Successful Blog

Showcasing the Professional You Are to Land that Job

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Jobseeker, Freelancer, or Entrepreneur

We all need meaningful work to pay the bills and feel good about who we are.

In the past six months, I’ve had the experience of interviewing candidates for positions with my conference and a new roles for a company that’s starting up. What I’m finding explains a lot. Most of us don’t know how to talk about ourselves, our personal vision, and our successes. Few of us have a real strategy..

To bring it down to it’s most basic form, most people only think they are actively looking for work. They are waiting to be hired. That makes their role to react to a “job offer.” In hopes of getting more they open their net broad and wide, and then wider, and wider to take more and more potential customers in.

Unfortunately, most people who are hiring aren’t looking for anyone who do anything. We want someone unique who’s passionate about working for us.

Showcase the Professional You Are to Land that Job

We start by defining you and who you love to serve — the ideal employer, client, customer. I’ll ask questions that get to the heart of who you are — your successes and your passions. It won’t take long — maybe an hour. We’ll pull out the relationships and patterns to define what talk most about and where you excel. We’ll discuss the kind of problems you enjoy solving and identify the passion at the heart of your business.

The Complete Story

We’ll get to a business profile of you that includes
1. What your professional strengths are and what you want to be known for.

  • What problem do you solve?
  • What is your unique value?

2. What you can promise and will deliver — this usually is bringing people or customers to the table, getting people to buy, act, move,

3. The a partnership you offer — that you hear them and will be there, that you can think as they think, what you bring to any work situation that no other person will, what work situations you thrive in and what sort of people you want to work with.

4. A “do” line — the brief answer to “What do you do? With a tagline that describes you that’s easy to remember because it expresses the authentic you.

We’re all attracted to people who know who they are and where they’re going. We know people like that get things done and moving. They have time for ideas and action.

Don’t fit yourself into a job, find the job that fits you.

Yes, you can afford this. It’s a special offer for 15 readers of my blog. Email me lizsun2@gmail.com . . . It’s fun. Really. It’s what I’m good at. If you like that, we can keep going and make a longer plan for your business.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Open Mic 7pm Chgo Time: Glenda Watson Hyatt Will Be Talking About Accessibility

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Join Us Tonight

JOIN US TONIGHT AT 7PM

With Guest Host Glenda Watson Hyatt


Watch Glenda’s Video From SOBCon09

How POUR Is Your Blog?

Blogs need to be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.

Is yours? Find out tonight.

Join us tonight and bring links and your questions to add to the discussion.

The rules are simple — be nice.

Do be nice. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Great Headlines on the Web Always Win … Except When They Don't

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how to blog series

Got Traffic? Want Traffic?
Why Do the Clickers Come?

If you’ve been studying How to Get Literally Everyone’s Attention on the Internet, you probably know that headlines count.

An attention-grabbing headline is everything. 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.

A great headline will get traffic and attention, but what sticks? What turns a click into a subscriber? Strong businesses are built on strong relationships. What transforms a clicker into someone who hangs around?

It starts with with the reason the clickers came. People come to a website for information, entertainment, and communication / engagement. When they click through on that headline they’re looking for one or more of those three.

Our greatest achievement in building a Web site is helping a person achieve his or her goal. During our research our biggest discovery proved to be that navigation and content work best when they are wed tightly together. “It seems that you can t really separate content and navigation” says Jarod Spool, “without losing something important in the process.” How to make your Web site fast and usable

If folks who click find something that delivers on that promise in that headline they stay and possibly return. If not, they feel thwarted and leave. 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 what your headline promises.
  2. Deliver it in short paragraphs using subheads surrounded by lots of white space so that people have room to think and breathe.
  3. Deliver it without making folks jump over ads or through hoops to get to the prize that the headline promises.
  4. Deliver it by recognizing the people who take time to comment.
  5. Deliver it by making it easy for folks to stay..

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

It’s not the click that doesn’t come that’s a loss. It’s the click that comes to find that we’re not what we suggested we would be. A great headline followed by something less doesn’t win. It doesn’t even finish.

Great headline, lame blog post — you’ve been there. What’s your response when you end up on one of those?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Australian Coffee and Australian Wine … What Dream Have You Left Waiting?

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Every week Suzie and Des send the most amazing thoughts and photographs from the beaches of OZ. The small missives they send may be just slightly more meaningful because of a dream I carry to return to the beaches I walked there 8 years ago.

Time for a 7-year-old Dream Now?

I started writing this in 2005. This dream was four years old then. I still think about it more often than I might. It waits until more important things hit zero balance. That could take a few more minutes … Usually I don’t talk about it.

I don’t need vacations. At least I don’t lack for places to visit. I don’t spend lots of time thinking about things that aren’t on the schedule to be happening yet. But maybe it’s time that I start doing so.

If I did, I’d be planning to go to Australia. I’d see friends that I miss. We’d reminisce of times passed. We’d plan new times to come. We’d drink Australian coffee and have Australian wine.

I’d choose the coffee shop across the street from Bondi Beach — a table by the window where I could watch the people. I’d have my laptop on the table and fine Australian coffee with those narrow packs of sugar. What a writer I would feel like. What a writer I would be.

My friends would visit me there.

We would drink Australian coffee. I do like Australian coffee.

We’d road trip up the cliff with Australian wine and cheese, to watch the boats in the harbor and talk of Captain Cook — new memories to hold me over until the next time.

And we would drink Australian wine. I do like Australian wine.

A night walk by the Sydney Harbor bridge. I can’t resist the lights on the water. I’d be thinking wishes that could hug a moment into stillness.

Mostly, though I’d be with my Australian friends. The ones I knew before I came online and the ones that I’ve met since. It’s not right always hoping folks will come to me.

Five tiny diamond chips like tiny stars are mine. Two yellow, two pink, one white. They hold a promise I’ll return to see mu Australian friends. Five stars inside a tiny boomerang. I wear it on a chain since before my last visit in 2001.

I don’t need vacations. I need safe harbor with my friends.

Maybe it’s time I dust off that dream and find good reason to be tasting some Australian coffee and Australia wine.

What dream have you to left waiting? How will you know when it’s time?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Thanks to Week 186 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

SOB Business Cafe 05-15-09

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

The Buzz Bin
Dale Carnegie’s principles have stood the test of time because they are about fostering better relations amongst people. And the classic mistake with social media is to treat it like a mass communications vehicle, when it’s a conversational form that builds relationships. Social media is about a larger community and its concerns, as opposed to a litany of messages. There is no better set of guidelines for this then “Friends.”

A VC
The WSJ gave its journalists some rules about conduct in social media this week according to Editor and Publisher.

Most of them are good common sense rules for everyone using social media. But there are several that I think are wrong and should be rethought. Here are four “rules” that I think should be reconsidered and why.

Mashable
But there’s so much info and chatter coming in through social media that it can overwhelm you, eat up your time, and ruin your productivity.

Simplifying will help you stay in touch, and continue to participate in the conversation, without losing sight of your mission and the important work you need to get done.

Social Media Explorer
Last week, David and I got the opportunity to hear Geno Church of Brains on Fire speak about word of mouth marketing and social media, courtesy the Louisville AMA and Social Media Club Louisville. He ended the presentation with the story of the role social media played in a pivotal, scary event in his own life as a parent. It got the gears turning in my head.

Marketing Pilgrim
Fizzle in 2009
If you’ve not stopped popping champagne since we published Forrester’s predictions for social media marketing, you might need the Alka-Seltzer after you see eMarketer’s contrary estimates.

Related ala carte selections include

Chrisg
All around the world people are very excited about Social Media Success Summit 2009 — the first major online event dedicated to helping you successfully market your business with sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. More than 500 people have already registered. Now you have the exclusive chance to win two valuable seats to the event for no cost!

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