Julia. This film, from 2009, intertwined the story of cooking sensation Julia Child with Julie Powell, a blogger who challenged herself to cook every recipe in Julia’s first book and record her experiences in a blog. This true life adventure helped me realize a key to reaching goals.

One pivotal scene is the movie is when Julie decisively commits to this cooking/blogging challenge. She announces her decision to her husband, Eric, and says that if she does not give herself a deadline, she will not complete that immense task. One year for 524 recipes.

Give yourself a deadline

When I worked for the newspaper, deadline was a word I heard daily. “Will it be ready by deadline?” “We have to meet deadline.” “Maybe we can extend the deadline a little for this breaking news.” “It’s too late; it’s after deadline.” The deadline dictated what would make the daily news.

With a blog, it’s hardly a necessity to make your content stick to a strict 10:30 a.m. deadline. However, there are benefits to establishing a blogging schedule.

A deadline means more than just the time your posts appear for public viewing. A deadline gives your goal or goals a point of fruition.

Let me illustrate it this way. Let’s say that I want to start integrating video into my blog. I would give myself a week to research and purchase a video recording device and another week to shoot two to four videos. I would allot myself two to three hours per day per video to make my own edits. Then I would spend a day posting the videos and another week to fiercely promote them.

Know this, I’ve not yet put video on my blog. But this rough sketch gives me the idea that it would take me a good month to get a few decent video posts published. My time allocations fit my schedule. They might seem drastically long to you or perhaps not long enough. However, only I know what I can handle.

The same goes for you. You know what you are capable of achieving and how long it will take you.

Light a fire

Do you need to light a fire under yourself? Make your deadlines tighter and stick to them.Give yourself one week to get high quality video on your blog.

At the same time, be realistic.If you work a full-time 40-hour week, such a task might be insurmountable in such a short period.Give yourself necessary leeway, not excuses.

And please, don’t decide to do something by the end of 2011. That’s too general. If you’re going to be that general, make several short-term goals and deadlines along the way.

A new year, a new deadline

Most people look at the start of the new year as a fresh start. Challenge yourself by setting a deadline to just one goal. It could be for your blog, for your weight, for your family, or something else. Whatever it is, treat it like you were a reporter at a newspaper. It is urgent. With no deadline, there will be no news.

Tell me, what is your goal? What is your deadline, and how will you achieve it?

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Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. She has written informative pieces for newspapers, online magazines and blogs, both big and small. She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas . You’ll find her on Twitter @thewriteblogger.

Thanks, Terez!

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