Successful Blog

Sunday Link Love: 15 Great Finds on Promotion, Working at Home and Productivity

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Can’t Have You Sitting Home with Left-Overs

I’ve collected 15 more links for you to read or add to your tool kit over the weekend — more help and treasures.

Blog Promotion and Traffic

  1. How to Rank Well in Google with Your Blog Matt Cutts Style

  2. Blog SEO: Link bait option Simply put, if no one finds your posts of value, no one is going to link to them.

  3. Quick Blog Traffic Tip – Link To Another Blogger Spend some time continuing the discussion they started or recommend an article they posted to your readers. In other words, send some link love. :

  4. Building “Word Of Mouth” Capabilities Into Online Apps “Put a tell-a-friend form on every page of your website.”

  5. How to Rank on Google Base
  6. Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Guide

    7. Working at Home

  7. What the Heck is a “Real Job”? How I Learned a Business Doesn’t Count

  8. Working from Home – What to Do When the Kids Are on Holiday from School

  9. Paying Fixed Bills With a See-Saw Salary
  10. Top 30 Free Windows Software Apps

    11. Productivity

  11. Self-Destructing Distractions

  12. Take a Break and Refresh Your Productivity

  13. How to manage your blogging schedule

  14. Neat Living “Do-it-Yourself” Organizing Library – Our FREE Gift to You!

  15. Procrastination hack: “(10+2)*5”

Have a great Sunday!. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
After Thanksgiving Link Love — 15 Links that Are Better than Left-Overs
Great Find: Boosting Blog Traffic
Thinking Inside-Outside the SEO Sandbox
Blog Archive Promotion To-Do List
Turning Reluctant Readers into Loyal Fans

Don’t Design for Comments: Design to Give Readers an Experience

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The Right Thought, Not Far Enough

Customer Think Logo

I talked about design and comments in a post Friday. My theory, based on my experience and continuous conversations with readers, was that design has an impact on whether we leave a comment in response to what we read. I was on the right track, but my thinking was just short of where it should have taken me. I should have gone deeper. I also should have left more room for other folks to add their experiences. Details in such conversations are the the nuggets and the takeaways.

We Break Stuff Said It Better

This morning I read an article from We Break Stuff on design.

What We Break Stuff says is crucial and brilliant.

I’m not talking about large type, gradient and rounded-corner design, but the understand user needs, develop meaningful experiences design. I’m talking about the art of tailoring products to the necessities of the user, creating emotional connections and building compelling solutions.

Emotional Connection — I felt that thought, I recognized it when I read it. We Break Stuff had nailed it.

Let’s take a look at how they propose we give readers a complete and compelling experience.
[Read more…]

Phil Gerbyshak Is a B.A.D. Blogger

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Blogger A Day Call: Hello is Phil there?

By a weird turn of the calendar and of the clock, I didn’t realize it, but I was blogtipping Phil on Friday, and he was my B.A.D. Blogger call. It was 6:30a.m. when I spoke with Phil. Yes, he’s the same cheerful guy even then. If he wasn’t truly that way, it would be really annoying. Instead he’s kind of amazing. Talking to Phil is a great way to start any day. I highly recommend it.

Phil is the VP of the Help Desk Department for a company of over 2000 people and the Wisconsin President of Help Desk International. We talked about how Help Desk is internal customer service. I asked what sort of folks are drawn to that group. He said people who like computers, but want to work with people not machines.

Phil said that it’s not uncommon for people who work Help Desk to have a poor self-image, that they are often treated as the lesser half of IT. We discussed how that was a skewed perception, that the Help Desk was more of a bridge than a back yard. Phil said there’s not much support for Help Desk people about their jobs — that’s why he decided to take on the Help Desk Notes Blog for Know More Media.

I couldn’t help but point out what a helpful guy Phil is. We talked about that for a few minutes. I got on the subject of stories from childhood that seem to define us before we even know who we are.

As an example I told him a story in which I changed a question on test because I couldn’t answer it the way it was written, and though I got every answer right, my teacher took 10 points off for editing her test.

I asked Phil if there was a story from his childhood that predicted the consummate helper he grew up to become. Phil thought for a minute and then told me this one.

He said it happened when he was two years old. He was in church with his family. A little girl he didn’t know fell down. He immediately ran over to her, bent and kissed her knee to make it better.

As I said, if it wasn’t he truly that way, it would be really annoying. 🙂

B.A.D. Blogger Quote

There’s a lot of nice people out there that needed the blogosphere to connect. Isn’t it great how you can open the network and people just help?!!” — Phil Gerbyshak

Stop by Phil’s Blog, Make It Great! and say hi!

Thanks, Phil, you B.A.D. Blogger!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to be a B.A.D. Blogger see the. . . a B.A.D. Blogger? page in the sidebar.

Thanks to Week 58 SOBs

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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.

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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

Once Upon a Time: Five Things in a Story

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Oh Okay
I’m not a big believer in memes or tagging games. Most folks have plenty to do. Plenty of them want to keep their blogs focused on their blogging goal.

However, this one is short, and seems to fit almost any blog scenario — it offers more details about the blog writer. Our friend, Phil Gerbyshak passed it me, Troy Worman, Jodee Bock, Ted Demopoulos, and Kammie Kobyleski. That hero man, Troy, already has his up. AND it’s not just some list; it’s packed with his personality.

So here I sit with the gauntlet on the flat screen before me. I feel the beads of sweat beginning to form on my forehead. Where will I find five things about me that the committee of me will agree are interesting enough folks will want to read them? Perhaps if I pick five things and put them in story form. That will make the difference.

Once Upon a Time: Five Things in a Story
Once upon a time a little girl was born, and though today many people know her, details from those days aren’t well known. That’s what this story will share.

The little girl’s surname at birth is Italian. It’s long and musical. It means “star of the mountain.”

It could be that the star name ties to the branch in her family tree where she shows up. She’s the second daughter in three generations on one side of the family. On the other side, she’s part of the third generation that is made of two boys and a girl. Figure that one out.

She was a long-awaited daughter of an Italian father. So when she finally came, her proud papa rented a 40-acre farm and hired an accordion band for a party.

She was painfully shy as child, totally not a risk taker — even grass was suspect in her book. People, however, could win her over. That’s how she ended up with two childhood nicknames — Bashful and Mushy. They came at almost the same moment in time.

Her mother sent the three year old off to traditional dance training because she said the child was clumsy. The little gifl must been very clumsy because she was still training 14 years later.

The rest of the story is not nearly so interesting. . . .

Ah, to have the best life details of your story show up before you are four. I guess worse things can happen. 🙂

Now I tag Mike Sansone, Drew McLellan, Delaney Kirk, TechZ, and Ann Michael.to do the same. What are five things we don’t know about YOU?

Liz's Signature

PS. I’ve been tagged again.
Tag It Is, Then

Chris Cree Is a B.A.D. Blogger!

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Blogger A Day Call: Hello is Chris there?

The phone call came from Savannah, Georgia, and in reality, it was Chris Cree asking for me. Let’s just say that Chris Cree has my number. . . .

What fun it is to have a conversation with Chris! From the first words, I knew it would be an adventure. Even when Chris is dead on serious talking about life and it’s ups and downs, he knows the value of laughter and sharing it with other people. Chris has a way of adding a spark of life to things.

Chris and I talked about his upcoming speaking role in Savannah’s first ever Blogging Conference. I teased him that I had to read about it on is blog. He laughed with me. He said he knew of a whole group who had signed up already just for his business blogging seminar. That’s so cool! I wish we could all get together and take road trip down to see it.

That bit of conversation led us into a discussion of his new clients. He’s choosing his clients carefully and has a great outlook. “If there’s no joy in it, I might as well stay in my day job,” is how he sees it. His newest clients are raring to go — how excited they are to be breaking into blogging. I’d say that Chris’ criteria seems to be working.

Chris is looking forward to getting these clients running before he comes to Chicago next week. When he returns, he’ll be showing them the details — ins and outs of trackbacks and coding. Yet, Chris has confidence that his handholding won’t last long. He says the fire he saw in the group was sure to ignite in one individual who would take up blogging naturally.

I suspect Chris will be introducing a new member of Tuesday night comments to all of us in a few months.

Chris and I talked about the lovely morning writing time while our significant others are still asleep. He says the irony is that he gets up early because he’s not a morning person. I think that nothing could make him a morning person more quickly than having that time alone to write. We both think of that time as a bit of a luxury. It’s cool to think that he’s writing when I am.

As I write this, I still hear myself telling Chris how my morning ritual includes a moment, when I whisper, “Honey, Sleep longer, a little longer, sleep, sleep, sleep.”

B.A.D. Blogger Quote

I meet new people I would never connect with otherwise, people from all over the world. I love it. I don’t have to be someone I’m not. I like it because I can be just be.” —Chris Cree

Stop by Chris’ Blog, SuccessCREEations, and say hi!

Thanks, Chris, you B.A.D. Blogger!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to be a B.A.D. Blogger see the. . . . a B.A.D. Blogger? page in the sidebar.