Successful Blog

Surprise Yourself

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Timing Isn’t Everything.

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They say that

  • opportunity happens when we’re prepared for it.
  • when we’re ready the right teacher appears.
  • Winning isn’t getting ahead of others. It’s getting ahead of yourself.

I say that trying is what happens right before succeeding begins.

Timing isn’t everything.
Knowing our place in time is.

We can stand in the perfect place in time with opportunity right within our reach. How we’ve used our time to prepare, what brought us here, won’t be enough, the outcome will still be affected by how we think. Despite the fact of our top-notch abilities, if we think we’re ready, we’ll take on that chance, if we think we’re not good enough, we’ll let it pass.

Surprise Yourself

Some days, some Mondays, we may be ready for the week to begin. Some days, some Mondays, come with challenges that mean a lot and we wonder whether we’ll win.

Wondering allows those voices and doubts in your head to say things like,

  • you’ll never be able to do that.
  • you’ll never be as good as he is.
  • who are you for thinking you should that?

Don’t wonder.
Dig in and do something about those doubts.

Consider replacing those old voices in your head with a few voices that I’ve heard in the last week or two …

  • You never know until you try.
  • Never underestimate your own value.
  • People could be saying nice things about you.

Refill your positive opinion of you. Remember when you’ve helped someone, answered a question that someone asked or passed on a kind word that was shared with someone who never knew good things were being said about him. Inside those moments you’ll find fuel to face a new challenge or even a plain old Monday again.

Then spend a while doing thinking about how you might do the same things for yourself. People who can cheer themselves, help themselves, and keep themselves are inspiring to be with.

Be inspired!
And don’t be shy about showing it!


Let a sunrise surprise you and inspire you!

Have faith in your ability to surprise yourself.
Surprise yourself with the ways you can make good things happen for you and everyone else.
Believe in what you’ll make, not what you’ll break!
Your subconscious will do the rest.

Every winner believes in winning.
Every leader knows to believe.
Surprise yourself with believing.
It’s irresistible.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Thanks to Week 358 SOBs

by

muddy teal strip A

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

Purple SOB Button Original SOB Button Red SOB Button Purple and Blue SOB Button
and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

muddy teal strip A

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

deep purple strip

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Negative Reviews and Consumer Complaints: How Your Business Can Keep a Positive Image

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by
Rich Gorman

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How Your Business Can Keep a Positive Image

Business owners typically take a lot of pride in the goods and services they offer. Hearing a consumer offer positive feedback, then, is one of the best feelings a business owner can experience. By contrast, negative reviews and customer complaints tend to sting. They tend to hit where it hurts —- at the business owner’s own sense of pride and accomplishment.

Negative Reviews and Customer Complaints

Unfortunately, negative reviews and customer complaints don’t just hurt a business owner’s pride. They also hurt a business owner’s sales. That’s never been truer than it is today, in the Age of Google, Bing, and most importantly, perhaps Yelp.

The Trouble with Online Reviews

Yelp and consumer review sites like it have effectively become the new word of mouth. Study after study finds that consumers turn to these review sites before making big purchases, and that they trust the information they find there. What this means is that online reviews and consumer complaints can prove massively influential over consumer behavior — good news if your business’ reviews are excellent across the board, but bad news if they are not.

The trouble here is that no business owner can trust that his or her reviews will always be positive. A negative review or an online complaint can come from any number of sources, so simply ensuring that you offer excellent products and superior services is not enough. A bad review could be planted by a business rival, or even by a disgruntled ex-employee.

These reviews can be disastrous to any business. But the good news is, there are steps that you, as a business owner, can take to minimize their visibility and negate their effects.

Watch Out for Your Online Reputation

If your company has any kind of an online presence at all, then it has an online reputation. The question you need to answer is simply this: Is your online reputation a positive one or a negative one? If a consumer searches for your brand name, does that consumer find information about how wonderful your company is; or does the consumer find one-star reviews and customer complaints?

Knowing where your business stands is crucial. That’s why it’s important to search for your brand name on a regular basis. There are a couple of professional tips that will make this a little more efficient:

  1. Set up Google and Yahoo alerts, which will let you know when any new online listings appear. This will help ensure that you have up-to-date information delivered directly to your inbox.
  2. Log out of Google before you search for yourself. Google, after all, offers personalized search results. If it knows that you own the business, it may try to protect your feelings, and hide the negative stuff that’s out there. Logging out ensures that your data is more objective.

Protect Yourself from Defamation

The next step is to build a strong, defensive wall — enhancing your brand and keeping your company insulated against negative reviews. The underlying concept here is that you cannot stop bad reviews from being written, but you can keep them from being seen. If the first page of Google is filled with positive information about your brand, then the negative stuff will be relegated to page 2 or 3, where it will do little or no damage to your brand’s online reputation.

Protecting yourself starts with registering for exact-match domain names, which will rank well on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. For instance, if your company is called Braverman Industries, make sure that you’re the owner not just of bravermanindustries.com, but also .org and .net. These sites will help you fill out that first page of search results. Signing up for exact-match account names, on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, is also helpful.

Merely registering for these accounts is not enough. You also need to be proactive in building your brand, by using these domains and social media accounts to publish positive, brand-enhancing content. The more content you’re able to publish, the better insulated you will be against the threat of damaging online reviews.

Reviews Happen

Of course, there is no way to absolutely guarantee that negative reviews and customer complaints won’t happen, or that they won’t breach your defensive wall. The question, then, is how you, as a business owner, can respond. If the review is a positive one, of course, or even if it offers genuinely constructive feedback, then it’s important to simply be nice, grateful, and prompt with your response.

And when the review is flat-out negative, to the extent of being unreasonable or even defamatory? Don’t respond at all. Any response is only going to serve to lend that review search engine traction, which means more consumers will see it and you’ll have an even tougher time suppressing it. Avoid the response, and simply double down on your efforts at brand enhancement and Google insulation.

Author’s Bio:
Rich Gorman is a serial internet entrepreneur with an extensive background in direct marketing, affiliate marketing, and online reputation management. In addition, Rich manages the Direct Response industry’s official blog where he shares his thoughts on Direct Response Marketing. Currently, Rich leads the team at reputationchanger.com

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How to Gain Influence and Earn Trust – 3 Things to Be First

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Influence and Trust

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Two relationship words — influence and trust — can be found throughout this social business culture. Those of us who authentically enjoy the influence of high-trust relationships with a large audience are finding that to be almost a currency evidenced by the way that we are pursued.

Influence is valued because it wins attention, moves people to action, and sometimes even changes how and what people think. Trust is valued because it extends and deepens influence into a stronger bond. The power of influence and trust has become so studied, demonstrated, and valued that major corporations regularly include influencer outreach in their marketing strategic plans because a few words or a blog post from the right ones can bring thousands of potential customers to them.

How does a person gain influence and earn trust like that?

How to Gain Influence and Earn Trust – 3 Things to Be First

If you’re a person or a brand who wants to establish your own community of fiercely loyal fans, it’s natural that you’d be interested in how to gain influence and earn trust. Building a platform or making an offer as a means to attract an influence network establishes a fragile and at best. The sort of influence and trust that consistently moves people to action comes not from something that we build or offer, but who we are.

If you want to gain influence and earn trust, here are 3 things you need to be first.

  1. Be clear about your values. Be an example of your values in action. Values establish common ground. When we act from our values we attract people who share them. When we share values, it becomes easy to predict decisions you’ll make and responses you’ll have. So when you point something you believe in or recommend, we can trust that we’ll have the same experience of it.
  2. Be more than credible. Be honest. Trust is goes beyond believing to knowing. We trust people we know who are what they appear even when we’re not around. The only consistent way to live up to that is to be honest with everyone — including yourself — about your your competencies, your expectations, and your commitments. Take care not use honesty as a weapon. Trust is the hard truth spoken gently. Tell the truth with respect.
  3. Be a generous, collaborative, and open source. Bring your expertise and your beginner’s mind. Share information. Share expertise. Share your thinking — as a learner as well as a teacher. Share by introducing people who would benefit from knowing each other. Share in gratitude, without expectation of receiving back. Connecting people to good ideas and other good people with good ideas builds influence and trust. Keep your focus on valuing the people who already trust you and providing value for them. They will share you with their friends.

Take a long hard look at anyone who has a truly lasting network of influence and trust. You’ll find these three traits are attracting people to them. People who enjoy a position of influence and trust give attention, move to action, and often change how or what they think because of the people who listen to them.

Influence and trust aren’t one-way streets. No lasting grant of influence or endowment of trust will be gained or earned without an equal openness to influence and a willingness to trust. We think of influencers as teachers, but the greatest teachers never stop learning. And learning requires trust.

What have you learned about influence and trust?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Productivity and Focus: Avoid Relationship Detours in a Pay-It-Forward World

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Relationship Detours on the Road to Success

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Monday morning seems a good time to realign our focus, set new goals, dig in and get going on the week. How long does it take before something happens and you find you’ve been pulled off your path?

Avoid Relationship Detours?

A strong reason for deciding where we’re going and what we want to build, make happen, or become is that if we don’t chart out our own true path, other people will. Even after we decide on our destination — the mission and vision that will propel our business or our life — our own true nature can pull us away from that true path.

One of the coolest things about the internet is the community ethic that we’re here to help. I figure it comes from the fact that statistically we’re more alike than different.

  • We all have access to the internet.
  • We all can communicate in text
  • We all use the same tools to do that

Sometimes we even agree on what the tools can do for the world.

Productivity and Focus: Avoid Relationship Detours in a Pay-It-Forward World

Now we’ve started to move that social business ethic into the larger world. Whether we work at home, with a team, or for a company we love, contributing to the community is part of our own success. That community ethic makes it easy to reach out to new people who join us. We want to keep the culture that we’ve come to know and value. So why not show them how it works? Someone helped us when we got here. It’s a pay-it-forward world.

The downside of that can be relationship detours.

  • Are you so busy helping other folks that you’ve lost your own way?
  • Do ideas and projects that other folks propose take you away from your personal goals?
  • Do you spend more time on other folks’ success than your own?

Helping is good, but doing is necessary to get to where we want to go. You have to know where you’re going to know who to help. Time is a limited resource and focus is key to achieving our goals. So, when you choose to help, ask yourself if you’re extending the most help to people who are heading on a similar path. Then the help you give can be part of your learning, expertise, and growing skill sets.

And when folks expect you to set aside your own productivity to focus on theirs, remember that sometimes the most useful help is to show someone how to find the answers rather than to offer a hand.

Be generous with your time.
Share your expertise with abandon.
Help others achieve their goals without expecting something in return.
But know how to decline when what someone asks you will detour too far or too long off your true path.

How do you decide who gets your time and your help?

Knowing where you’re going in irresistible.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Thanks to Week 357 SOBs

by

muddy teal strip A

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

muddy teal strip A

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

deep purple strip

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss