Successful Blog

Thanks to Week 162 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

Are You Social Media Addicted?

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Do You Hear Your DMs in the Shower?

Search and Social has made a fun litle quiz about social media addiction. Apparently I’m 46% addicted to Social Media. I might have guessed higher. Perhaps, I’ve been slacking …

46%

It’s a simple quiz of multiple choice questions. Takes about five minutes.
It made me think about what I do.

Click the box with the big red heart to give it a go

Enjoy!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

What Sheila Scarborough Said … About Getting Paid

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A community isn’t built or befriended,
it’s connected by offering and accepting.
Community is affinity, identity, and kinship
that make room for ideas, thoughts, and solutions.
Wherever a community gathers, we aspire and inspire each other intentionally . . . And our words shine with authenticity.

Asking for What We’re Worth

When we take on the role and reins of a professional, not all of the skills come at the same time. Often we’re great the work, but not so good at asking to be paid what the work is worth. How do folks figure that out? It comes from experience and trust in our own value.

Here’s what Sheila said . . .

For one thing, people are rather itchy about giving specific amounts when discussing payment and salary, so we go around not knowing that there are some people out there getting paid pretty good money to do what we’re doing.

Once I finally figured out that .50-$1/word was more than reasonable and even low-end for most print pubs, I started doing the math for my online work, which is just writing, after all.

Holy cow, was I giving away the farm! That led me to turn down a few blogging jobs that sounded nice but just were not paying enough for my considerable efforts.

So, let’s be more frank about money so we know what is “standard” and reasonable to ask for.

Then, let’s realize how increasingly valuable our online savvy is to businesses that want to move online. Knowledge that we think “everyone knows” is in fact gold bullion to companies who have just found Web 2.0. I’m not saying overcharge “because they can afford it,” but we should really appreciate our unique skillsets.

The teacher/consultant role and the need to pay such folks seems to be understood, so I plan to lean more in that direction, and try to make a decent living teaching what I know.

Sheila Scarborough from a comment on December 29, 2007

A successful and outstanding blogger said that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

SOB Business Cafe 11-28-08

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking–articles on the business of blogging written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Chris Brogan points out the power of Batman available to all of us.
Batman, no matter how amazing, is only one man. Crime is a large and amorphous thing, and it requires lots of people to fight. It requires a better Gotham Police Department, a more capable Commissioner Gordon, a Robin, a Batgirl, and more and more help from others. Oh, and let’s not forget Alfred.

Geek Mommy points out the silent gift that reaches out.
Sometimes, because I’m so chatty (or noisy as some would say) people make the mistake of thinking I’m not listening. Then I end up repeating something back to them they said a few hours or weeks earlier and they seem stunned. You see, as much as I love to talk, share and inform, well… I love learning even more. You learn from listening, observing, and paying attention.

Levite Chronicles points out that we can ask for a gift.
I love the idea, but I started to laugh. I thought, “if everyone is listening, who is going to talk?” And then I realized that this is a day addressed to those of us who always talk. It probably should be a doubly-named day, called both, “national day of shut up and let someone else talk already why don’t you.” and “national day of please, you, in the back, arranging the chairs, would you tell us a story? Please?”

Beth’s Blog points out that giving starts early.
When I was a kid, Lucy the Elephant, was in a state of disrepair. A community group worked hard to get her placed on the historic register and raise money to restore her to her mid-century glory. How? Bake sales organized by my third grade teacher, Josephine Harron, nicknamed “Cupcake.” Sitting by next to my mom in the kitchen, I mixed up a lot of cupcake batter and icing with my mom for those bake sales.

Related ala carte selections include

The Jeff Pulver Blog highlights giving that happened in near record time.
Tweetsgiving is a Twitter celebration of gratitude and giving created by Epic Change, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The project aims to demonstrate the power of the social web by raising $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

The Art of a Personal Thanksgiving and Thanks Receiving

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Don’t Let the Words Throw You

Change the World!

How good it is that people made a tradition — a day for giving thanks. Life too easily becomes getting to the next sunrise, through the next problem, onto the next goal.

Days of thanksgiving are important. We need days to remember what we’ve already received. It’s easier to have faith in a future when we value what’s here — when we gather, thank all who have given to us and give back in whatever ways we can.

The list of people who have changed my life grows daily. I thank every one of you with my head, heart, and fingers on the keys. I hope I live that gratitude visibly.

Gratitude has the power to change the world.

The Art of a Personal Thanksgiving and Thanks Receiving

It’s easy to care for a world that gives. It’s even easier to love the friends who turn the world by helping each other. We’re grateful for so many people and things. We look for every way to say so.

We write a thank you. We offer flowers. We pay it forward. We give because we’ve been given.

But are we receiving?

When someone offers those flowers, that thank you, that gift paid forward, it takes open hands, open minds, and open hearts to accept. Openness completes the transaction with honor. It’s a gift in return.

A personal thanksgiving is answered best with a personal thanks receiving. “I heard you. Thank you, I value your gift.” The art of personal thanks receiving is knowing it’s about the the giver. Receiving gratitude hears people, values them, and builds relationships.

Don’t let the grateful words throw you. Hear the person. Answer with relationship.

We can change the world — just like that!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Image: sxc.hu
Work with Liz!!

Affiliate Marketing Myths — Myth 2: It’s Best to Start with a Crash Course

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In this time of a down economy, who couldn’t do with another income stream? Those of who’ve been online for a few weeks or longer, realize that not every offer of income potential is quite what it seems to be.

James Nardell and his team at Shopster have been writing a series on myths bloggers have about affiliate marketing. This is the second in that series to help us all avoid some potholes on the information highway. (Does anyone still call it that?)

Myth 2: It’s Best to Start Affiliate Marketing with a Crash Course
A Guest Post by Raymond Lau

Is a crash course from a leading affiliate the best way to ramp up fast on affiliate marketing techniques?

Sort of. When looking for a crash course in affiliate marketing, the key words are “buyer beware”. While it is entirely possible to learn good fundamentals from a beginner’s course, there are many resources out there that are either misleading, out of date, or entirely loony.

A misleading technique is one that worked for someone, once, under circumstances they either cannot reproduce or cannot adequately expand. Avoiding this is as simple as doing your homework: look back at the history of the technique itself, and who is presenting it. The best business is built upon a stable foundation that can adapt to changes in the market. Learning the processes and habits of a fluke will only lead to troubles down the road.

An out-of-date technique is just as useless to you when starting out. Changes in affiliate marketing happen all the time, and as a beginner you simply cannot afford to start your business without a step ahead of the competition. Why even bother entering the race in the middle of the pack, where business winds down to the lowest bidder? Affiliate marketing is about innovation.

Of course, among the throngs of dead ends there are some shining examples of solid, easily-accessible courses from people who know what they’re doing. They’re not that hard to find (hah, they’d better not be!) and it takes virtually no time to get started with their guides.

Some are free, like the “Affiliate Masters” guide by Ken Evoy (http://aff-masters.sitesell.com/AffMasters.pdf) which thoroughly covers the potential beginning of your affiliate marketing life and provides a wealth of links to other solid resources.

Others, such as the Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook by James Martell, or Rosalind Gardner’s How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online, require an up-front investment but come with backup support and counseling by the authors themselves, allowing for a much more personal experience that may more thoroughly ingrain the fundamentals.

Whether you go for the free route or decide to pay for the information, there are three simple questions to ensure that what you’re learning will help you and your business:

1. Does it suit you? Look into the history of who is teaching and what they are saying. Make a judgment on whether or not what they’re teaching can be adapted to the markets you want to enter.

2. Is it stale? It’s one thing to learn a stable set of basics, and another entirely to clog your brain with dated information that has been reworked and improved upon since it first came out. Research the techniques offered to confirm they’re still relevant to today’s market.

3. What do you expect? Just because the course you’re taking promises to teach you the solid how-tos of affiliate marketing, don’t go in thinking you’ll get rich quick. By now you should know that “instant profit” is only made by people taking advantage of others who are looking for it.

–Resource box–
Raymond Lau is a marketing analyst for Shopster.com — a company that provides Web sellers with a dropship product source and e-Commerce storefront tools to build their online business. Shopster gives retailers and affiliates access to over 1 million products they can sell on auction sites or their own storefront. You can reach him at rlau@shopster.com.
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Thanks, James and Raymond!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!