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Post Card 3: Maybe the Bridge?

December 5, 2007 by Liz

Post Cards from the Fake Liz Strauss (written by the real one)

I figure if Dan Lyons can write the fake Steve Jobs, I can do one better . . . I’m writing these post cards before I go on the UK trip with Ann Michael. Consider it a fictional account of real people we might have met, real places we might have visited, and real things that did or didn’t happen as told by the fake myself. Some things actually might have occurred. Like I said, I’m writing this before we go. –Liz

Re: Dec. 4, 2007

Hi, Everyone!
We checked in at the conference on Tuesday. Still no one would give up any information about the mysterious shark.

Meeting after meeting found us talking about Web 2.0, social media, blogging, and content. Could we get a person to budge on something about the toothy predator? They showed no interest at all.

Then it dawned on us, which is quite a feat since it was late afternoon. We looked out our hotel window and saw a location that might hold a clue.

Ann and I called John Dodds to say we’d be delayed on our way to dinner, and we were off to see the famous bridge.

tower bridge

We were told that the original famous bridge is now in the southwestern USA. So we settled for this one — which has no appearance of falling down. That was a minor disappointment, for sure.

The bigger disappointment was that no one near the bridge had any information about sharks at all.

Yours truly,

Liz's Signature

The Fake Liz Strauss

PS That night we accompanied John to a movie premiere exclusively for high-power bloggers. Our responsibilities to our industry had to take precedence over our charitable endeavors and our quest to save the world from land sharks just this once.

Filed Under: Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Liz-Strauss, Postcards-from-the-UK, ZZZ-FUN

The Mic is On: Guest Host Timothy Johnson

December 4, 2007 by Liz

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.

Naughty or Nice?

Timothy Johnson of Carpe Factum has been moonlighting as Santa’s spy this year. We’re going to be talking about good deeds and ornery pranks. Klondike Bars and Nachos available on request. Open bar will be flowing: egg nog, spiced cider, and hot chocolate all evening (well, at least until the Fat Tire runs out).

Timothy Johnson

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 links about pranks and good deeds to share!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related article
What is Tuesday Open Comment Night?

Filed Under: Blog Comments, Community, Links, SOB Business, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, blog_promotion, discussion, letting_off_steam, living-social-media, Open_Comment_Night

Open Mic 7pm Chgo Time: Guest Host Timothy Johnson

December 4, 2007 by Liz

Join Us Tonight

Naughty or Nice?

Timothy Johnson of Carpe Factum has been moonlighting as Santa’s spy this year. We’re going to be talking about good deeds and ornery pranks. Klondike Bars and Nachos available on request. Open bar will be flowing: egg nog, spiced cider, and hot chocolate all evening (well, at least until the Fat Tire runs out).

Look for the picture of Timothy in the Santa hat!

Oh, and bring links to share!

The rules are simple — be nice.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related article
What is Tuesday Open Comment Night?

Filed Under: Blog Comments, SOB Business, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, blog_promotion, discussion, letting_off_steam, living-social-media, Open_Comment_Night

Change the World: One Dollar, One Euro, One Yen at at Time

December 4, 2007 by Guest Author

Hey, Erik, How Can We Change the World?

changetheworld8

This guest post was contributed by friend, J. Erik Potter. Erik’s post grew out of a conversation at Open Comments Night. He brings thoughts of our daily lives. –ME “Liz” Strauss

One Dollar at a Time

by J. Erik Potter

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.– Sir Winston Churchill

We’ve all heard it before. It’s nothing new really. If everyone would just donate $1 to a cause, we could raise millions for any cause overnight. There have always been two big problems: there wasn’t an easy way to spread the word to these millions of people and there were no means of funneling these millions of $1 donations to a deserving cause effectively. Enter the Internet.

Much like the whole “change the world” phrase appears daunting; the whole “get a million people to donate $1” appears just as daunting. Or is it?

Through blogs and social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, word can be spread like wild fire. I just signed up for LinkedIn and have a meager 16 connections, yet through the power of the site, my message can be spread to over 77,000 other connections, a 4,800:1
ratio. If this ratio remains constant, I only need to connect directly with 208 people in order to spread my message to the magic million. 208 vs. 1,000,000 . . . that doesn’t sound as frightening. Does it?

The second part of the equation is the collection and funneling of the $1 donations. Sites like SixDegrees.org and Network for Good go a long way towards making the transaction easy. Once you’ve established an account, you can donate to one of over 30,000 charities. Their system even keeps track of your donations throughout the year for tax purposes.

The tools are here. So what’s stopping you from changing the world?
— J. Erik Potter

_______
Thanks, Erik, for showing us how.
We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Filed Under: Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Change-the-World, donations, Motivation

Post Card 2: Land Shark?

December 4, 2007 by Liz

Post Cards from the Fake Liz Strauss (written by the real one)

I figure if Dan Lyons can write the fake Steve Jobs, I can do one better . . . I’m writing these post cards before I go on the UK trip with Ann Michael. Consider it a fictional account of real people we might have met, real places we might have visited, and real things that did or didn’t happen as told by the fake myself. Some things actually might have occurred. Like I said, I’m writing this before we go. –Liz

Re: Dec. 3, 2007

Hi, Everyone!
When we got back from lunch, Sunday, two handsome young men who said their names were Harry and Will, showed us up to our rooms. They said they were in town from their travels visiting their family who stay in the “palace.” Our room was called the tower, the jewel of the place. Apparently, it has a huge history.

We asked Harry and Will if they were bloggers. They answered with a shrug and said polo was more of their game. At that point we figured we might not have a whole lot in common. They wished us well and hoped we fared better than previous guests of the room — whatever that meant.

Bags emptied. Stuff put away . . . we did our knitting and retired for the night.

London Online 2007 logos

Monday saw Ann and I off to the conference. Immediately upon arrival, we started asking why someone had chosen to put a shark on the conference website. It seems no one would reveal the mystery, which only made the question more tanatlizing.

What does a shark have to do with Online anything?

In the afternoon, Ann went off to do some sleuthing on the shark mystery. I met with Kevin Dixie to find fuel for our investigation. He suggested beer.

Yours truly,

Liz's Signature

The Fake Liz Strauss

PS We spent the evening reading old transcripts of Saturday Night Live, studying up on Land Sharks.

Filed Under: Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Liz-Strauss, Postcards-from-the-UK, ZZZ-FUN

How Do You Know When You're Ready to Move to the Next Level?

December 3, 2007 by Guest Author

This guest post was contributed by friend and SOB, Sheila Scarborough. Her advice here is flawless and based in deep expertise. –ME “Liz” Strauss

Moving To The Next Level

by Sheila Scarborough

Most entrepreneurial online “digital creatives” find that their business moves through a progression.

At first, many writers, Web designers or other content providers often take most any job as long as it pays. In the quest to amass a decent portfolio or group of clips, it’s easy to succumb to the siren offers of “revenue sharing” or “exposure” or “future growth,” rather than demanding a higher per-word or per-project rate.

Blog for $50/month and post 5-7 times a week? Sure!

Heck, blog for nothing and hope for some ad revenue? Sure!

Anything to get a toe-hold as a freelancer.

There comes a time, however, when the digital entrepreneur is ready to truly make a living in his or her area of expertise, maybe even to be able to drop the side job that actually pays most of the bills.

How do you know when you’re getting ready to move to the next level?

I’ve asked myself that question a lot lately, as I approach two years as an active freelancer (a writer and blogger, in my case.) Here are some benchmarks that I’ve stumbled across at this juncture; you may find some similarities to your own situation, or as a newbie you can look forward to someday grappling with these turning points:

1) You can’t work by the seat of your pants anymore.

Perhaps you have more than one blogging commitment, plus offline work and some clients and consulting. Life starts to implode, you meet all of your deadlines but just barely, you gain twenty pounds, the house is a wreck and upon awakening you think, “Oh, no, I have no idea what I’m blogging about today, plus there’s a client meeting that I’m not ready for this afternoon and an article deadline by close of business.”

It’s time for a schedule, because it’s time to admit that this is your job and you’ve gotta get organized. Big wall calendar, some online software, a PDA, an old-school Filofax, whatever — you’re at the stage when you must get a grip on the madness. It’s time to hire a CPA for taxes, it’s time to buy Quickbooks or other bookkeeping software to track invoices, it’s time to buff up that blog/Web site, it’s time to….move into the bigger leagues.

2) You are ready to build a specific or at least semi-defined expertise.

At first, entrepreneurs will do most anything to make a buck, even if it isn’t what they like or isn’t what they’re very good at. For a PayPal transfer or an actual check, I’d write about most any topic when I first started out, for any publication that was halfway legitimate.

At some point, however, you know which subjects really make your heart sing, which ones call forth your best work, and it’s time to begin to focus and hone your expertise and creative efforts.

For writers, this is the moment to say, “You know, I write mostly about X, Y and Z. Someday I’d like to touch on A and B, but right now, I specialize in X, Y and Z.”

This is different from what you said in the beginning, which was roughly, “I’ll write about anything.”

3) Your time and effort are worth something to you.

At first, many digital creatives are so eager to succeed, they’ll leave no stone unturned to get their business off the ground. They sign up for every e-newsletter and magazine that seems professionally helpful, they have a gazillion RSS feeds, they go to every meeting that seems like a good networking opportunity, and the answer to every problem is to throw more work hours at it.

I personally have reached the point of admitting that I can’t know everything. I can’t read it all, can’t track all the feeds, can’t answer all the emails and memes, and most importantly, I should not feel horribly guilty about it.

To do my best work, I can no longer allow myself to overload my own brain. It’s time to prune the RSS feeds, not follow everyone on Twitter who follows me, unsubscribe from emails that I don’t really read nor care about, all so that I can concentrate on the information flow that is most helpful in my work.

It’s also time to be paid what I’m worth (for a writer, that’s no less than US$0.50/word and preferably US$1.00/word, and roughly $20/post for blogging) and to cast an unfriendly gimlet eye on work that may require a lot of wheel-spinning for a monetary pittance. Some occasional work may be worth lower or even no pay, for a variety of reasons, but my going-in position has shifted to an expectation of decent pay for the work that I do, rather than pleased gratitude that anyone pays me at all.

It’s scary to realize that your baby, your business, is at a turning point, but the good news is that it’s time to make some tough career focus decisions because….you’ve done well and are ready to do even better!

–Sheila Scarborough You’ll find Sheila and her blogs at SheilaScarborough.com

Isn’t Shelia amazing? So why not tell her? How will you know when you’re at the next level? Could you be there already?

–Liz
Work with Liz!!

Related
Sheila Scarborough Is a B.A.D Blogger
Roving Sheila at SXSW 03 -09-07
Roving Sheila at SXSW 03-10-07
Roving Sheila at SXSW 03-11-07 and 03-12-07
Roving Sheila at SXSW Finale

Filed Under: Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Inside-Out Thinking, Sheila-Scarborough

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