Successful Blog

Be Effortlessly Cool in Your Red Shoes and Own Your Own Life

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The Red Shoe Tragedy

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The rules, values, and ideas we learned growing up served us in those situations and settings. Some of those rules, values and ideas are universal to humanity, but others were built from the goals people who . Yet we often keep living by those rules long after we’ve left the group, society, or culture from which they came. We still use rules from grade school peer groups to define ourselves and make decisions as adults. The values, rules, and ideas imprint deeper and last longer than the channels for which they were developed to build, serve, and protect.

In my high school, it was a social and a fashion faux pas to EVER wear red shoes. Yet my friends who went to a Chicago high school had never heard of that “law.” It was stunning and amazing that these attractive, fun, funny, intelligent kids could live so effortlessly cool wearing red shoes whenever they wanted. It took outright clear thinking on my part to choose to set aside that rule — The tragedy was that it didn’t occur to me to stop following the red shoe rules until long after high school, long after it was even a remotely useful rule.

In every group, society, and culture that we belong, we use rules, values, and ideas to identify ourselves as members of the group, align our goals and define our roles. We use those rules, values, and ideas to attract like-minded thinkers and to channel our energy in the useful directions. But no single set of rules, values and ideas carries over completely to the next universe of people.

In increments we’ve learned to look outside us — to our parents, teachers, friends, bosses — for answers for the keys to navigate those elusive rules, values, and ideas that define good behavior and outline the clearest path to our success. What meet instead is other people who have also learned to look outside themselves.

The rules, values and ideas we collect over time grow and gather. Each one we add comes from someone else. We keep adding in more to those we’ve picked up and combine them in our own ways to make our own sense. The rules, values and ideas don’t leave our minds when we move on with our lives.

Rules, values, and ideas are like people in the way that few will fit us well-enough to earn the place of a life-long friend.

Who built the rules, values, and ideas that fuel the decisions you make?
If you haven’t named the values, rules, and ideas that are your friends for life, fair chance the answer is: not you.

Every new teacher, location, clan, situation, culture, corporation, church, organization, school, or troop offers new rules, ideas, and values slightly different from the last. Yet no person, group, or association has to live one moment of your life.

Think about that.

It’s your life.
No one has walked a mile in your shoes.
No one knows what you wish in the middle of the night.

Choose your values.
Make your rules.
Have your own ideas.
Be effortlessly cool in your red shoes.
Be your own unique value proposition.
Live your own life.

Are you ready to move the useless rules out of your head and get to a new sort of productive?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

6 Tips to Consider When Choosing a Payment Processor

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The Right Tools and the Right Partners

If you want your online business to be successful, you need to choose the right tools for the job and the right partners for your situation. For example, one of the decisions you’re going to need to make early on is how you want to process payments. Unless you’re going to set up a fully-functional merchant account, that means a payment processor.

Payment processors are ideal when you’re first getting started. They give you the flexibility to accept credit card payments without jumping through the technical and financial hoops a merchant account requires. However, if you don’t choose the right payment processor, you’ll wind up with just as many technical hurdles and probably a higher cost, too.

Here are some of the most important things to consider when choosing a payment processor:

1. Start with security.

If you’re going to build a reliable online business over the long haul, you need a secure payment processor. Today’s web customers are security savvy. They’ve been bombarded for years with horror stories of online transactions gone wrong.

There are two areas in which your payment processor needs to address these security needs:

  • PCI compliance. PCI compliance is the basic level of security standards required by the credit card companies. Some payment processors implement their own PCI compliance, while others use a trusted source to do so. Either way, make sure your payment processor provides that level of security.
  • Fraud prevention. There’s another aspect to payment processing security you need to have. Fraud prevention methods – the two most common being Address Verification System (AVS) and CVV (Card Verification Value) – protect both you and the consumer. These are simply ways to make sure that the person using the card really is who they claim to be.

Poor security on the part of your payment processor means more unhappy customers and more charge-backs.

2. Find payment processors that are compatible with your existing system.

Payment processor choice almost always comes at a later stage of development than shopping cart choice. What this means is that you’re limited from the get-go to choosing a payment processor who offers compatible service with your shopping cart.

While payment processor support isn’t usually a consideration when choosing your shopping cart software, it probably should be. Your choice of payment processor directly affects your bottom line. While it shouldn’t be the sole determining factor in cart choice, it should be in the mix.

3. Look at all of the fees.

Different payment processors charge different fees. It’s easy to get caught up in the per-transaction fee, but you need to look at the big picture. A company with a low set-up fee might seem ideal, but after a couple thousand transactions you’re going to have paid way too much in transaction fees.

Try to build a reasonable sales model, and plug in all of the associated costs of each payment processor over the first six months you’re in business in order to get an accurate comparison.

4. Understand support for multiple cards and currencies.

If the vast majority of your website customers are going to be located in the U.S., you don’t need to worry too much about multi-currency support. On the other hand, if you’re promoting a global product or service, you don’t want currency to be a barrier to entry for your customers. Some payment processors are only able to accept U.S. payments, so find out ahead of time what restrictions exist.

The same holds true for different types of credit cards. If you’re dealing in a high-end product or service, you want to make sure that your processor can handle American Express and probably Discover, as well as MasterCard and Visa.

5. Identify special billing needs.

Depending on your business model, you might have some special billing needs. For example, you might be offering a subscription-based service, and so you’ll need to make sure that your payment processor supports Automated Recurring Billing (ARB).
Alternatively, you might want or need the ability to process customer transactions manually via a virtual terminal. This is useful, for example, if you take telephone orders.

6. Don’t get hung up on pay out details.

Sometimes, you’re anxious to get things up and running and get revenue flowing in. More than one online business has rushed into a contract with an online payment processor because they believed they’d get paid quicker.

Over the long haul, this shouldn’t be a concern. Don’t choose a payment processor just because they make weekly (as opposed to monthly) payouts. If your business is running that close to the edge in terms of cash flow, find other ways to keep things moving, such as increasing investment capital.

Your online business is only as strong as the tools you use. Choose a payment processor that creates a smooth, secure transaction for your customers, opens up your products or services to the largest possible market, and lets you maximize profits.

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Image Credit: Some rights reserved by 2Tales
Author’s Bio:
Sara Schoonover is Vice President of Ticket Kick , a California company that helps drivers get red light tickets and other traffic tickets dismissed by helping drivers through the trial by written declaration process.

Thank you, Sara!

Love learning this stuff!

Be irresistible!
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Every moment is January 1.

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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It’s the end of the first week of January. Did you already start slipping on some of those resolutions? Well quit beating yourself up, you’re not alone. The mystical pull of January 1 gets us every year. We take deep breaths, ponder the future, and muster up the guts to make some decisions about our lives and our businesses. And then….life happens.

Here’s the most important trick: Every morning is January 1. Every moment is January 1. You can make a decision right this very second to take action on one of your primary goals. In fact, stop reading this right now and go do one thing that will get you closer. Send that email, follow up with that customer, finish that report, call your grandmother. We’ll wait.

……….if you’re back, then you did your one action, right? If you didn’t, go away and do it now!

…and…see how easy that was? Now keep the momentum going by allowing yourself to have space in the day (or evening) to proactively plan the next day, week, month, in increments you can handle. If you want to wake up on December 31, 2012, having accomplished something big, then you need to chip away at it all year long. And you need to have periodic check-ins with yourself so that you can course-correct if necessary.

I’ll share my check-in secret sauce. It’s a hot pink Moleskine that goes everywhere with me. In the front are the big goals for the year, and then broken-down goals for each month that will draw me closer and closer throughout the year. There is no one-size-fits-all method, but the key is to avoid drifting.

Now go and take the second step. And write down what the third, fourth, and fifth steps will look like.

Feel free to brag about your audacious action in the comments. We’ll do this together.

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Social Business: Past, Present, Predicting Beyond 2012

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PAST: A Brief History of Social Media

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Social Media Marketing budgets are on the rise.
In 2008, I had a conversation at BlogWorldExpo with Lorelle VanFossen aka @LorelleonWP about the future of social media adoption by corporations. The basis for the conversation was my experience with the Whole Language movement — a holistic approach to interaction around information that had moved through the field of education.

The prediction I was drawing focused on four key stages that occur when a social meme moves from “first believers” to the mainstream.

Stage 1: The Community Culture and Vision Begins. Individuals come to the community through curiosity and contact with a believer. They are like-minded thinkers who see the vision, adopt the culture, join the community — they want to wear the t-shirt. They learn tools with deep interest in how and why the tools work to support the vision of the community. They learn the process, etiquette, rituals, and traditions with respect for the people who teach them as they align their goals and values and become part of the vision.

As the follower population grows, the meme moves outward from the “first believers” like rings around a stone dropped in the water.

Stage 2: Quiet Revolution Moves Outward. The ideas move out like the rings from a rock dropped into water. Spreading wider, but with less power. The new believers share their passion faster than they can learn the depths of the vision. They tell their friends how cool it is to be part of something important. Each generation further from the center gets less depth of the original vision, culture, and community. They get the vocabulary, the tools, the rules, but not the reasoning.

Stage 3: A Demographic Emerges. A critical point occurs at which the vision, culture, and community gathers a large enough following that it has become an identifiable demographic. That’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s what built great religions, great art movements, great style in architecture and fashion. It’s also what brought us Muzak, bad television, and spam.

Stage 4: Business Objectives Disrupt the Community Culture. Business establishes a reason to participate. But business comes as an entity not as individuals. They have their own vision, culture, and community. They don’t want to wear the t-shirt; they want to market to the people who do. They pick up the tools and visit the venues without changing their thinking. They will also bring organization and money. All of these will change and affect the original culture.

What dies or survives?

Present: Death and Rebirth

In her book, RenGen, Renaissance Generation, the Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business, Patricia Martin demonstrates how throughout history every rebirth of a culture is preceded by a death — the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, the kind of changes we face today.

In a world poisoned by a century of progress at any price, it is easy to look around and believe we are in a free fall. But civilizations have cycles. The twilight moment right before one civilization ends and another emerges is often driven by cultural clashes, religious wars, polarizing viewpoints and overreaching rulers. Look around you. What you see marks the end of the end ? but also the beginning of the beginning. — RenGen

Death and rebirth? Yes.
In 2007 – 2011, when the community culture met and mixed with the corporation, neither came away unchanged.

In 3 short years, from a mildly polarized blogosphere of hobby bloggers and business bloggers emerged a group that became the social businesss-phere. An entrepreneurial and freelance culture began testing new business models where there were none. Three sorts showed up: blogging gold rushers, business pioneers, and those who watched. The evolution raced and the learning curve raised as the floor fell out under the economy. Business pioneers started playing for keeps.

At a slower, but still noticeable pace, the corporations realized the loss of their business models. Print publishing took it especially hard, responding in ways that looked a lot like Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s Five Stages of Grief — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Print publishing’s use of the term “citizen journalist” is good example. It changed from at first patronizing,, to an attempt to control and spin things, followed by public conversation by old media on how they should respond to new media, on to writing negative comments on blogs using false names, until finally they saw their advertising profits flowing out the door like so much ink on the pressroom floor — which led to sales of properties, layoffs, and new social media teams playing catch up.

So what’s working and what will be next?

The Future in a One Sentence Test

Leaders want to build something they can’t build alone.

Social media doesn’t grow a business. Strategy and service does. Great and growing companies know what business they’re in and how to take care of the people who help their business grow. Facts are that … social tools are important in the way that computers, telephones, and pencils are, but business grows the way it always did.

The companies who can’t see their customers lose my business.
The companies who use social tools, but lose at service and partnership, might count me as a friend, but I don’t buy from them.
The companies that deliver great service are growing and I love buying from them whether they’re on Twitter or not.

I say this often. I’ll say it again …

In any sentence that uses the term “social media, you should be able take out that term and replace it with “telephone,” and the sentence should still make sense.

If you want to predict where social media implementation is going in the next two years, do the sentence test. After all, there was a time once, when cutting edge businesses had only one person who had a telephone. Here’s a brief discription about the telephone as a disruptive business tool.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
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Are You Seeing the Things that Make a Difference to Your Business and Your Life?

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1200x1200--GeniusShared ReadWhere Do You Focus Your Vision?


Take a 60-second look at this lights in this photo then try not to look back again as you answer the questions that follow it.

Now look at this while space for a while as you scroll down to a few questions about what you saw.

Where do you focus your vision? What’s important in your business and your life?

Are You Seeing the Things that Make a Difference to Your Business and Your Life?

Everyday we interact with a world of information that has potential for adding something to our our business, our brand, and our life. But the ways our brains work, the way we jealously guard our time time, we as easily overlook what we’re seeing as finding the fuel and the data that might …

  • to make our work and our lives easier … It’s not that we’re not thoughtful enough to find easier ways. It’s that we’ve forgotten to take time to reflect and think while we keep up our breakneck pace, racing through time to beat a clock that would work for us if took the time to look.
  • make our work and our lives simpler … It’s not that we’re in love with the complicate and difficult. It’s that we’ve come to believe that balance is adding more and more things to juggle without stopping to sort which really deserve our time.
  • make our work and our lives more meaningful and inspired … It’s not that we’re without mission or purpose. It’s that we’ve let our heads get disconnected from our hearts, setting that inspiration at a lower priority, not letting our aspirations fuel our businesses and our lives.

And those those thoughts, those beliefs change our world by changing what we see and how we respond it.

So answer me this, when you saw photo above, did you see …

  • the three lights up front that look like stars and the fourth that did not?
  • the light in the window of the building next door?
  • the trees along the harbor?
  • the reflections in the water?
  • the way the water changes color?
  • the yellow in the sky?
  • the red light under the clouds on the horizon?

Think for a minute about what you saw and what you missed. Were looking with your heart or with your head? Or did you hardly even look?

I started taking photos of the harbor so that I would remember to look. After months of pictures what I’ve found is that the harbor never looks exactly the same twice. The light and color from the sky add mood and flavor. They communicate about the weather that is and the weather is coming. They communicate about my connection to it. And that communication has unlimited power to open my eyes, open my mind, open my heart to what inspires me to what’s important in my business and my life.

Did you believe that you didn’t have time to really look? It’s not just the beautiful harbor. It’s the clouds and colors in the sky that change one day to the next.

It’s not just the “what” of the bar graph. It’s the people behind it that tell you the “why.”
It’s in the looking that we find the nuance, the detail, and the color that inform a business, a brand, and a life. Understand those and your work and your life will become easier, simpler, and more meaningful.

Are you seeing the things that make a difference to your business and your life?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Empower Yourself!

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by LaRae Quy

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It’s an Inside Job

Someone needs to tell the political candidates that personal empowerment is not about power over others. Rather, it is understanding that you are in charge of your own life.

People who are personally empowered know that happiness is an inside job. They don’t wait for someone else to make them happy and they can take care of their own needs for affection.

You Are Responsible For Your Own Actions

In other words, there is no finger pointing and blaming others for your lack of performance. You are willing to take responsibility for your actions. OK, so now it’s very obvious that most political candidates have no personal empowerment—they are just power hungry.

I make this distinction between power and personal empowerment because they are two very different things and people often assume that to be empowered is to be powerful.

Wrong.

Empowerment is a process where you do something, reflect on your actions, assess whether you made the right choice—and why—and continue on. This progression is a very important piece of the puzzle because personal empowerment acknowledges complete responsibility for self and the choices that are made. It is strong enough to look at itself and say, “Badly done, Emma. Badly done,” and then move on, taking with it lessons learned from the experience.

Personal empowerment is not for wimps. It takes a strong character to look at oneself with honesty and decide what to keep and what to throw out.

Where To Begin?

Life unfolds in phases. As we look back over time, we can see when we felt empowered and when we did not. Each time period has it’s own characteristics.

We all spent time as students when our lives revolved around classes, teachers, and other students. The academic calendar was central to all of our planning. Life as a student is a unique time.

Similarly, we are always in different phases of life as we mature and circumstances change. Life is a series of interconnecting phases. So when we stop to take that honest look at ourselves, we will be empowered only to the degree to which we understand what phase of life we’re in.

Our life is bigger than a single moment. The things that we cherish, the goals that motivate us, and the issues we wrestle with are connected to the period in which we currently find ourselves.

We feel lack of personal empowerment when we are unable to make choices that are always in our own best interest. Indeed, it is impossible to feel empowered if we cannot identify the issues that hold us back. We feel out of control when we try to live up to the expectations of others. We give power over our life to others when we allow them to define success or achievement.

But when we let others generate ideas and solutions for our issues, we are no longer taking the lead.

We become the ultimate follower when we are no longer the leader of our own life.

Dig Deeper Into the Now

As an FBI counterintelligence agent, the first phase of a recruitment operation was to identify the target. This meant collecting as much information as possible about the target’s past and current situation, as well as aspirations for the future. Every investigation starts with understanding the nature and character of the NOW phase.

Here is a list of typical questions used in FBI recruitment operations to help agents get clarity about the issues and specific needs of the person we’re investigating. These same questions may also help you define the phase of life you are now living in. It is impossible to attain personal empowerment without understanding the nature and character of your current phase of life:

  1. When did this current phase begin? Identify the boundary that separates this phase from previous phases. The boundary may be a transition (a new job, relationship, or a new city), an event (marriage, divorce, death, children), a discovery, or a decision (a different career or going back to school).
  2. Who are the key people in your life during this period? What role does each play? Which relationships are satisfying? Disappointing? Why?
  3. What events characterize this phase? They may be personal or professional events.
  4. What are the major opportunities and responsibilities that characterize this phase? How do you spend your time? What interests you most? Least? What is most creative about your life during this phase? Most demanding?
  5. What characterizes your inner state during this phase? How would you describe your spirituality? Reflections? Feelings? Do you journal?
  6. What is your physical state during this phase? Are you healthy? What are your health challenges?

To attain personal empowerment, it’s important to understand the key issues in your life and decisions you are being asked to make during this phase.

What kinds of thoughts, impressions, experiences, etc. came to you during this exercise? What are some key insights in this phase of your life? How do these empower you?

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Author’s Bio:

Larae Quy

LaRae Quy was an FBI agent, both a counterintelligence and undercover agent, for 25 years. She exposed foreign spies and recruited them to work for the U.S. Government. Now she explores the unknown and discovers the hidden truth via her blog Your Best Adventure. You can find her on Twitter as @LaRaeQuy

Thanks, Larae!

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Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!