Successful Blog

Thanks to Week 354 SOBs

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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.

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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

Don’t Build Your Business Castle on Another Guy’s Land

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How to blog series

Content Is King

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When building an online presence for a business, people quickly think of a website, social networks like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+ — all of which, when put together, can seem overwhelming. Add in a blog to the mix and often people will flinch. It’s reasonable that growth-focused businesses might worry about the commitment and time that a blog could represent.

Still, whenever I’m invited to help a business connect to their customers and grow their community, a blog is always central to the content strategy. Content attracts, informs, demonstrates, and establishes value. There’s a reason online professionals say, “Content is king.”

Don’t Build Your Business Castle on Another Guy’s Land

All of the social sites might seem to replace the role of a blog. Twitter allows us to connect, converse, reconnect, faster and easier. Facebook and Google+ allow us to be social with our customers. LinkedIn is the Chamber of Commerce online. Instagram and Pinterest give us a chance to share what we see and like.

But if you want to the search engines working for you, a blog is a cornerstone to reaching those goals.

Have you read the terms of service on those social sites where you’re putting your advice, your expertise, your unique content? Would you keep your address book, your contact lists, your communication records inside another guy’s business?

It’s hard to have a true presence, if everything you say is on social sites. How to people know which place you call home? Where do you put your serious thoughts? What home holds your business body of work?

Your business blog content is the cornerstone of your business online. Well thought and well presented content is easiest, fastest, and most meaningful way to share your expertise. Helpful (not hypeful) insights, how-tos, and information that’s relevant to your customer’s lives is an invitation to get to know your business beliefs, values, and business sense. Content like that attracts people you want to work with, and give search engines valuable pages to index. Those indexed pages advertise you whenever people search for the solutions you write.

Don’t put something as valuable and attractive as content on another guy’s url.

If you’re going to build and share online content, own the url where you house it. Instead of writing a post on a social site write it on your business blog. Share the link and an excerpt on that social site instead. Keep the original content on your own URL – where Google and your visitors can connect it to your business.

Let the traffic and the authorship come to you.

Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and the rest make it easy to build groups and share content quickly. But what are we risking by building a following in places where we don’t own the “land”? The social site “landowner” is gaining benefit of every customer you attract. If you decide to leave, you might lose your whole list.

Who can trust that the social site sill never change the “rules”? Are you willing to risk your business on that?

Free isn’t free when you think about it.
Go visit instead and invite folks back to where you’ve build a location that looks, feels, and interact with them in a way that only your own property can. Content is king. Don’t build your castle on another guy’s land. You might find that you can’t get to the castle one day.

How would your business be affected if Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, or Google+ lost the content and connections you’ve built?

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

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

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The Power of Community Focused in the Same Direction

Whether you count yourself in huge corporation, a small team, or feel you’re the only member of an entirely unique group. If we hope to move forward, we all could use a more strategic view. We can chase our dreams. We can hire an evangelist. We can put our noses to the grindstone. Still the truth of the matter is we’re social beings and we build better things together than we’ll ever build alone.

The best dreams are built with insight from a variety of viewpoints. The best ideas and innovations are fleshed out with minds and voices that approach a problem from differing points of view. The best communities come together around participation and personal investment. And we’ve all seen the power of a community focused in the same direction.

Leaders want to build something we can’t build alone.

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

When we think of social business, the tools may have changed, but the people haven’t. We’d still like our lives to be easier, simpler, and more meaningful than just getting up each day to go to work. Invitations attract us. Aspirations move us forward. Focus brings us to a clear path. Relationships well-chosen lighten our load. Quality raises our investment. True collaboration brings out our better selves.

Great leaders who build great things understand that human nature and engage it to fuel their goals. If you want to be that kind of leader — one who attracts, inspires, guides, focuses, connects, and unites — here’s how to build something you can’t build alone.

  1. Be a Magnet, not a Missionary. Quit converting and start attracting. Understand and respect our different, yet symbiotic purposes. The community needs the goods, services, and economic contributions of growing businesses. Growing business need the support and patronage of loyal communities.
  2. Have and Share a Vision. To make a thriving business, start with a long-term loyal, internal community of employees. They will build and protect a healthy innovative culture, promote the values of the business, stay with the company, develop expertise with coworkers, and live to serve customers.In any community, it’s not the how or what of work that builds connection and loyalty. It’s vision and mission. The underlying vision that unites us toward building something that we can’t build alone. A community needs leadership to set and invest that vision and so that they can feel smart, safe, and powerful in investing too.
  3. Know How to Choose the Easiest, Fastest, Most Meaningful Next Move Strategy is a realistic plan to advance a position over time by leveraging your unique opportunity. Recognizing opportunity and getting where you want to go is impossible if you don’t know where you are now. Position is informational — It’s part part property and packaging, part size, scope, and systems. Position is relational — it’s part values and relationships, part mission, vision, and perception. The most advantageous next positions look only slightly different than the place we already are. Deeply study your position and you understand the true value proposition of your brand.
  4. Lead with Relationships Choose the people around you — employees, vendors, partners, customers — wisely with deliberation and intention. They are the people who will build your business with you. Likewise, choose your sponsors and the businesses you support with equal thought to how they build your community and your life.
  5. Even Cheap Is Expensive When the Model Is Doesn’t Work Start a new business and you’ll soon see, that numbers reflect history. Without history, questions are what we use to generate the numbers we use. Numbers are important and useful, but they are as deep as the questions we ask. When we aggregate the numbers into a graphic they become shallow and flat. What I just saw will forgotten in an hour. What I just bought won’t win you my next dollar. Haven’t we figured out yet that impressions, circulation, and hits in general are short-terms goals and NEVER have been attributable?
  6. Understand the Power of Collaboration If communities and corporations, align our goals and head in the same direction the results could be amazing. But first we each have to know where we’re going and negotiate from the SAME SIDE of the table, recognizing that we’re stronger together.

Leaders make work and life easier, simpler, and more meaningful. Sometimes we do that simply by letting folks see what they see, know what they know, and do what they do … because other people see, know, and do valuable things that we can’t see, know, or do.

Leaders who need no one, lead no one. Don’t hire a staff, engage people who contribute. Don’t build a coliseum, raise a barn.
It’s irresistibly attractive to build something you can’t build alone.

How will you be a leader this week?

Be a leader.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Thanks to Week 353 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

5 Ways to Leverage Other People’s Success to Fuel Victories of Your Own

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A Good Wheel Already Exists.

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I had a problem with my computer. The operating systems wouldn’t recognize the CD-DVD player. Every time I tried to reinstall the drivers, I received an error stating that my attempt to install the drivers was unsuccessful. I put to work my problem-solving skills. I tried various and sundry fixes. I approached it from every direction I knew.

The situation went on for a few days — or was it weeks — until a day came that I needed to use the CD-DVD for a project. I was serious now. Again I tried in my usual problem solving approach. Then, when I’d decided the whole endeavor was taking too much time, I turned to Google asked the question. Found an answer. It worked. I did a victory dance and moved on.

The I remembered something I already knew. The kind of common sense that we commonly forget.

The answer had been waiting while I suffered though all if my testing and trials. I’d been thinking that I had to do everything alone, solve every problem myself. I’d ignored perfectly good answers.

Never let a good thing pass you by. Charlize Theron.

I’d been letting those good answers pass me by, because they weren’t my own.

5 Ways to Leverage Other People’s Success to Fuel Victories of Your Own

Now, let’s be clear, I’m not proposing that we shift the burden of doing our own work to someone else. When other people hand us their work, we don’t learn. Rather, I’m suggesting that we take advantage of work that’s available to help yourself. Leverage the success of other people to reach success of your own.

Many people have discovered answers to the problems we’re facing, with a little creativity in our thinking we can save time and get to successful solutions by finding out what they did. When we find their solutions and apply them to our problems we still learn, but with fewer random guesses along the way.

Here are 5 Ways to leverage other people’s success to fuel victories of your own .

  1. use Google to find an established model or solution. See who’s solved the problem or built a process already.
  2. Ask your networks, including Linkedin, Quora, and Twitter, WWhat’s your best advice for doing this?

    3. When people answer be sure to explore what doesn’t work too.

  3. Look at how the “big guys” do it. Email several people who are more experienced than you are. Ask each to answer the same question — one that gets to the solution you’re trying to find. Compile and publish their answers into a single blog post so that others looking for that solution find you.
  4. Look at how it’s done in other domains and other industries. Ask yourself, How would a mathematician, a scientist, a painter, a dancer, a chef approach this problem? What other industries
  5. Find a mentor, join a community, or take a class. Experience is hard won and valued by those who’ve earned it. It’s hard to top the feeling of being asked to share what we’ve learned. Give someone that great feeling by choosing an experienced teacher, mentor, or friend and Inviting him or her to asking them the

Time IS money. Knowing how is good. Knowing how to find the answer quickly save time. When we need an answer to what we might never need to know again it’s time to leverage other people’s success to fuel our own victories. Getting help with problems that are peripheral can keep us focused on what we truly need to learn. Getting help with what we truly need to learn can keep us moving forward toward our most important goals.

Put the two together — focus on what we need to learn and moving forward is powerful fuel for a business, a career, and a life.
Leveraging other people’s success can make our work easier, faster, and more meaningful. And you know those are keys to unliking the irresistible.

Bet you know more ways to leverage other people’s success to fuel your own. Will you share them?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

The Difference Between Wrong and Different

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Learning, Innovation, Collaboration

They Weren’t Wrong

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When I first became an editorial manager, it took me a while to realize that if I asked 25 people to revise a paragraph I would get back 25 versions, each version uniquely worded by the unique editor who did the work. I even did a test.

Not one of the edited paragraphs were exactly as I would’ve done it.

They weren’t wrong. They were different.

Difference Between Wrong and Different

Ask 4 people how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and you might be surprised to find that three of them make a pbj quite differently from the way you do. It’s true. People have at least four ways to make something as simple as that.

Even more interesting is that most people have never considered another way to do it.
And when you suggest a different way, you might hear, “That’s just wrong!”
But every way works. Every way brings about a positive outcome — something great to eat.

For the record, I like my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches grilled.

Rules of how we learned tend to tell us that another way — an other way — is wrong.

Check the etymology, wrong comes from words that mean …
“not right, bad, immoral, unjust”
“crooked, twisted, ”
“that which is improper or unjust.”

The sandwich making method that’s not mine results in the desired outcome without being bad, immoral, unjust. It’s not really crooked or twisted in the true sense of the words. So, other methods aren’t really wrong — they are just different from how I do it.

What about the Rules?

I suppose you could argue that a sandwich “rules” dictate bread and filling.
I have trouble with dictates and the dictators who dictate them.
It’s easy to close our minds and our thinking by sticking too tightly to traditional rules.

Every creative person, every jazz musician understands the value of tradition, but also understands when to stretch to innovate or invent something new.

Then would an ice-cream sandwich — cookies with ice-cream between — be wrong?

I don’t mind if you say it is.
But I won’t agree with that premise.
To me, it’s just different.

Wrong needs more than different to be wrong.
Different isn’t wrong.
It’s just not the same.

Learning, Innovation, Collaboration Thrive on Different

In fact, different is where learning, innovation and collaboration begin. Learning, innovation, and collaboration, thrive on different. They wither when held to the binary judgment of right or wrong. When we begin to see different as neither good or bad, we can get to seeing new ideas, trying new ways of doing what we’ve always done, finding new ways that old things fit together to make new things.

What makes us valuable is our differences — the different ways we think and do things. Celebrate, welcome, and explore the differences we bring to the table. Bring your differences gently and with respect, but please bring your differences. We need them.

Different can be irresistible in the way it pushes us to rethink, rebuild, and grow.
Without different, an ice cream sandwich would never have happened.

We’re all the same in the fact that we’re all different. Don’t hide your difference. Different is not the same as wrong. Different is a value of it’s own. Find the thoughts behind different and get the learning, innovation, and collaboration going. Make a sandwich in a new way.

What’s the most innovative sandwich you’ve ever made?

Be different. Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss