Successful Blog

An Interview with Grant Griffiths

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Blogger and sobcon talk radio show | Grant Griffiths – Professional Blogger

Who is Grant Griffiths

In February of 2005 my first blog was born. This blog was used to market and promote my family law practice. Soon blogging became my only form of written advertising because of its reach and effectiveness. What I also discovered is blogging is one of the most powerful marketing tools available for the small business home business and professional service firm. In fact I am so sold on the effectiveness of blogging it is the reason I am cofounder of G2WebMedia.

I also now publish this blog and another blog who’s focus is on providing information to those who work from a home office called Home Office Warrior.

Prior to starting my first blog much time was spent researching what the heck blogging really was. There were a few blogs out there about blogging. Many of them focused on monetizing a blog with ads and payforlinks. My idea was different How to use a blog to promote professional service firms.

Why I started Blog for Profit

The primary reason I started Blog for Profit was to teach you how to use your blog as an attraction tool to generate profit. How By having it would serve as a powerful promotion and marketing tool for your business or firm. That’s why you won’t see us normally suggest ways to put ads or “text link ads” on your blog. Our focus remains on blogging as a communication tool which you can use to build a relationship with your target audience turn them into regular readers and then into lifelong consumers of your goods or services.

BlogTalkRadio is the leading social radio network with thousands of shows from around the world.

The Mic Is On: We're Talking about Procrastination

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It’s Like Open Mic Only Different

The Mic Is On

Here’s how it works.

It’s like any rambling conversation. Don’t try to read it all. Jump in whenever you get here. Just go to the end and start talking. EVERYONE is WELCOME.
The rules are simple — be nice.

There are always first timers and new things to talk about. It’s sort of half “Cheers” part “Friends” and part video game. You don’t know how much fun it is until you try it.

I Can Hear the Late Jokes Already

And, whatever else comes up, including THE EVER POPULAR, Basil the code-writing donkey . . . and flamenco dancing (because we always get off topic, anyway.)

Oh, and bring example links.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
image: sxc.hu
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Aren’t We in the Idea Business?

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I have been reading the Age of Conversation 2 ( a book of essays on Social Media, but you know that, site | book) and it really gets me thinking. For example, we have nuggets of inspiration like this:
Efrain Mendicuti – Google Mexico

“We have to realize that most of the jobs that will be here in ten years haven’t been invented. So it’s hard to set up a curriculum for these new kind of creatives.”

These jobs that are yet to be created are in the realm of the knowledge worker, the creators of ideas that will transform the workplace.

Where should we look for new ideas?

The blogosphere is full of these creative types, and there is the very real possibility that one of the remarkable people that comes to SOBCon this year just may create something that no one has ever seen before. But we are not learning these skills in college, or in high school. We are learning them from each other as we reach out across teh interwebs and talk. We talk to our friends and neighbors, whether they are around the corner or in faraway countries.

This new medium has transformed the way that people talk to each other, work and live together, create businesses and communities. Everything is different today, and it will change again tomorrow. Writing for the Web – DIY SEO training course

Can we share something here?

All this talk about conversations, and the amazing things that we see on places like Twitter and Flickr everyday gives me a great deal of confidence in our future. So here are some questions for sharing:

  • Where do you get your ideas?
  • What gets your creative juices flowing?
  • Who inspires you to be better today than you were yesterday?

Please leave a Comment, and share your answers.

It's So Easy to Get Stuck Repeating What We Already Know

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A Partnered Post by Heather Rast and Liz Strauss

Knowing What We Don’t Know

He was a young man, Stephen, straight from MBA school. In every meeting he’d apply what he’d learned from this book or from that professor. He’d forget that his audience was 7 or 8 people who’d each been in business since before he knew what business was.

He could analyze, organize, spreadsheet, posit, and problem solve, but mostly we thought of him as “school smart and business naive.” Oh yeah, he knew plenty that we didn’t. Only, some days he didn’t know what he didn’t know … and he forgot that we knew things too.

I Called Him My Irritating Little Brother

I liked him, even when he had his head stick in invisible books. On Fridays he’d “dress down” to business casual, even though the rest of us wore jeans all week — and he’d get all self-conscious when he did. That’s when I thought of him my Irritating Little Brother. The affection helped on occasions like this one.

In one meeting, Stephen proposed a fairly classic plan of action. I gently tried to point out a possible hole in his approach to our situation.

“That’s inconsequential,” he said, brushing my thoughts aside with a musical word.
I smiled and replied, “Thank you!” with overdone joy and enthusiasm.
He stopped, looked at me, and replied, “What?”
Bigger smile. “Inconsequential. I haven’t had that word tossed my way for the longest time.”
He was stunned. Then he smiled back and listened. He made had room for experience that didn’t come from school.

Breaking Out of the Repeating Conversation

Stephen wasn’t necessarily arrogant or even intentionally narrow-minded. But he hadn’t considered an approach other than his own — which is to say, a linear, traditional approach. And he hadn’t considered his audience — people with real-world, complex business problems that might not be solved with an academically choreographed, sequenced formula.

What Stephen needed was to channel his learnings and solicit tested techniques and ideas from his colleagues. Together, they could discuss, debate, and collaborate solutions, all the while learning valuable lessons from one another.

Stephen would better understand that learning and solutions needn’t be centered around heavily vetted models and dogma. And that people need to be engaged if you hope to be able to lead and guide them. The audience could learn practical ideas from one another, while gaining an appreciation for how traditional texts could be applied to real situations.

In the world of the digital gap, there’s two sides to this argument.

Some folks are Business Smart, but don’t value the Virtual Conversation.
Some folks are so Social Media Smart that we’ve lost our Concrete footing.
It’s easy to get stuck repeating what we already know.

Hopefully the folks who listen say, “Thank you” and share what they know anyway.

Got some words of wisdom for breaking out of a repeating conversation?

Heather Rast writes at Insights&Ingenuity about the delicate balance between achievement and growth.

and me well, you already know.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

The Traffic Game, Auditioning Ants, and How Communities Grow

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A True Story Can Be a Parable

Our neighborhood was the greatest space. It offered football-field-sized back yard, a huge (never filled) lot great for running down. It rolled all the way to the tree lined river bank. The river behind was an inlet, the dead end of a branching off. The our front streets were clean and wide without much traffic. The houses were occupied by quiet people with big kids who had already used what was around each of them every day. Now they went on dates and went to college.

The grown ups probably always had been too busy working to get to know each other.

But by the time I came along. the neighborhood wasn’t much more than a huge space that people came to eat and sleep.

His name was Craig. I met him when he ran across the street the day that he moved in. He was wiry, smiling, energy. I was long, curious, sincerity. He was a smarter Charlie Brown. I was a nicer Lucy.

For a little guy, his voice was deep and slurry. I told my mom his name was “Ray.” He was 4. I was 5.

The big kids totally ignored us. But as it was we didn’t have time to find things boring.
We called it “going exploring.” We rolled down hills, walked river banks, climbed rocks, learned to skip a stone the hard way. We laid back under trees and talked about the shapes the leaves would make. We heard the lectures about grass stains.

We watched my younger, older brother cut the huge backyard in the shape of baseball diamond. I spent my birthday money knowing we’d play with what I brought home. We got generous (and in trouble) picking Rose’s peonies for our mothers. We didn’t know weren’t supposed to. Still Rose and Elmer still gave us pinwheel cookies when we cut through their yard.

And we got a little cranky, our moms would send us outside with two lawn chairs, some KoolAid, our lunch, and tell us to play the Traffic Game. We might have seen about 10 cars an hour.

The rules to the Traffic Game were simple …

  • Choose a color. (Craig always choose blue or red — his favorite colors. I picked the best seller.)
  • Count the cars of that color that drive by.
  • The winner was the first to get to 21. It took a while.

We’d always start, but we never knew who won the game — it’s hard to have fun when you’re playing a game someone else made up..

We would do so many other fun things. We’d start with conversation — like the grownups had the kitchen table. That was while we got our lunch out of the way. We made up sci-fi stories about the people in the cars. We wondered how my school had letter grades when his school didn’t have report cards?

When lunch was officially over, we would use Craig’s magnifying glass to burn holes in the paper towel that had wrapped our sandwiches.

One day, we held auditions for a circus act. We held that magnifying glass to light a path for each fat black ant on the sidewalk — you might note fat black ants don’t have the right discipline to be in a circus.

In the middle of this serious auditioning, another kid ran up with a butterscotch cocker spaniel at his heels. He wanted to know what we were doing.

He said his name was Scotty. He lived in the house next door to Craig and his birthday was two days and two years after mine. We started showing him around. A few months later another family moved in, the three of us showed them the best way to attack the sledding hill and where to sit when you put your ice skates on by the river.

And in the spring, the six McGuire girls came — in time to see yard where the Tulip lady has tulips of every color and a windmill. It was a bike ride so close their parents wouldn’t mind. We learned the Dutch words for “Will you put on those wooden shoes by the door?”

By the time that Craig was 7 and I was 8, we had a community. We put on the best carnivals. Our parents paid to attend them. Our big brothers brought their big friends, including the girls — the ones they liked a lot. By then we’d sit our moms in chairs like this to watch the plays that we put on.

By the next summer the whole neighborhood was watching fireworks on lawn chairs and blankets in the huge backyard down by the river. Craig and I were trying to figure out who might star in our next community show.

That’s how small communities grow.

How does this align your ideas of how communities are and how they grow?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!