Successful Blog

Internet Fame, Leaps of Faith, and the Truth from Guy

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Famous? Dirt Poor?

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In a recent conversation, a client made the following observation.

So many businesses seem confused about how to use the Internet. They appear to know their own product or service, but they don’t have clients or customers. They built it, and no one came. Has no one found the right model?

Some folks think the answer is to get famous. . . .

A strong personal brand and passion for your niche teamed is what makes a blog a powerful New Media marketing tool. That’s what will build trust, rapport, and reputation equity. Once you have those things, it’s a relatively straight forward process to turn those assets into profit. — Tribal Seduction

I’m with Tim Bourquin’s observations about that.

Twitter, blogs, podcasts and new media in general have created a wave of “famous” people – people with a “wealth” of attention and inbound links, but can’t pay their bills at the end of the month. Worse yet, some seem to think that if you do find a way to make your living successfuly, you’ve “sold out” and are no longer true to your audience. That’s a shame and it needs to change.

The “link” and “attention” may be the currency of the Internet, but until someone can show me how to pay my mortgage by linking to my bank once a month, that just doesn’t fly with me.

Internet famous isn’t “Oprah famous” . . . not even close . . . and the Internet forgets quickly.

When I asked Internet Rockstar, Guy Kawasaki, about what bloggers should know about blogging as business, he said.

The truth is that it’s very difficult to monetize a blog. I have a fairly popular one and sell less than $100,000 of advertising per year on it. It serves other purposes though for my activities as a venture capitalist, author, and speaker.

So to some extent, a blog can help with the overall branding and marketing of a company, but it’s a leap of faith.

A blog by itself isn’t a business. A product without customers won’t sell.

What do you see when you look at online businesses?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

A True Lesson in Affiliate Selling

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It’s Not a Trick

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I had to think about about this post before I wrote it. It’s a bit out of my usual niche. When I talk about business and making money, I don’t know much about affiliate selling or “make money online blogging.”

Last night I read an in-depth report that Patricia Mayo did on information products that proclaim they’ll teach you how to make money online. Near the end, she gave a link to a price-controlled viral product that offers a tool, not information, for free.

I followed the link. What I found was what she described. I thought hard about whether I should blog it. Obviously, I’ve decided to pass it on to you.

A True Lesson in Affiliate Selling

My reason for sharing this information tool is the mastery with which it is put together. I keep thinking about how, step-by-step, this offer does everything to make it easy to buy. It’s state of the art online selling — done so seamlessly that the solid principles behind it would be easy to miss. It’s not a trick. It provides a true lesson in affiliate selling. Here’s why I say that.

A great selling model has these parts: the product and the offer.

A Great Product has low development costs, yet offers high value in many ways.

  • The product has critical mass.
  • It saves time.
  • It’s compelling.
  • It makes life easier.
  • It offers something immediately actionable.
  • It fits my life.

A Great Offer is about customers, has high barrier to competition, and high chance of going viral.

  • The language is conversational.
  • The sales model is transparent.
  • You know the product before you buy.
  • It’s fast and easy to buy.
  • No one asks for your email information.
  • You keep your profits.
  • The sense of the model is easy to see.

You might find it a bit complicated to go from one hyperlink to another. However, I think you’ll also find that the offer itself lives up to what I describe. It’s an effective model. I’d love to see the figures on it.

I’ll never be the consummate affiliate marketer, I don’t have the discipline for that sort of selling. I’ll never be an engineer, a ballerina, or live on a submarine either. Still, I recognize state of the art work when I see it.

I’d be interested in whether you agree.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Be the best at what you do! Work with Liz!! SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Have a plan!! Register now!

WordCampDallas Business Panel

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An Exceptional Experience

I’m not a fan of panels as presentation format. I’ve been on them and attended them, and in both roles, I’ve found that the experience is often less than it might have been with a well-prepared speaker. Still I was honored when I was invited to join the business blogging panel at WordCampDallas 2008.

Had I know John Pozadzides before that event, I might have known this panel would be an exception.

The original panel was to be Aaron Brazell, Mark Ghosh, and Liz Strauss — that’s me. What fun when the panel started and Matt Mullenweg came up to sit down along with us in the big chairs at the Frisco City Hall.

The rest is history. John moderated the panel as well as any television host. He played devil’s advocate to get the discussion going. He was sure to connect the thoughts from one question to the next so that the discussion went well beyond the surface chat of most panel discussions.

Watch the video. Even if you don’t blog for business, seeing a panel this well done is an exceptional experience.

Thank you, John P.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

Social Media: How to Get Off the Fast Train and Get More Value

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Worth Saying Again

The Living Web

Comment on my YouTube Vid! Be part of my wiki! Join my Ning! Are you a member of these Facebook Groups?!! Do you Stumble, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, and the others?!! Where’s your account on Flickr?! I haven’t seen you Twitter in hours!!

With all of that to do, how do we do anything else — write a blog post or send an invoice, for an example?

Social Media: How to Scale Back and Get More Value

Quickly enough, we figure out we can either be overwhelmed or make some choices. Am I sounding redundant? Probably a little. (But the horse isn’t dead.) What I said yesterday is worth underscoring with the words of a friend.

In the first of a series for Freelance Switch, m. saleem suggests that we opt out of those we can.

The first thing to keep in mind is that while it may not be impossible for you to dabble in all these different mediums, it is important that you ignore most of them.

I so agree.

Here are some simple tips for how to scale back and get more value from the time you invest. It’s easier to decide if we set up criteria and eliminate what doesn’t meet those standards.

  • What’s your purpose? What’s does the site deliver? Are you looking for community, for friendship, for business or some combination of those? Pick a site that supports your purpose. Do you really need to be on both Pownce and Twitter?
  • Who do you know there? Social networks are popping up all over. Everyone can’t participate everywhere. Some I joined were gone by the time I returned there. Be a slow adopter. Look for where your friends already are.

Then decide which networks you value most and what percent of your time you want to spend on social networking tasks. We don’t try to read every book or see every movie. It’s as fruitless to try to use every social networking site.

One of my favorite sayings goes something like this.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Use the time you gain from scaling back to

  • Interact more at the sites you stay a part of.
  • Be a stronger presence and write stronger content on your own blog.
  • Spend time in other networking pursuits: visiting blogs, meeting clients, and working with people.

It’s okay to get off the social media fast train. Sometimes less really is more.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Work with Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

Pre-Networking – How Well Do You Know Your Social Networking Sites?

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A Model to Organize a Social Networking Life

The Living Web

I’ve been wondering and wandering around social networking for more than a year. The socialscape of the Internet keeps expanding. I keep finding connections to my friends in more places and getting more detail about their activities than I might have imagined. If I don’t figure out soon how to manage the information, I’m sure I’ll soon be buried by bits and bytes.

I’m on a quest to find a model to organize my social networking life. I don’t want a fancy dashboard to track things. I want personal competence and right choices made from experience. Right now, I’m looking at the writing process.

The Writing Process as a Model for Social Networking

When we write, we start a conversation. We put ourselves and our thoughts out there for readers we might or might not know. Public writing is a reaching out to connect with other people. The writing process balances structure and expression so that what we offer is clear, concise, and compelling to the people we’re trying to reach.

Social networking and writing both strive for authentic and successful relationships through communication. It seems that the writing process might serve for carving my way through the overwhelming world of social networks.

The writing process I work with looks like this.

Writing Process via Voyages in English (with permission)

The blue ovals show the steps in the process that focus on expression. The green ovals show the steps that focus on structure. Social networking is not as much about expression and structure as it is about ourselves and our connections. I’m going to modify the model to reflect that using the blue steps for ourselves and the green steps for our connections.

Pre-Networking – How Well Do You Know Your Social Networking Sites?

If you’re like me, you probably belong to many social networks already. For the sake of this exercise, choose only one. We can’t write a book, a poem, a magazine article, and a dissertation at the same time. They each have a different form, format, audience, and message. Choosing only one social network will let us focus on how to get the most from our time.

The first step in the writing process is Prewriting. So I’m calling this Pre-Networking.

  1. Pick a topic: Choose one social networking site.

    Choose a site you know something about and where you already have friends and connections. Facebook, LinkedIn, or StumbleUpon might be good choices because each has a breadth of features. If we do this deeply for one site, that site will be a benchmark for all sites we use.

  2. Research the site. See how it’s structured. Go wide and deep.
    • Notice which friends participate and which seem just to be there.
    • See how and how often people act and interact publicly and privately.
    • Look for how they share information and the kind of information most shared.
    • See how the site handles groups, events, and links to other networks.
    • Read reviews and notice who writes them.

    Record what you learn some way or post about it.

  3. Narrow your focus: Choose one audience / purpose for that site.

    Every social networking site has its strengths. Some are social. Some are about content. Some are strictly business. Decide how the site you’ve chosen best works for you. By choosing your purpose for using that site, you’ll know in an instant which features support you and which sort of communities you want to be part of there.

  4. Note what information you might want to share.
    Over the next few days, read profiles of the people in your chosen communities.

    • Freewrite or outline the ideas about yourself and your work that you want to share.
    • Make a few notes about the kind of connections that you’ll have in this venue. Will you be an open networker? Keep this to friends? Concentrate on business contacts or potential clients? What sort of information will you share and not share?

    Sound like a lot? If you think about it, it’s an investment in saving time. Having a strategy and knowing a site inside out from the start, can save hours of time spent on things that don’t serve us, . . . or even worse, save us the loss of finding out months later that the feature we wished for has been there all along.

    How well do you know the social networking sites that you’re on?

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Next: Drafting that Profile
    Work with Liz!!
    SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

What Makes a Healthy Investment?

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Understanding Return on Investment

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The hardest part of building a business is the signal to noise ratio. Every second someone offers something to tilt our sails in another direction. What keeps successful business folks unwavering and always on course?

Serious businesses are future oriented. They chose how they will grow and plan a way there. That growth is viewed through a lens of return on investment. The return keeps the path moving forward.

A healthy investment is built on three major parts:

  • a flexible, realistic vision for growth
  • an actionable plan based on tested models that mitigate unnecessary risk
  • a support system, including advisors, to keep the vision and investment on an upward track

It’s easy to throw time and money to the wind, hoping they will grow.
A healthy investment builds in strategic controls that generate a more likely and higher return.

What sort of investment have made in how you want to grow?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Expert Models, An Actionable Plan, and the Support of a Mastermind Team! Register now!