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Green Blogging…Is It Possible?

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By Jael Strong

It’s hip! It’s socially responsible! It’s green! Everybody, every company, seems to be going green, making choices and taking stands so as to limit their negative impact on the environment. I heard a piece on National Public Radio about businesses becoming more environmentally aware and I started to think: Is it possible for bloggers to go green?

I immediately felt silly for asking the question. After all, it seems to me that blogging by nature is a green activity. So many bloggers write from home. We can’t really cut back on our commute. We do our work on the computer, so paper waste isn’t an issue. Aside from the choices that all of us can make, choosing locally grown foods, avoiding gas guzzlers, recycling, we don’t seem to be left with environmental options specific to blogging.

For those who really want to decrease their environmental impact, that answer might not be sufficient. Isn’t there something that bloggers can do to go green? I did actually come up with three ways: decrease paper use, blog at night and promote environmentally friendly activities on their blog.

We already established that bloggers don’t use a ton of paper, especially in comparison with other fields, but there are places that could take a cut back. For example, if you are a note taker, which I am, you could choose an alternative to the old pen and paper. A voice recorder may be a way to keep track of burgeoning ideas or a PDA might be a good fit. Those tiny notebooks and sticky notes could add up over time if that is your currently preferred avenue for note taking.

Another way to cut back on paper use is to not insist on printing a hard copy of all of your writing. Now, I know that most of you do not print hard copies every time you post, but I also know for a fact that someone used to be very attached to having a paper version for all of her writing (me, of course). This was a bad idea, especially as my writing became more prolific. I also know that some are very paranoid that they will need hard copies of everything when all of the computers in the world decide to crash. I think if that day ever comes, our writing might not be foremost in our minds. So, cut back on hard copies equals less harm to the environment.

Now on to blogging at night. Well, we put less strain on the energy supply if we use electricity at night, so I thought we could start doing our writing at night. Besides, running electricity during non-peak hours is often better for our budgets. Okay, I know this is a stretch, but I was brainstorming! Plenty of us already do our writing at night anyhow, but it’s a thought.

And finally, can more writers promote going green on their blogs? If everybody did this all of the time, every blog would become a platform for ecological change. That sounds like a bad idea to me, but if the opportunity presents itself I suppose there is nothing wrong with plugging good citizenship.

It all feels like a stretch to me. The piece that I heard on the radio was inspiring; I really wanted to employ some great green practices, but the more I think about, it just doesn’t seem like there’s much a blogger can do. Do you have any thoughts on how a blogger can lessen their environmental impact?

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Jael Strong writes for TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility.  She has written both fiction and non-fiction pieces for print and online publications.  She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas .

Thanks, Jael

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

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Be Irresistible: 10 Steps to Consistently Develop Highly Viral, High ROI Products

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How Good, Great, and Elegant Is a Product that No One Uses?

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Yesterday while I was talking with @MichaelPort about solid.ly the software system he’s developing to support his Book Yourself Solid System. He told me about a conversation he had with venture capitalist who asked him, “What makes you think you can move from writing books into developing software?” I was taken by the perfectness of his answer. It was something like …

“I’m hiring the best people to do the development, but I know and care about the people who will be using it.”

That lead us into a discussion of what a product developers job is.

I spent almost 3 decades developing products for teachers — books, CD-Roms, websites, videos, audios, and others. During that time, I learned a lot about how products were made — what works, what doesn’t, and that the great idea that hasn’t made it to the market probably isn’t there NOT because someone hasn’t already thought of it, but because

  • it’s too expensive,
  • too labor intensive — to build or to use
  • or no one really wants it.

If I can’t afford it, don’t have time to use it, or don’t want it, it doesn’t matter how elegant, great, clever, cutting-edge, award-winning or beautifully you produce it.

10 Steps to Consistently Develop Highly Viral, High ROI Products

But the most crucial thing I learned as product person was that no matter how much I thought about my products, I had to think about my customers more. My role wasn’t to produce great products, but to produce great products people wanted to buy and use. Those are the products that folks buy again and tell their friends about. Here’s the secret I discovered …

It’s not my brilliance that makes a product irresistible. It’s not the awards the product might win that makes a products go viral and gain loyal long-term fans. It’s understanding my role as the product person is to know, love, and serve the customer.

Most of my intelligent customers could do or learn to do what I do.
But if they did what I do, they wouldn’t have time to do what they do.
My job is to make the customer’s life easier, faster, more meaningful and, if possible, more fun.

We turned around a failing company by developing highly viral, high ROI products by getting as close as we could to our customers. Here’s a few ways to do that before you even start planning that product execution …

  1. Know and live with the people you’re building for. Talk to the people you want to use what you’re building. Live in their natural habitat. Know the issues of their lives. Know the little things that bring joy to them. Know the prickly things that they don’t even realized irritate them daily. Know the influencer group of your customer group. Know the folks who understand both groups intimately and best. Invite the most interested from all three groups into your process as participants not just advisors.
  2. Use measurements appropriately. Data supports how people do things but rarely gets down to the why they do or the patterns of what moves them emotionally. When you think you know something, then, test and measure it. Don’t build a profile of customers through measurement only. Think about what companies would get wrong about you if they only used the quantitative data and scores from your medical check ups and school reports about you, without ever finding out about your personality.
  3. Respect the products that your customers are already using. Don’t fall into the trap of only seeing the faults of what’s already out there. That product you see so many flaws in has already solved a huge number of problems for your customers or they wouldn’t be using it. If it’s so bad, why does it have 100,000 or a million people using it? Ask people what they love about it. Be careful not to build something that takes away something they’ve made a part of what they’ve come to enjoy and they’re regularly doing. Lose what they hugely love and it won’t matter if you offer something that fixes a minor irritation.
  4. Start with a small offer built to your highest standards. Respect your customers’ time. Make the first release your best work, not a beta test. If you know your customers, if you’ve lived with them and invited them into the the development process, you know what works for them. Deliver it. Don’t play with their time or ask them to work out the bugs for you. That’s your job. If you want to attract the best, be the best.
  5. Simplify until there is no learning curve. Simple is not only elegant. It allows us to focus on why we got the product not learning the product first. Apple has mastered this. They can put the entire manual for using a product in a pamphlet that no one reads because we can pick up the product already knowing how to use it.
  6. Get paid for your product. Free samples are fine. Free products are not. The model of building things for free costs those who build products more than we might think. We release things unfinished at standards less than our best. We don’t build the appropriate support or service into them and we ask too much from our “free” customers who take us for granted. We work with people on promises. We lose money, reputation, and if nothing else, time we don’t have. Ever seen a tweet the equivalent of, “I’d gladly pay for Twitter if they’d guarantee service.”
  7. Systematically and strategically build your customer base as you build your product line. We no longer need to build a huge department store and fill it will products to prove we exist. We don’t need to stress our resources, cash, or infrastructure like that. Release one product that does one thing well for one audience. Let that product and that customer base finance the next. One customer group well served is better than 12 products less well defined — and one product is easier to market and easier for our friends and networks to share on our behalf. Know, love and serve that first group and they’ll tell their friends. They’ll also tell you what they want next and what group of their friends are your next best bet.
  8. Learn the life cycle of your product and know when to revise. Every product has a life cycle. It seems the way of the Internet to let the product die a slow death. Know how long that product is likely to sell well, then just after the peak selling point, carefully revise it to add new features. Once you’ve got a history to rely on do this on a predictable schedule. If your product life cycle is 9 months to a year. Plan your next revision at 11-12 months. Be careful not to revise out the features that customers love and not to add features they don’t care about. Look to make your product even easier, faster, and more meaningful at doing what it does. .
  9. Release new products on a predictable schedule. High tech companies might be slaves to the fast-changing conditions, but not every company is. If you can provide a predictable release schedule get fully behind that. It will build discipline into your infrastructure and your process. Predictability also builds trust. Customers will come to know that they can look forward to something knew from you when they’re planning their budgets. .
  10. And go back to Step 1 by getting to know your customers even better after they buy from you. Think of that first purchase as the first date in a long-term relationship. Value the customer who’s already shown a commitment above all others. Respect them by giving the best offers to them, not to the “potentially new” customers who haven’t been listening to you. .

These 10 steps work. I know because I’ve used them successfully and two well-respected financial guys have put their names on that fact.

It takes two things to win a loyal and growing customer base,

  1. products customers truly want that live up to their promise
  2. and more opportunities to get those kinds of products from a business they can trust..

Simply being that business who knows, loves, and serves their customers better than anyone else can save those customers the time of having to look in other places when they need what you offer. Who wouldn’t value that?

Have you had any experience with a company that consistently builds highly viral, High ROI products.

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

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The Riskiest Question We Ask When Introducing Our Business and a Much Better Approach

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People Ask It All of the Time

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We meet on Twitter or on my blog. Perhaps you came up to talk after I spoke at a conference or a mutual friend said that we should meet and talk. We have a lot in common and a lot of expertise that supports each other. We both think the other is smart. So we decide to sit down to talk more.

Things are going great. So we begin to introduce ourselves and our businesses to each other.

I ask about what you’re doing. You tell me more. We’re getting somewhere that looks like we could find a way to build something together that might move our businesses forward. Then one of us asks what appears to be a simple question that people ask often and the other one starts to buy out.

The question — one that people ask all of the time — might surprise you because on the surface it sounds smart, other-centered, and on target. But, it’s not because of how it shifts the burden of thinking and how it changes my perception of who the person who asks it.

The question?

How can I help you?

What’s wrong with that?

When we ask How can I help you? here’s what happens. We throw the burden of thinking (and the evaluation of our fit) to the other person. The person we’re talking to has to stop to consider within their entire realm of possible jobs, tasks, and future dreams,…

  • where he or she might be able to use some help.
  • who we are, what our skills are, how they might fit the culture and brand of what he or she has planned.
  • whether he or she might be able to manage putting those two together in the context of what’s already going on.

That’s a huge amount of thinking, considering, and evaluating to answer even to someone we know really well. The risk is huge that the answer will be wrong — that the person answering will misjudge our skills (too high, too low) or not think of the perfect fit for what we have to offer. Inside that situation is also the risk that the person will be uncomfortable at being unable to give a quick answer and the chance that he or she will wonder why we already don’t know.

Why take those risks at all?

A Much Better Approach

For almost a year now, I’ve reserved the How can I help? solely for situations in which people are outlining specific problems that fall into my area of expertise. And even then I try to avoid it, reaching instead for Would it help your situation if I offered a way to … ? I find that opens the discussion to more concrete exploration of where my skills fit the person’s business goals.

And when it’s a conversation that’s with a new business acquaintance rather than leading with How can I help? which is really about me. I turn the conversation to them by asking

What are your goals for the next two quarters? What are you hoping to achieve to move your business forward?

Then I listen and as I listen I ask more questions about vision of those positive outcomes.

So, would that look like a new product? a growth in awareness? a larger community? a more functional website?

And I listen more until I can clearly see their goal, their vision. Then I can also see how I might use my skills to help them achieve it, how we might align our goals to build something together that benefits us both.

A leader is someone who wants to build something he or she can’t build alone.

Do you see how a new approach to introducing your business can help your business and their business grow?

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

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Thanks to Week 280 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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laurinda-shaver
lttlewyw-s
paul-papadimitriou
pramit-j-nathan

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

Top 5 Free Video Tools for Producing Internet Marketing Videos

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A Tools Review by
Rahil Muzafar

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Who Says Your Marketing Video Can’t Be Cool?

Whether you’re making

  • a video commercial
  • something funny for YouTube and hoping that it will go viral
  • a video tutorial
  • or a video for any other purpose

And the video requires some sort of editing, you don’t need to pay for editing anymore. The advancement in the technology and a number of user friendly video editing software means that it is quite doable at home even if you have no understanding of how video editing works. Anybody with a little bit of creativity can produce compelling, share worthy, and interesting videos by using these intelligible tools and step by step guides which are freely available on Internet.

Multiple options are available for mixing up still pictures to create a meaningful video, joining different video clips into one, adding music, audio, or jingles to your recordings, and of course, adding titles, text overlays, and credits to describe your company or products. Sounds pretty convincing? Keep on reading to find a list of 5 freely available tools that you can use for making a video and make the most of this cost-effective marketing medium.

1. Windows Movie Maker:

This, as you already know, comes with the Microsoft Windows, without any kind of additional charges. It is a very basic, easy to use, and a beginner’s level software that can be used by just about anybody for producing some impressive projects and editing home made videos. The best thing about Windows Movie Maker is that it has a very familiar interface that syncs well with the overall user experience of Microsoft Windows, which means you will be able to get on with this tool in next to no time. A simple, yet powerful tool to create and edit videos, add audio, and many different effects, Windows Movie Maker is the perfect starting point for your video marketing campaign.

Wax:

Slightly more complicated than the Movie Maker, but still pretty easy to understand, Wax provides a great platform for creating professional looking videos with flexibility and special effects. The special effects include 2D and 3D, and it has a multitude of options for both professionals and home users.

Zwei-Stein and ZS4

This tool is one step ahead of the basic ones (even though it doesn’t appear to be when you first look at it) but once you get going, you will find that it’s an incredible video compositing and editing tool, offering some very unique options as compared to the features provided by other free tools. In fact the features are exploitable by both an average user and the pro. Zwei-Stein lets you edit a large number of videos, putting forward a staggering number of special effects. Both Zwei Stein and ZS4 are free for personal use and available for download on their websites.

Blender:

Blender is not really a video editor, but it totally deserves to be in this list. This one is actually meant for 3D content production and even though 3D animation may take more time, but it’s a great way to stand apart from the crowd. The interface will take some time before you can get used to it, but once you get a handle on the hotkeys, you will find that your effort were totally worth it. Blender lets you create unparalleled animations, and has a plethora of features that seem to offer more and more every time you get a little creative. There are a number of tutorials and lots of websites dedicated to the tips and tricks for 3d enthusiasts. Blender offers a number of tools that will make your task easier and there’s no limit to what you can do with this software.

Jaycut

This is a web based editor, which means you don’t need to download or install anything on your computer, Jaycut gives you the freedom of editing anywhere on the internet with some handy options available for web based software. It provides the functionality similar to the Movie Maker, and includes features like recording audio or video straight from the application. You can publish your videos direct to YouTube or save on your disk; in fact you can save the video on their servers to access it from any computer with Internet access.

So, what are you waiting for? With so many free tools and a platform like YouTube at your disposal, you have got no reasons but to utilize video marketing and publicize your products, create buzz, engage customers, and much, much more.

,

Rahil Muzafar

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This post was contributed by Rahil, and this piece of information is not the only thing he has to offer, you can also benefit from Hostgator coupon code and eleven2 coupon code at his website.

Thanks! Rahil!

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

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