Successful Blog

The Art of a Personal Thanksgiving and Thanks Receiving

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Don’t Let the Words Throw You

Change the World!

How good it is that people made a tradition — a day for giving thanks. Life too easily becomes getting to the next sunrise, through the next problem, onto the next goal.

Days of thanksgiving are important. We need days to remember what we’ve already received. It’s easier to have faith in a future when we value what’s here — when we gather, thank all who have given to us and give back in whatever ways we can.

The list of people who have changed my life grows daily. I thank every one of you with my head, heart, and fingers on the keys. I hope I live that gratitude visibly.

Gratitude has the power to change the world.

The Art of a Personal Thanksgiving and Thanks Receiving

It’s easy to care for a world that gives. It’s even easier to love the friends who turn the world by helping each other. We’re grateful for so many people and things. We look for every way to say so.

We write a thank you. We offer flowers. We pay it forward. We give because we’ve been given.

But are we receiving?

When someone offers those flowers, that thank you, that gift paid forward, it takes open hands, open minds, and open hearts to accept. Openness completes the transaction with honor. It’s a gift in return.

A personal thanksgiving is answered best with a personal thanks receiving. “I heard you. Thank you, I value your gift.” The art of personal thanks receiving is knowing it’s about the the giver. Receiving gratitude hears people, values them, and builds relationships.

Don’t let the grateful words throw you. Hear the person. Answer with relationship.

We can change the world — just like that!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Image: sxc.hu
Work with Liz!!

Affiliate Marketing Myths — Myth 2: It’s Best to Start with a Crash Course

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In this time of a down economy, who couldn’t do with another income stream? Those of who’ve been online for a few weeks or longer, realize that not every offer of income potential is quite what it seems to be.

James Nardell and his team at Shopster have been writing a series on myths bloggers have about affiliate marketing. This is the second in that series to help us all avoid some potholes on the information highway. (Does anyone still call it that?)

Myth 2: It’s Best to Start Affiliate Marketing with a Crash Course
A Guest Post by Raymond Lau

Is a crash course from a leading affiliate the best way to ramp up fast on affiliate marketing techniques?

Sort of. When looking for a crash course in affiliate marketing, the key words are “buyer beware”. While it is entirely possible to learn good fundamentals from a beginner’s course, there are many resources out there that are either misleading, out of date, or entirely loony.

A misleading technique is one that worked for someone, once, under circumstances they either cannot reproduce or cannot adequately expand. Avoiding this is as simple as doing your homework: look back at the history of the technique itself, and who is presenting it. The best business is built upon a stable foundation that can adapt to changes in the market. Learning the processes and habits of a fluke will only lead to troubles down the road.

An out-of-date technique is just as useless to you when starting out. Changes in affiliate marketing happen all the time, and as a beginner you simply cannot afford to start your business without a step ahead of the competition. Why even bother entering the race in the middle of the pack, where business winds down to the lowest bidder? Affiliate marketing is about innovation.

Of course, among the throngs of dead ends there are some shining examples of solid, easily-accessible courses from people who know what they’re doing. They’re not that hard to find (hah, they’d better not be!) and it takes virtually no time to get started with their guides.

Some are free, like the “Affiliate Masters” guide by Ken Evoy (http://aff-masters.sitesell.com/AffMasters.pdf) which thoroughly covers the potential beginning of your affiliate marketing life and provides a wealth of links to other solid resources.

Others, such as the Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook by James Martell, or Rosalind Gardner’s How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online, require an up-front investment but come with backup support and counseling by the authors themselves, allowing for a much more personal experience that may more thoroughly ingrain the fundamentals.

Whether you go for the free route or decide to pay for the information, there are three simple questions to ensure that what you’re learning will help you and your business:

1. Does it suit you? Look into the history of who is teaching and what they are saying. Make a judgment on whether or not what they’re teaching can be adapted to the markets you want to enter.

2. Is it stale? It’s one thing to learn a stable set of basics, and another entirely to clog your brain with dated information that has been reworked and improved upon since it first came out. Research the techniques offered to confirm they’re still relevant to today’s market.

3. What do you expect? Just because the course you’re taking promises to teach you the solid how-tos of affiliate marketing, don’t go in thinking you’ll get rich quick. By now you should know that “instant profit” is only made by people taking advantage of others who are looking for it.

–Resource box–
Raymond Lau is a marketing analyst for Shopster.com — a company that provides Web sellers with a dropship product source and e-Commerce storefront tools to build their online business. Shopster gives retailers and affiliates access to over 1 million products they can sell on auction sites or their own storefront. You can reach him at rlau@shopster.com.
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Thanks, James and Raymond!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

What Mark Goodyear Said … About Blogging for Others

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A community isn’t built or befriended,
it’s connected by offering and accepting.
Community is affinity, identity, and kinship
that make room for ideas, thoughts, and solutions.
Wherever a community gathers, we aspire and inspire each other intentionally . . . And our words shine with authenticity.

Blogging and Community

When we write our first blog post, we write for expression. We’ve something to say and we put it out there. Sometime along the way, people come to read what we’re writing — one person, many. Our blog turns from a website into a place where minds meet. How often do we consider the power of that?

Here’s what Mark said . . .

People want to do something meaningful. That is so true.

That’s why I love your site. You remind bloggers that this is only meaningful when we create in community. What we say must have a direct, positive affect on another person–or else we’re just stroking our own egos by building online archives of meaningless content.

Sure, we can pretend we’re writing for posterity. And we can overly fixated on a need for seeing with our own eyes how our work helps others.

But the central point remains. We are honest with others to encourage them to be honest. We give ourselves away to encourage others to give themselves away.

If everyone in the world did that, what a wonderful place it would be!

Mark Goodyear from a comment on March 22, 2007

A successful and outstanding blogger said that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

The Mic is On: We’re Talking Turkeys

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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.

The Birds, the Flops, and the Foolish Folks

And the WKRP Turkey Drop episode

Surely you’ve got a turkey story to tell.

  • Is it a fine family dinner?
  • Is it a plan that crqshed burned?
  • Is it a date that didn’t go quite the way that it might have?
  • Is it something that only a turkey could have done?

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: Flickr: by tristanf
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A terrible loss

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Our SOBCon friend and colleague Phil Gerbyshak alerts us that we have lost one of the members of our community, Susan Quandt:

Last Tuesday one of my dear friends and mentors was taken too quickly from this world; Susan Quandt was killed in a car accident just outside the city of Milwaukee. Susan was one of those people who could connect with you immediately, with a smile, a knowing glance, and always a hug. She lived her life abundantly, always sharing whatever she had with whomever crossed her path.

I was blessed to have Susan in my life for but a short time, as I met her at last year’s 800 CEO Read Author Pow-Wow. We knew immediately we wanted to work on some big stuff together, and she invited me to dinner, and to meet her family at her homes in Chicago and in Port Washington.

Stephen Hopson Susan Quandt

Phil shares some of the things that he learned from Susan in the brief time that he knew her in 5 Lessons [Link to Phil’s article], please read the article.

Our hearts and prayers are with all of Susan’s family and friends.