Successful Blog

Thanks to Week 301 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

My Experience with Cliffs and Decisions

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2016 GeniusShared Read from Liz StraussI’ve been thinking about falling off cliffs.

I’m fairly sure I was born with a fear of heights.

My uncle, the photographer, didn’t have such fear. And as I recall, the rest of my family didn’t either.

And my uncle — the one with all of the expensive photography equipment — would find every opportunity to take pictures that involved standing my cousins and I near dramatic scenery.

I was always the one who ended up on the cliff side. It was always impossible to find my smile.

Even now, I can’t walk up to the edge of a cliff without thinking that the stone will give way. My imagination has me tumbling, down, down, down . . . even though, I’m fairly certain that’s not meant to be a scene in my life.

I used to have the same experience with decisions. Choosing any option would leave wondering whether the choice would fall out from under my feet. Then I realized the only thing between me and every success I every won was a decision that I would succeed.

Maybe it’s the awe inspiring beauty of the world that sets me on my heels.
Maybe it’s the awe inspiring idea that I can determine the course of my life.

I still respect cliffs and decisions, but now I place my feet firmly in where I stand so that down, down, down isn’t on mind.

Be Irresistible: Find the Unique Opportunity that Is Yours in Any Moment

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Ack, What Do I Do Now?!

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Let’s just say it was in the last few years …
My life already had become all about working with corporations and individuals on simplifying their strategic goals. Daily I asked people questions. Sometimes the situation was about an immediate problem. Sometimes it was about far-ranging visions and goals. The questions were the same, the answers were sometimes easier to find than other times..

Five types of questions can get anyone to the best view of the opportunities in any moment:

  • Mission – Know where you are going. What is your specific and ultimate goal? Can you see it. What is your commitment to it?
  • Position – Know the unique place where are you alone are now. What is unique about where you stand in the situation? What do you uniquely bring to the table? How can your perceived weakness be turned into a strength? (if your back is against the wall, no one can come up behind you.)
  • Conditions – Know how change offers you unique opportunities. What has changed that offers an opening, an opportunity, that uniquely suits you?
  • Command Decisions – Know how to focus and sort which decisions move you toward your ultimate goal. Which opportunity moves you toward your ultimate goal? How does your response work toward making more opportunities? Which decisions will build a foundation for stronger opportunities tomorrow?
  • Networks and Systems – Know who will help you execute and how you will keep your process going. Who can help? How can you align your goals with another to make the movement faster, easier, and more meaningful for both of you? Where is the process so strong it’s invisible or so weak that it stand out?

Strategy is a framework for claiming the opportunities that uniquely our own to move forward toward a specific goal in realistic ways over time. Keeping an eye toward our end game — our mission — is only the beginning. If we recognize the unique opportunities inside every change — when we move, when circumstances move, when the people around us move — we can see a clearer way to that ultimate, specific goal.

Have you analyzed your unique opportunities lately?

Be Irresistible

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

Dear Big Company: Why Your Best Customer Offer Doesn’t Cut It!

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The Wrong Kind of Attention

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As I checked my bulk email, a subject line stood out to me. It read …

Only For Our Best Customers > Charisma Now On Sale!

I thought. there’s an “almost clever” idea meant to get me to look inside.
Charisma is the name of a bedding product line the company sells. I’ve bought it in the past and I am a fan. So the email ad should have made positive points … right?

It had the opposite effect. Here’s why.

Dear Big Company: Why Your Best Customer Offer Doesn’t Cut It

From the moment I read the subject line, my mind was brought to the offer not to the product. I was thinking What makes me a best customer and what’s so special about this best customer offer? That’s a doubly dangerous line to walk. After all, something ONLY for best customers really should be something exclusive and highly rewarding.

  • A “Best Customer Offer” Needs to Be Exclusive If they call me a best customer, I need to know what got me there. Am I truly a member of that exclusive best customer club or do they “say that to every girl’? I was doubtful about my “best customer-ness.” I haven’t bought from this big company for over two years.

    I found my doubt confirmed by the words under the ad.
    This offer “only for our best customers also said …

    If you received this email from a friend and would like to subscribe to our email list, click here.

    and something like …

    You received this email because you have subscribed to promotional emails from [The Big Company]

    So everyone on their list and anyone they pass the email onto is a best customer?

  • A Best Customer Offer Should Be Best Customer Rewarding If you call attention to my best customer-ness, I would think you’re trying to encourage best customer kind of behavior. So the next “best” requirement would be a Best Customer offer that seduce me into being a Best Customer — an unforgettable sale of such value that I not only stocked up for my own home, but also encouraged my friends to do it too. Unfortunately, the sale prices I discovered matched every other sale The Big Company has sent me.

    • Dear Big Company:

    Your “Best Customer” offer backfired on me.

    If you want me to read your ad and buy your product, don’t lie to me. It shows no respect for either one of us and takes the focus off the value of your product. In fact, it gets me wondering about things like these:

    • Is a best customer anyone with an email address on your list? Would you include the guy on the corner flashing open a trench coat saying “Hey look at this!”
    • Is your company in trouble that you have to resort to this? Are you like the guy who’ll say anything to get a date and doesn’t care who it’s with?
    • Did you think about who would read this email? Or were you so busy trying to sell me that you forgot that I might actually want to trust what you’re saying?

    “If you’re going to lie to me, at least have the decency to be convincing.” If this is your best truth, you need a better plan to get “best customers” to fall in love with you again. Because saying the equivalent to …

    You’re my best girlfriend and I offer you the same thing I give every girl even the ones I don’t know yet.

    just doesn’t cut it.

    If I’m a best customer, I want to feel like you care about me. A better subject line might read …

    Wake Up with Charisma! Sweet Dreams and Savings Sale!

    then don’t tell me … show me.

    Be irresistible.

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

Thanks to Week 300 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

7 Key Steps to Being Seen as the Best in Your Field

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What Good Is an Expert No One Knows?

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Whether we’re part of a large organization or working at home, to be successful and recognized, people have to see the quality of our work, know its value, find it relevant and worth coming back to. Without that we won’t be working long. It’s not enough to have knowledge, know-how, and be able to deliver extraordinary value, if we’re the only ones who know that’s what we can do.

To succeed in business, we need to share our expertise in ways that are relevant, real, and understandable and the more quickly we do that the faster we’ll be able to get on with the real work. These are the 7 Steps to becoming visible as the best in your field, the expert worth knowing, the first trusted source.

  1. Debriefing your successes to find your unique expertise. Inside your successes you’ll find your natural strengths and how they are best used. Capitalize on your strengths and match them with your deep interests — those things that you talk about and do even when you don’t have to talk about or do them. Your unique talent and experience differentiates your expertise — makes it uniquely your own. Know your strengths and play to them.
  2. Chose ONE key area of expertise. Find ONE niche that fits your strengths. With the noise of a crowded market, one niche, one offer, one specific expertise is a clear, easy to share message. People like a “go to” person for a specific need. Having ONE key area of expertise makes it easy for people to share what you do. It makes it easy for the people who want that expertise to find you. Once you’re working together, they’ll discover the other wonderful things you know.
  3. Network online and off to find people who need your expertise. Get to know the groups offline that attract the people who want to know someone who does what you do. Use tools like Listorious.com and Twitter search to find people to follow on Twitter and talk with them. Make friends on LinkedIn one by one. Align all of your profiles to showcase that one area of expertise that is your strongest suit. Introduce yourself with your best true story and a build your powerful personal network systematically.
  4. Share Your expertise as content. New customers and clients want information about how to run their businesses and their lives better — top-notch, quality, relevant content. Find opportunities to write, speak, or teach for your business. Share wht you’ve learned in contexts that are appealing. When you speak, write, and casually answer questions give them information, answers, AND analysis that shows them how much you love what you do. People can get news anywhere, but they don’t want to do what you do. What they want is your experience and the expert opinion, analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and predictions.
  5. Use online tools to curate relevant content around your expertise. Make finding interesting content tidbits your expert quest. Get to be friends with Google Alerts and similar services. Follow terms around the Internet. Choose several publications, blogs, and writers who stay on top of the areas that your customers and clients care most about. Retweet their articles on Twitter. Share them on Facebook and LinkedIn. Add a comment to the article as you send it out. Use popurl.com or alltop.com to locate
  6. Learn as much as you can about those who do what you do. Get to know the other experts in your niche. Talk with them. Visit and comment on their blogs. Ask them for an interview. Share war stories. Discuss ways of working together. Discover the ways that your expertise is the same and different from theirs. Volunteer to guest post on their blogs and determine who you might want to invite to work with you on larger projects and referrals. That’s a great way to build the base of people who know what you do.
  7. Go deeply into your area of expertise. Saturate yourself in the trends and the traditional ways of doing things. Find out what researchers are thinking so that you can offer clients and customers the perspective they don’t have the time to gather on their own. Be the first trusted source of the highest quality and most relevant information so that people begin to look to you for an analysis of their situation.


    8. PLUS ONE: Love what you do. . Nothing is more appealing than an expert who is fully engaged in what he or she is doing. It’s easy to trust that someone who is so engaged will be upbeat and easy to work with when problems come. Share the joy of your niche with the folks who come to see you. They’ll want to know more about what it is that you do.

    Focusing in on your expertise gives customers and clients insight into who you are and why they should keep coming back to see you. It becomes a key centerpiece of your offer — quality, knowledge, and credibility as promotion. Now, you’re ready when that person comes to look with the reasons founded in the relevance and the results that you represent. Just keep counting to seven — seven key steps to being seen as the best in your field.

    What has been the single most useful strategy you’ve found in building your own business expertise?

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

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