Successful Blog

Cool Tool Review: Highrise

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Highrise
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Liz reminds us, “Relationships are everyone’s business, and every business is relationships.”

How are you keeping track of your business relationships? This is the purpose of CRM – Customer Relationship Management. CRM is a broad category of software, encompassing anything from fancy address books to sales forecasting and client invoicing. But essentially, CRM is understanding who are the people and companies important to your company. Sidenote: I hate the “M” in the acronym. What customer (or anyone for that matter) wants their relationship managed?

Nonetheless, the people you and your employees know are one of the single most valuable assets to your company. It is essential to develop a database of contact information. It’s a bonus if you also can encourage your employees to include correspondence records and organize their to-do’s in one central place. This way, if one of your employees leaves the company, you can instantly see where they left off and what needs to be done.

Two months ago we looked at Rapportive, a very simple social CRM tool. Rapportive is great for giving you context to who you are corresponding with, and where to find them online. But it currently only offers individual accounts. For businesses, you need something more.

I recommend Highrise. Highrise, developed by the trailblazing software renegades at 37signals is just enough without being too much. If you’ve read this column before you know I appreciate simplicity in design and usability. Highrise shines here.

There are a handful of add-ons that can make Highrise into Salesforce.com lite. The basic product allows you to easily enter names, companies, tags, contact info, social network locations, and notes. You can assign tasks to yourself or others. You can also set levels of permissions so your junior associate doesn’t have your board member’s cell phone.

The pricing is relatively cheap, starting at $25 per month. (Also, a 30-day trial is free regardless of company size). We are all waiting for a customized Android and Blackberry app. iPhone app is available.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 2/5 – more options for business integration with Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM for SaaS. Or maybe your stuck with Oracle.

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – must-have. The hard part is getting your employees to use it consistently.

Personal Value: 0/5 – an online address book or an old fashioned Rolodex is good enough

Follow The Leaders and Be Your Own

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By Terez Howard

A blogger is not just a blogger, not just a writer. Sure, the basic nuts and bolts of blogging includes stringing words together to make an entertaining, informative blend of copy. A truly great blogger also is a follower.

What? A follower? That’s what I said. And you thought that a major part of blogging was uniqueness. You’re not incorrect. That one-of-a-kind feel is necessary. You see, top bloggers make it to the top because they learn from other top bloggers.

It’s starting to make sense, huh? We bloggers learning the ropes (I include myself) can benefit greatly from regularly checking out what the bloggers who know their way around the web have to say.

But who are these great leaders?

I have my favorites, which I will share. But first, let me say that this will be different for everyone, depending on your niche, style and goals. In addition, there are business professionals that you might discover that have nothing to do with your specific niche, style or goals. You just like what they say and see the benefit from their words of wisdom. Let’s examine each of these.

1. Niche. What is your niche? If you are a fashion blogger, you should read well-established fashion blogs. Emulate what they do, while making your blog your blog. Do not be a copy cat.

I haven’t yet found a blogger who exactly does what I do. If you know any bloggers for businesses that willingly share their knowledge, please let me know.

2. Style. If you are looking to improve your writing skills, visit a blog that helps you become a more prolific writer. I believe a multitude of these blogs exist. If you’re like me, you don’t have the time to follow everyone; so find the person who blogs in a way that makes sense to you.

As for style, my absolute favorite blogger is Jennifer Mattern. I found her blog allfreelancewriting.com about six months ago, and I’ve been following her advice on writing and building a business, tailoring it to make it work for me. If you follow what she says, you will not fail.

3. Goals. What goals do you hope to achieve with blogging? If you want to make money selling your own product, you should visit blogs that tell you how to do this.

Hint: Look for ones that offer tons of free advice and don’t reek of sales copy. These are the bloggers that will truly have a desire to help you.

One of my goals is to make a modest living by blogging. I look to Chris Brogan on chrisbrogan.com to help me see how I can get my name out there. I notice that he primarily focuses on helping people. While I want to make money (I’m being honest!), I sincerely want to help people. I refuse to use fraudulence for material gain.

4. I like it. I ran across successful-blog.com when I was looking for leaders. I enjoyed what Liz Strauss had to say and how she got her point across. She’s the businesswoman who makes you think and motivates you to do something. I’m very grateful for the time she has taken with me.

You have your leaders. Now what?

Now you be you. Be unique. Take what leading bloggers say, apply it to your blog and make it your own. This isn’t a mindless game of follow the leader. The blogger does a dance, and you attempt to imitate the routine precisely. No. You dance to the beat of your own drum.

Who are some of your favorite bloggers and why?

 

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Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. 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!!

Cool Tool Review: Google Alerts

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Google Alerts
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Do you know the people, posts, and sites that are influencing your brand and industry?
Are you engaging in the most relevant conversations?

Google Alerts is one of the most valuable free services on the web. With Google’s indexing power, you get immediate or regular notification in your inbox or reader on topics or keywords of interest.

With the advent of the real-time web, you no longer need to wait a few days or even a week to learn that you’ve been praised or defamed on some obscure site. Alerts represent an early advancement from search-based tools to discovery on the web. Alerts is rather infantile in this sense – you have to tell Google exactly what you’re looking for. So, the key is determining:

What’s important to YOU and YOUR business?

Here’s a simple way to think about what alerts you should create:

1) Companies
2) People
3) Products
4) Issues

The first alert someone sets up (other than their own name), is usually your company. Make sure to also add alerts for competitors. Google lets you determine the frequency at which you get alerts. So, for a primary competitor, you may want immediate alerts. For others, daily or weekly may be fine. As the notifications are sent to your inbox or reader, you want to manage how much volume you get on an ongoing basis.

For the people category, monitoring executives, analysts, and industry luminaries allows you to stay up to date on what is being said about whom. Whether or not you choose to set up alerts for your employees is up to you. I would question anyone who spends a good portion of their week monitoring what their people are saying. If alerts are set up for the other three categories, you should get any post that is relevant without playing big brother to your employees.

Products is a no-brainer. My only caution here is, if you are setting up alerts for more than a dozen products, you may want to consider a social media monitoring solution. Nathan Gilliat watches the industry closely. There is value in getting the additional analysis and tracking, but you pay for what you get.

Finally, the category that most people miss: issues. Too many companies are jumping into blog and Twitter conversations only when their company is mentioned. Consider the values, objectives, and challenges your company is pursuing and facing. Listening and participating in conversations about “financial transparency,” “deregulation,” “surfing,” or “single payer health insurance” will both enliven your content creation and allow you to highlight what is important to you as an individual or a company.

Setting up Google Alerts takes less than five minutes. But thinking about the keywords and themes you want to monitor should be an ongoing process.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 2/5 – more sophisticated tools with graphs, charts, and sentiment analysis exist for a cost

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – if you know of a more simple way to quickly get the info you need, please let me know

Personal Value: 4/5 – tracking your favorite band, athlete, or ex-boyfriend provides some balance to the more professional alerts

You Can Do It: 4 Celebs Who Lost It All and Came Back Again

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A Guest Post by Katheryn Rivas

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If your life is suffering because of the economy, personal issues or relationship failures, you still don’t need to give up. As you’ll see below, even some of the most successful and popular public figures of our time are not invulnerable to losing it all. See how these actors, producers and business moguls turned their lives around and got it all back.

1. Mickey Rourke

At fifty-seven years old, Academy Award-nominated actor Mickey Rourke has had a roller-coaster life in and out of the Hollywood spotlight. But with the 2008 film The Wrestler, many fans and industry insiders were excited to see Rourke make a comeback after he spent nearly a decade on the fringes.

Rourke broke into acting during the 1980s with small appearances in films and in TV movies, and became a veritable celebrity after roles in 9 1/2 Weeks, Barfly, and Year of the Dragon. In the 1990s, Rourke felt like he was a terrible actor and turned to boxing, almost as a way of punishing himself. Despite his success in the ring, he underwent lots of plastic surgery — some needed and some not — and many outside observers wondered what direction Rourke would take next.

Mickey Rourke had a hard time making it back into the spotlight over the next several years, but he allowed himself to take small roles — even in Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” music video — in order to rebuild his repertoire with critics and the public. In 2008, The Wrestler opened to immense critical acclaim and public excitement, and the film and Rourke were nominated for — and won — several prestigious awards. With the summer 2010 release Iron Man 2 many believe Rourke is continuing his comeback.

Robert Downey, Jr.

Another actor who was popular in the 1990s but who suffered a long-term absence in Hollywood is Robert Downey, Jr. Downey has been working in the entertainment industry since he was a child, and has been a high-profile, critically and commercially successful actor since his 1992 Academy Award-nominated role in Chaplin.

Along with his movie successes, however, Downey was known for having serious drug problems, landing in jail and rehab centers several times and getting kicked off movie sets. Relationships with actresses like Sarah Jessica Parker also failed during that time allegedly because of his drug use. Because of his talent and charisma, however, Hollywood continued to give Downey second chances, and in 2000, he joined the cast of the then-popular TV series Ally McBeal. He won a Golden Globe for his work, but was arrested and sent to rehab soon after.

When Downey finally decided that he could regain control over his life, he — like Rourke — turned to small roles and even music videos to get work. Friend Mel Gibson paid Downey’s high insurance bill as a favor, and Downey was allowed to work on Gibson’s film The Singing Detective. Directors continued to hold back some of Downey’s salary until after filming for their own insurance purposes, and higher profile roles in films like Zodiac and Good Night and Good Luck, Downey was rewarded with blockbuster roles in Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Sherlock Holmes. Downey has been married to his wife Susan Levin — the producer of Iron Man for five years.

Drew Barrymore

Today, actress and producer Drew Barrymore is known as a bubbly star who supports environmental issues, works regularly, and wins awards, such as her 2010 Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe awards for her role of Little Edie in Grey Gardens.

But after she won over Steven Spielberg and the public with her adorable portrayal of Gertie in 1982’s E.T., Barrymore fell into a life of alcohol and hard drugs. She allegedly was already into cocaine by the time she was just 13 years old, and attempted suicide at age 14. After rehab and becoming emancipated from her mother, Barrymore began to work again in her late teens. During the 1990s, she appeared in films like Poison Ivy but refused to give up her rebellious attitude. She posed nude for playboy and even flashed talk-show host David Letterman while standing on top of his desk during filming.

Her buoyant, positive attitude today has helped Barrymore to win over critics and the public, and she was hired to star in a string of successful movies like Riding in Cars With Boys, Scream and The Wedding Singer. By 1995, Barrymore started her own production company, which backed films like Never Been Kissed and Charlie’s Angels, which were both big hits. Today, Barrymore continues to act in romantic comedies and more independent films, and is a vocal supporter of women’s and children’s rights, as well as the environment.

Martha Stewart

By the mid-1990s, Martha Stewart was one of the most powerful women in the country, and also one of the richest. She began her own catering business in her Westport, CT, basement in the 1970s, and quickly expanded her network and experience, starting a partnership with Clarkson Potter, which published many of her cookbooks and and homemaking books. Stewart appeared on talk shows like Oprah, had her own newspaper column, and even got her own magazine, and by 1997, she was chairman, president and CEO of the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia company. Going public with her stock two years later, Stewart was officially a billionaire, until she lost it all.

Stewart — a former stockbroker — was pursued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading, and by 2003, was indicted on nine counts of fraud and other crimes. Besides stepping down from her business duties, Stewart had to go to federal prison for five months.

Almost immediately afterward, Stewart began publicly working on several lucrative projects, including collaborations with Kmart, Macy’s, and other top retailers. She also has her own radio channel is slowly building up her multimedia empire once again.

Four celebrities each went down a bad road that led them away from their success. The powerful point is not in where they went wrong, but how they are working their way back. Certainly, with the odds they face and people watching them, any one of us with the right focus and determination can get our lives going in the direction we choose.

Katheryn Rivas writes on the topics of jobs and online universities. She welcomes your comments here. You can find her at katherynrivas87 @ gmail [dot] com .

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

Write For A Blog Reader And Not A Book Reader

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By Terez Howard

How to blog series
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When you sit down to read a book, you read from left to right, paragraph to paragraph, page one to page two. That’s how I read a book, anyways.

When you read a blog, how do read it? I scroll like I’m looking for something, even if I don’t know what I’m looking for or what I’m going to find. I go up and down like a yo-yo, deciding whether or not a post is worth my time to read it. I check out subheadings, bullet points, bold characters, italics, a discernable font, and I love short paragraphs.

Time for a new paragraph. That last one was getting too long for my eyes. Why should you care how people read blogs?

First impressions – the worst impressions?

Because if readers don’t like the way your blog looks, even if you’re a first-rate writer, they are not going to read what you write. I do it all the time. I discover a post with an interesting headline and excitedly click on that link. When I see huge clumps of text and yellow-colored, size 8 font on a black background, I’m done.

It doesn’t matter what that blogger wrote. I’ve made a judgment call. Slap my wrist and tell me that I’m wrong. I don’t care. I’ve decided that if that writer doesn’t know the basics about blogging, then he/she couldn’t possibly have anything worthwhile to say.

It’s not the nicest way to be. I wasn’t always like this, tough. I’ve stumbled upon poorly constructed blogs that I have attempted to decipher. A deeper dig reveals typos galore, poor English and terrible content again and again. So why waste my time trying to translate?

You never get a second chance to make a first impression

Make a good first impression on your readers. First and foremost, you need original, well-written content. That is the foundation of a great blog.

Second, and this may seem ridiculous to say, but please make sure that people can read the size and style of your font. If you try to be too fancy, say with a script-type font, people will click away. If your words are too small for the average pair of eyes, people will click away. If the font is too big and overbearing, people will click away.

Either while you write or after you write and edit, you should try to include:

  • Subheadings. These break up text and summarize what readers can expect as well as build anticipation.
  • Bullet points/numbered lists. These are my favorites to read and write. They, too, break up text so well. I notice that if I read nothing from a blog post, I will read the list.
  • Bold, italics, underline, etc. Pepper your post with these font features when you want to stress something. But do not inundate a post with them. No need for the entire post to be bold.
  • Short paragraphs. Don’t write an entire blog post with just one paragraph. Staring at a computer screen with one long block of text is rough on the eyes. You can’t see anything. Experienced bloggers recommend three to four sentences per paragraph.

Use common sense

When you write for blog readers, don’t be a stickler to any rules. You’re thinking, And what’s the reason for this post if I can do whatever I want?

Well, of course you can do whatever you want. I’m saying that you don’t have to count the number of sentences per paragraph or include a bulleted list in every single post. Be natural. Think about your audience. Remember, write how you read.

A computer screen looks much differently than a book. Make it easy for people to read your blog.

How do you write for blog readers?

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Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. 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!!

Beach Notes: Changing Views

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Walking on the path this week, past what we call Froggy Beach we saw a new view. The changing shape and views of this small beach frequently surprise us.

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The view this day, was like a Japanese Zen Garden, the rocks so inviting as a place for contemplation. I could see myself meditating there, listening to the sounds of the sea, refreshing, rejuvenating……… – Suzie Cheel

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh