Successful Blog

Great Find: $10K College Blogging Scholarship

by

Is Your Blog Worthy?

If you’re a college kid with a weblog, read on.

Would $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs?
$10,000 is given away annually to a college student who blogs.

Great Find: College Scholarships: The Blogging Scholarship
Permalink: http://www.collegescholarships.org/our-scholarships/blogging.htm

Target Audience: US College students who blog
Content:
The founders of College Scholarships.org earn their living as bloggers and they we believe that everyone deserves a shot at a decent education. So naturally, they had to include a blogging scholarship in their offer.

Check the rules and hurry over submission are due October 15-31, 2008. Click the logo to learn more.

Good luck!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Related
Great Graphic Find: Wordle
Great Find: PictureTrail
Sandy’s Great Graphic Find: CoolText
Sandy’s Great Graphic Find: Pixel Ruler

Thanks to Week 156 SOBs

by

muddy teal strip A

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.

muddy teal strip A

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.

deep purple strip

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

Invite Back Your Muse by Cleaning Up Your Blog

by

Duck! The HTML Is Falling!

falling_leaves

Any time is a good time to look around at we’ve been living with, but not seeing. At the change of seasons, it seems we even get the urge to do that. I’ve got a server move coming, so I have an additional incentive. Who wants to back up and pack up things that aren’t working?

The point is that over time we load up out blogs with noise and clutter . . . is it time for a clean up?

Any time of the year is a good to clean up your blog. Here’s a quick checklist to make your home base more appealing.

  • Clean up the side bar. Seems we’re always adding to the sidebar. Take a look at what no longer needs to be there. Are things in the best order? Are the most important things above the fold?
  • Change a color. Be conservative and freshen up an existing color to make it feel more up to date and fashionable. OR take a leap and change out more. Get some attention. Save your stylesheet and you can always go back to where you are.
  • Try out a new header. Chances are good that you’ve outgrown the one that you’re now using. Are you still writing about what it shows? Is it still the best representation of your brand?
  • Fix broken links and falling html. I spent last night working the SOB directory. I’ll be doing more of that over the next few days. Plenty of folks have moved their blogs or retired them completely. Fixing the list is a professional service.

See what other folks are doing. Find your own version of new trends in the blogosphere. Naturally, you’ll want to have a compelling reason, but when you do, changing things on your blog can attract new attention.

A new look — a cleaner, sleeker blog — can inspire a blog writer and appeals to a blog writer’s muse . . . who wouldn’t like an easier more ideas and less distraction? Readers won’t find a cleaner, sleeker blog a problem either.

What else could help with blog clean up?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

SOB Business Cafe 10-17-08

by

SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking–articles on the business of blogging written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

The news from Seth’s Blog is about love or money.
Doing what you love is as important as ever, but if you’re going to make a living at it, it helps to find a niche where money flows as a regular consequence of the success of your idea.

The news from Global Neighbourhoods is a powerful echo.
If you Tweet something of interest and you have an audience of 10, or 100 or 1000 and no one retweets it, that is far as your message goes. But if you have 10 followers, and one of them has 100 and he or she retweets you, your message reaches that many more people. If of you of this wider ring… and so on.

The news from idea blob is help him help us safe before we need to be.
I have a team already working on the first phase of a project which would aggregate both major media sources (tv, radio, etc) as well as citizen journalists (via blogs, twitter, etc) and republish the information about disasters and emergencies into SMS, email, web, and other mediums.

The new from Escape from Cubicle Nation is about what we’re focusing on.
Just about every single client I have ever worked with has started their career quest by wondering what job would be of interest. The problem is, when you focus first on the perfect job, you automatically narrow your opportunities to jobs you are familiar with.

The news from Bringing Brands to Life! is that video can be habit forming.
Budgets are approved. Management is on board. They bought your vision. Whoa! Not so fast.
You and your team may think your ducks are all lined up. But are they really?

Related ala carte selections include

Web Urbanist has dessert.

AriWriter has an encore from BlogActionDay

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

An Extravagant Cure for Disappointment That’s Totally Free

by

Yesterday won’t be remembered as the best day in this life. Color it blue or call it Mars in retrograde. Nothing about it felt real and right.

No disaster occurred. The server didn’t eat my blog. My favorite social site was up all day. No one flamed my friends, and my traffic didn’t go on vacation all at once.

People acted like people. Two avoided the truth when they didn’t need to. That was disappointing.

Words don’t explain the way that disappointment can hang and pull at a person. It does that from the inside out. It can make you older than when you got up that same morning. It can make you sorry you are a grown up. It can bring a good day down. Sometimes all of the social media can’t do a thing for that.

crocus

Lucky for me, last night I had a meeting — face-to-face with a man who wanted to learn about what people do on the Internet. We spent a hours talking about tools, frontiers, and possibilities. I told him about what we do and the conversations we have. Finally we dropped by a site and I asked some friends to say a word.

People acted like people. They were encouragment. That was inspiring.

In those few hours, we both caught that extravagant feeling of learning — the one that everyone gets when discovering is the priority. It’s the feeling that happens when we chance to wonder not just look. The feeling showed in how we sat. The more we felt the learning, the more we leaned toward the computer. We were plants leaning toward the light.

Walking home I realized that extravagant learning feeling is the best cure for disappointment. It’s easy to create, and it’s totally free.

Have you experienced that extravagant feeling of learning lately?

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