Successful Blog

Are You Building a Birthday Cake or a Business?

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The Difference Between a Plan and a Strategy

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Do you know the difference between a plan and a strategy? Every strategy is a plan of sorts, but few plans are strategies. Thinking strategically takes a broader view and considers more variables than the planning that most of us do. Some ventures and adventures require a plan. Others require strategy.

Knowing which is which can mean the difference between watching the game and owning the team.

Are You Building a Birthday Cake or a Business?


BigStock: Birthday Cake

When we build a birthday cake, the plan — a recipe — takes place in a closed system. The birthday cake builder controls all of the key circumstances that will affect successful achievement of the goal.
And so the result is predictable.
We start building a birthday cake and we end with the birthday cake we set out to build. Rarely does an economic downturn affect it. It’s unlikely that another human unexpectedly tosses in a cupful of ketchup. A failure is a problem with execution or a flaw in the plan.

A plan is set of action steps to achieve a stated goal. Plans usually assume a closed system.

Birthday cakes can be build in a closed system.
A business can’t.

Building a business takes place in an open system. The business builder has inputs from outside the system and far less control. A business grows in an open system of change. It takes more than a plan to take advantage of the opportunity to grow that every change represents. That’s what makes a strategy the better road to growth.

Strategy is a realistic plan to advance over time by leveraging opportunities uniquely available to you.

  • Have a Mission — set an ultimate philosophical, economical, and / or political purpose
  • Assess and Reasses Your Position Every time You Gain Ground — Look, listen, measure, test your current situation, climate, resources, opportunities
  • Use Changing Climate, Conditions, and Trends — Find the advantage in interruption and unexpected — use change as a ally to grow.
  • Move Forward Tactically in Increments — Size, choose, and commit to campaigns that reflect obstacles, goals, and prizes

Don’t just plan to grow. Leverage the opportunity that shows up everywhere you are.

Do you use and leverage only resources you can control?
Could be you’re building a birthday cake not a business.

Be irresistible.

Be irresistble.
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2 Things You Can Learn from Like-Minded People in Business and Life

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Taking Advantage of Opportunity

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Everywhere we stand is replete with opportunity. Every situation we engage in offers a chance to learn more about ourselves and the world in which we work. Every conversation, every observation can bring us a chance for improving.

Great learners pay attention to the usual situations not just the rare ones. We watch what makes our ordinary world work as well as the extraordinary. We see what attracts people to us, what the like-minded and the like-hearted people find of value in us. We also can learn a few things about what might work against us.

Two Things You Can Learn from Spending Time with Like-Minded People

Like-minded friends in a line
BigStock: Friends in Line

One thing about social networking is the self-sorting way that it brings us to be in groups of like-minded and like-hearted people — people all looking and thinking in the same direction. Some folks call it the “fish bowl.” People often discuss the downside of staying in a group that shares the same disposition and thinking, the same biases and similar expertise. Among other things, if we’re not careful it can become safe and comfortable. Being in a group of like-minded people can narrow our vision and curb our opportunities to learn about the world and ourselves. Yet it can provide its own insights if we look.

It’s hard to get more like-minded than someone who shares your DNA.
I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned by spending time with my son.
I’ve learned at least two things.

  1. What people value in you. When my son was about 16, I considered a particularly positive interaction we had. It got me to thinking. My thoughts went to the reasons I liked him as a person — his intelligence, his quick wit, his positive, sweet way of considering other people. I had the thought It’s easy to see why people like him. Then I realized that we had those traits in common, that those traits we value are ones he valued too. It was then I knew that I could learn a lot about what people value in me and what I value by looking at what I value in like-minded people I attract.
  2. How people invest in you. Now my son is about 26. And recently we had a significant block of time to work together on a project. I saw how tenacious he can be about solving a problem, how other people’s answers don’t work for him, and how much I reinvested in each conversation in an effort help reach a conclusion. It got me to thinking. My thoughts went to the reasons that I find him intense — his singular focus, his search for rightness and truth, his unwillingness to wear a suit of clothes that doesn’t fit. I had the thought It’s easy to see why people might find him exhausting. Then I realized that we had those traits in common too, that those traits we might find exhausting are ones he might find exhausting too.

If you want to know who you are look at your friends — those like-minded, like-hearted people you spend your time with. See what you value in them. See what you invest to help them. Pay attention this week to the people you choose to work with. You’ll learn a lot about you.

Be irresistible.

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Thanks to Week 346 SOBs

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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.

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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

Productivity – The Best Way to End a Friday Checklist

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Great Weekends Start with Productivity

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Friday! Finally!
On a short week, it can seem to take even longer to get here and we can end up with a Friday that seems jammed packed with things we’re still trying to get done. And before we know it the weekend will again be upon us …

Don’t let it sneak up on you!

Rather than fall into this weekend still working, start a new productivity habit.
Set a plan that will end your Friday neatly, get your Monday optimized for productivity in the very best way so that your weekend can be your own.

It may take some practice to get it down perfectly, but if you get the habit of this checklist, you’ll find that you start your weekends and your Mondays more sweetly.

Productivity – The Best Way to End a Friday Checklist

    1. End your “real work” a half-hour early on Friday. Most folks don’t want to interact with you late on Friday anyway. If you need that half-hour to finish your work, start next week by planning to finish a half-hour earlier.

    2. Use that half-hour to organize everything on your desk. Put things away. Lay out things that still need attending to. Mark what needs to be done. Make a to-do list, if that’s your way.

    3. Make a plan for next week–at the least, decide what you will tackle first on Monday and what your three most important goals will be.

    4. Do an office check. Are the things you use most closest to where you use them? If not, move them, so that they will be. Are the files you access most on your computer only one click away? If not, move them so that they will be.

    5. Order the Monday tasks by putting what you can get done fastest first. Do this for two reasons. It will start your week with a quick sense of accomplishment, and you’ll be able to pass on what you finished–that means that when you move on to task two, someone else can be starting on what was your task one.

Then consider the week closed, leave the office at work, give your brain a break, and have a weekend. What a great way to promote yourself and your brand to anyone who walks by on their way home for the weekend. It says a lot for your personal brand — almost everyone wishes their office looked like it could be in a magazine . . . Even if the only one it says it to is you — that’s plenty.

Whether you work in a building away from home or in your bedroom, a productivity boost will find you on Monday walking back into a space that’s ready to work in.

The idea is to end work on Friday so that if you open your on the weekend you might actually be refueling — talking to friends or watching a movie — rather than cleaning up details left over from the week you just left. Having a headstart on Monday can free the mind space to enjoy Saturday and Sunday.

How do you amp your productivity to mark the end of a Friday?

Be irresistible.
— ME “Liz” Strauss

5 Simple Ways to Deliver Irresistible Content and Lower Your Bounce Rate

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Be Irresisible!

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If you’ve been developing a business online in the last few years, you’ve probably heard statics regarding the brief amount of time we have to get and keep the attention of first-time visitors. What was almost 20 seconds in 2005 now is being described as something between 8 seconds and 10.

Getting folks to arrive is the first step, of course. In that, an attention-grabbing, killer headline is everything.


Click image to access complete podcast at The Onion.

Whether it is something completely original and novel, ultra-specific and geared towards a niche, or just incredibly compelling, good headlines on the Web always win.

They always win, except when they don’t.

If a headline delivers traffic, but the traffic immediately bounces away, can you say the headline wins?

A killer headline will get traffic, but what keeps folks reading?
We have to deliver great content to give that headline legs or that traffic will bounce away.

5 Ways to Deliver Irresistible Content and Lower Your Bounce Rate

Strong businesses are built on strong relationships. What transforms a headline clicker into someone who hangs around? What turns first-time visitors into people who want to stick around? What makes them stay and already thinking about their return? Here are five things you can do to make it more likely they get what they came for.

Five Ways to Deliver to the Clickers Who Follow a Headline to Your Blog …

  1. Deliver content that your headline promises.
  2. Deliver content in short paragraphs using subheads surrounded by lots of white space so that people have room to think and breathe. Add a picture that supports the text and illustrates the content. First impressions count.
  3. Deliver it without making folks jump over ads or through hoops to get to the prize that the headline promises. Decide whether you want me to stay … there are other ways to get me to buy.
  4. Deliver it by responding to the people who take time to comment.
  5. Deliver it by making it easy to find more of what brought people to your site.

It’s not the visitor who never came that’s a loss. It’s the visitor who comes to find that we’re not what he or she thought. A great headline followed by something less doesn’t win. It doesn’t even finish.

The most important thing is deliver — do what we say we’re going to do.


Click image to see complete article from The Onion.

If the content you deliver is easy to access, faster to enjoy or employ, and adds value and meaning to a visitor’s life, you can bet that visitors will be glad they came and ready to come back. Easier, faster, more meaningful is irresistible. That’s a fact.

Great headline, lame blog post — who wants to deal with that? You’ve been there. What’s your response when you end up on one of those?

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

See the Flowers and Every Other Good Free Thing

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about the meaning and seeing.

Every year on Memorial Day weekend my mom would put flowers on the graves of soldiers who had fought for us and were gone. Even when I was tiny,she would take me along to participate in this ritual, not that I understood what it was about. Never did she tell me about a single soldier only the story about soldiers fighting for freedom.

I’ve known people who have lived through war. I know people who have fought in them. I have heard true and personal stories of those who went to war and never came home.

At this moment I’m reminded of the flowers my mom would put on the soldiers’ graves, telling me “they fought for what we have now. The flowers say thank you and that we remember.”

None of the soldiers in the graves could see the flowers, but I could.
See the flowers and every other good free thing this weekend.
Remember the soldiers.
Value the freedom.

Be irresistible.

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