Successful Blog

Bloggy Question 80: Internet Business Isn't Credible?

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Can See Them, Don’t Know Their Address

For those who come looking for a short, thoughtful read, a blogging life discussion, or a way to gradually ease back into the week. I offer this bloggy life question. . . .

Recently, a friend made an observation about working on the Internet. It went like this . . .

He said that that the Internet contractors, developers, consultants, and coaches he’s worked with all have a problem in in common. “They’re not grounded in the brick and mortar world.”

You asked him what he meant.

He said, “My experience is that people I work with all over the world, who have employment and a regular paycheck in structures where other people work, show up when situations get difficult. People I’ve hired on the Internet disappear when projects get difficult or they get overwhelmed.”

You point to folks you know who’ve never had that problem.

He points to the situations that tie those folks to brick and mortar. He suggests that you establish local business saying that, “The Internet will always be filled with people who can easily flee their responsibilities and therefore businesses that are solely Internet based will never have complete credibility.”

How do you respond?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles
Bloggy Question 79: What’s a Social Media Expert?
Bloggy Question 78: Like an Intriguing Blog Post Headline
Bloggy Question 77: I’ll Never Get There Alone!
Bloggy Question 76: Where Are My Clients?
Bloggy Question 75: Stop Thief!

Critical Skill 9: How to Have Positivity and Confidence Making Tough Decisions

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Let Me Think about That . . .

Future Skills

Life is a never-ending series of choices and decisions. Do I get up now or wait another minute? Do I sign this contract or hope for a better offer? Do I buy a new desk or upgrade my computer?

Some choices are fun . . . Where do I take my friends when they come to visit?
Some decisions are not so . . . Do I uproot my family or give up the great job in another city?

The fun ones speed up our thinking with endless possibilities. The not so fun ones mire us in thoughts of dead-end alleys. Sometimes, we forget that we have options about how we consider and respond to choices and decisions.

The Dilemma of Logic and Emotion

It’s almost impossible to find a child who doesn’t like to solve a puzzle or a riddle. Children usually find choices fun too — when the choices are simple or they can choose again. Decisions are a little trickier, because decisions cut off other options. Most adults don’t like big decisions any more than children do.

It’s the cutting off other options that often finds us in a dilemma. No answer seems the right one. Or worse, no answer even looks a glimmer better than another.

Our brains are made to sort information, make choices, and come to decisions. No decision is particularly frightful when we face it with raw logic. But logic alone omits a good part of what makes us human. We need our hearts and our personal goals to get to a grounded, well-rounded decision.

The issue is that our logic can be at odds with our intuition and emotion.

How to Have Positivity and Confidence Making Tough Decisions

A great decision is made from what we bring to the situation. We can’t change our views in response to every decision, but we can check our own and other folks’ views. If we open ourselves to test our thinking, a tough decision process can be one of positivity and confidence. Try approaching your next tough call in these ways.

Head - Heart List

  • Logic and Emotion Chart

    Make a two-column chart. Label the columns, Head and Heart. Above the labels, write the decision you’re facing. Spend at least 15 minutes listing logical reasons in the Head column. List both the boldly important factors and the random, minor reasons. — Don’t value your items. — Write them all down. Do the same for the Heart column. Make each list as long as you possibly can.

    When you look them over, notice which list you tried to make longer. (It will show itself by the number of minor reasons listed there.) That’s your subconscious saying what you want to do.

  • An Internal Board of Directors.

    Each of these people would approach the question from a different viewpoint. Write 1-3 things each of them would see that you haven’t yet considered.

    • A scientist.
    • A mathematician or musician.
    • An explorer or geographer.
    • An artist.
    • A teacher.
    • A writer.
    • A politician.

    What new ideas did you find in their points of view?

These approaches to tough decisions help us stand outside our thinking. In the chart of Logic and Emotion, we weigh our head and heart, but we also see our intuitive or experiential bias. Revealing that subconscious bias can help us sort more quickly than the information on the list itself. When we consult our Internal Board of Directors, we open our minds to new ideas and new views.

Those new ideas and new views offer a wealth of contingencies and possibilities. The decision made from them will be grounded and well-thought. We can move forward with positive confidence about what we’ll do.

How do you get through tough decisions with confidence?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need help sorting decisions? Click on the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. All that expertise in one room! Register now!

Related articles
The 10 Skills Most Critical to Your Future
Critical Skill 1: Strategic Deep Thinking
Critical Skill 5A: 3 Parts of Spectacular Ideas
Critical Skill 6A: Five Tools for Finding Faulty Assumptions

Thanks to Week 129 SOBs

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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

Careful Credit Card Management for Small Businesses

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Tisha Kulak works with a credit card service, Creditorweb. Recently she asked if she might put together something about small business and spending as a guest post for this blog. I encouraged her to do just that.

START UPS NEED SUPER CONTROL OVER SPENDING
by Tisha Kulak

Small, start up business owners need to be conscious of spending.

Just because a credit card is in the name of your business, you can’t go on spending sprees and expect to be in the clear. Credit cards designed for small businesses can help you get through some rough patches in the beginning. You may need to finance some equipment to get you started or perhaps charge some marketing expenses to a company card.

The reality is your business finances still remain firmly on your shoulders. Unless you start out with a multi-million dollar contract, your income from a start up business may be more variable than you can imagine. Many entrepreneurs spent time as an employee before venturing out on their own. That employee job came with a steady paycheck. Owning your own business full time does not necessarily make the same promise. Often it takes months to seek out qualified job prospects and more months to seal a deal. Even if you manage to score a few deals right from the start, they may not be so lucrative because you might make financial sacrifices to snag the job.

Small business credit cards do have advantages such as reward programs that offer discounts of office supplies or cash back incentives. However, it’s wise to monitor spending constantly and not simply go wild with purchases to get the rewards. Expense tracking is essential — to maintain a realistic view of your income and expenses and to charge what you can afford to pay off each month. It is important when you contemplate credit card offers and credit companies that you always read the fine print. Make sure you have an understanding of what the rewards programs are and what it takes to accumulate them. If you need to spend thousands of dollars each month to get a couple of bucks back, move along to another offer.

Itemize your credit card statements each month and note which expenses to which part of the business. Make it a point to not mix business with personal, even though you are responsible for both. At the end of the year when you are analyzing your records for tax purposes, the one thing you don’t want is more work to do, sorting through 12 months of expenses.

******

Tisha Kulak is a writer for Creditorweb.com, where she writes about business credit cards and responsible credit card use.

Thanks, Tisha, for the quick seminar!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Stuck with administrative overload? Work with Liz!!

SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

A SOBCon08 Contest for ALL Web Publishers !!

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SOBCon08 and Utterz announce the
GET MY MESSAGE Contest!!

Do a Commercial for Your Blog, Win a Nokia N95!

SOBCon08 Logo50

SOBCon08 and Utterz are inviting all web publishers to submit a commercial for your blog or webpage to the SOBCon Utterz “GET MY MESSAGE” contest.

Entries will be reviewed and judged by SOBCon (Biz School for Bloggers) attendees on Sunday May 4, 2008 in Chicago and one lucky website owner will win a Nokia N95 mobile phone. .

Find out how to enter at the SOBCon08 site and at Utterz.com

Get your message out there!!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

SOB Business Cafe 04-11-08

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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

Logic & Emotion points to a question that’s worth asking.
[The mainstreaming of social networks] has global implications—it’s significant. It’s transforming how we connect, relate and even do business. And it has downsides too. But I have to ask, are we losing ourselves to the word social? And if we are, what’s next?

gaping void points to something many other folks also wonder about.
” . . . I know very little about software. I have never claimed to be that interested in it. What gets me working for Microsoft is that I’ve always been very interested in something else, namely, how people make a living. This is true for large companies, small companies, billionaires and “humble tradesmen” alike. This is why I can work with a large software company like Microsoft, or a small tailoring firm like English Cut, and find them both utterly fascinating. Everybody needs to get paid; that is the great constant in business.”

Office Politics points to how it can be a challenge to work for someone who won’t offer a challenge.
I find this disconcerting because while I was doing my attachment in this firm (prior to being called to the Bar), she hardly said two words to me but once the Firm decided to take me on, she jumped and requested for me to work under her. Now she’s treating me this way.

Black in Business points to a three-part strategy for building and using a resume that works.
These were director level people with staff’s of their own. These 40 something business people had been with their previous companies for several years and had contributed to the success of their organizations. They never expected to be on the market. They do not know each other but had aligned their resumes in the same fashion.

Joyful Jublilant Learning points to tools that open up the digital.
Since there are so many opportunities, philosophies, and ideas that are being developed in the area of digital learning, I simply wanted to share some of my favorite tools. This isn’t necessarily a “Top 10” list, rather, it is ten tools that I use that help to facilitate the learning that takes place for me on a daily basis.

American Pai pointed out a more emotional social network.
Who would want a service that is basically a twitter for emotions and feelings? Can’t we just post how we feel already on Twitter, our blogs and other mediums? Sure, we can and we do, but Moonrise does it in a more powerful and compelling way. Most of all, it’s fun too.

Related ala carte selections include

Random Good Stuff pointed out some stress relief.

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