Search Results for: Introducing

NEW POWER WRITING FEATURE: An Editorial Makeover

July 13, 2006 by Liz

Why Powerful Writing Is Important

One of the ways I work with clients is to help them improve their writing. It might not be fair or accurate, but people judge our ability to reason by how we express ourselves in writing.

Thinking . . . writing . . . business . . . thinking . . . we can’t separate them.

Together they determine our place in society. Whether you blog, write for business, or only email, writing is critical to your future.

New Feature: An Editorial Makeover

I’m introducing a new feature — An Editorial Makeover. It’s a Content Edit — a Before and After — where you can look over my shoulder. Every editor edits differently. You won’t agree with all of my choices. That could make for great conversation.

I’m starting with a paragraph from my own work Bad Boys of Business: ThatÃ¢â¬â¢s Not Ã¢â¬ÅRealÃ¢â¬Â Work.

Turn the page to see the first Editorial Makeover. [Read more…]

Net Neutrality 5-20-2006

May 20, 2006 by Liz

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

SUCCESSFUL SERIES

Wonder what Successful and Outstanding Bloggers talk about? We talk about business, branding, writing, thinking outside of the box, and how customers think. We also talk about our blogs–a lot.

10-Point Plan for Building an Internal Community of Brand Evangelists

The 10 Point Plan to Build an Internal Community of Brand Loyal Fans
7 Reasons Why Investing in an Internal Community Makes Solid Business Sense
5 Reasons You Absolutely MUST Share Your Vision Early and Often
7 Steps to a Vision that Grabs a Community by Its Soul
3 Ways Leaders Demonstrate Commitment and Intentionally Build Community
How Will You Find Out Whether Your Community Is Bored, Broken, or Inspired to Take on the World?
How Do You Recognize and Attract Heroes and Champions for Your Brand?
Will Your Customers Define Your Brand or Will You?
Create a Powerful Core Community by Building a Brand Values Baseline
How to Attract the Leaders in the Pack
What Three Values Drive Your Brand?
How to Bring a 2nd Generation of Evangelists into Building a Brand Values Baseline
Values Questions to Make Decisions that Build Your Unique Brand
How to Make Quality the Signal above the Time and Money Noise
What Is the Most Critical Signal When a FAIL Noise Is Sounding?
Influence: How to Persuade Anyone In Business to Do What You Want
7 Steps Get the Best Leadership Thinking from Your Team
Change As Influence: How to Get the Attention of Deniers, Followers, Dreamers, and Leaders?
How to Get Bean Counters and Kumbayers Serving Both the Company and the Customers/a>
5 Critical Questions for Your High Performing Team of Volunteers or Employees
How to Turn Lurkers and Listeners into Advocates
Be Irresistible: Want to Own Your Space? Own Up to Your Highest Standards!
80-20 Rule of Customers: Stop Thinking 20th Century! Attract Only the Top 20%
Get Your Leadership ON: Before You Get Folks on the Bus

Tailoring Twitter

Tailoring Twitter: Does Your Twitter Profile Attract the Right People?
Tailoring Twitter: Building a Powerful Network that Fits You Perfectly
Tailoring Twitter: Get Busy Folks to Get Twitter in 2 Minutes Flat!
Tailoring Twitter: The ROI of Curating Content on Twitter

Building a Solid Business

Inside-Out Thinking

How I build a business and why I do what I do.
1.1 No Mission Statement: One Simple Question
1.2 WHY Doing What We Love Is Solid Business Thinking
1.3: If You Don’t Know What You Love Doing . . .
2.1: The Ideal Customer Test

Blogging for the NonBlogging Customer by Scott McIntyre

Week 1: Connecting with the Offline Customer: A Non-Blogger’s Perspective
Week 2: Targeting the Offline Customer: Do You Blog for Non-Bloggers?
Week 3: Reaching the Offline Customer: Do You Promote Your Blog Offline?
Week 4: Attracting the Offline Customer: Why Do You Promote Your Blog Offline?
Week 5: Top 10 Social Media Tips for Connecting With Non-Blogging Customers
Week 6: Welcoming the Offline Customer: Does Your Blog Create A Good Impression?
Week 7: Engaging the Offline Customer: Do You Talk With Non-Bloggers?
Week 8: Offline Customers: Do You Meet The Needs of Non-Bloggers?
Week 9: Offline Customers: Do You Make Room for Non-Blogger’s to Comment?

Personal Identity, Personal Development, Branding

Questions to Get Closer to You

One-2-One Conversation

It’s a cross-blog conversation.
1 Conversation . . . 2 Blogs . . . 2 Directions
121: What Makes Your Heart Sing?
121: What’s the Key to a Promotion Strategy?
121: What’s the Key to a Promotion Strategy?
121: How Do You Get from Strategy to Execution?
121: How Do You Clearly Know What to Do?
121: How Do You Use Social Media to Stay Customer Centered?
121: Help! I’m Lost – My Business Is Out of Control
121: How Do You Write Compelling Conversational Copy?
121: From a Blog Writer to a Conversational Dynamo
121: How a Colossal Mistake Taught Me 3 Keys of Blogging and SEO
121: I Knew Everything about Relationships Until an Audience Came
121: We Met, But Did I Ever Say Hello? [blush]

Change the World

Questions to Get Closer to You

Questions to Get Closer to Your Brand: Question 1
Questions to Get Closer to You: Question 2
Questions to Get Closer to You: Question 3
Questions to Get Closer to You: Question 4
Questions to Get Closer to You: Question 5

Brand YOU

Building a Personal Brand – YOU
Brand YOU – Capitalize on Your Strengths
Brand YOU – Making Your Weaknesses Irrelevant
Personal Branding: Strengths Assessment Tool
Brand YOU – What’s the BIG IDEA?
Brand YOU – You Are What They See
Your Resume-The Brand YOU Brochure
Images & Sound-Bytes of a Brand YOU Leader
Brand YOU – Images and Sound-Bytes Tool
Brand YOU – 2 Keys to Leadership
Brand YOU – Handling Problems
Brand YOU – When An Apology Is in Order

5 Sure-Fire Ways to Break the Promise of Your Brand
Job [and Client] Hunting ala Liz
6 Steps to a Branded Business Blog in Record Time
7 Steps to Being Recognized as an Expert
What to Do Before They Ask What Do You Do?

Thinking

Writing

Power Writing for Everyone

Power Writing for Everyone–6+1 Traits

Introducing Power Writing for Everyone
Don’t Hunt IDEAS – Be an Idea Magnet
Got the Idea. Now What Do I Do with It?
Before You Publish – Check for Spiders and Opportunities
Writing Ugh! 10 Reasons to Get Jazzed about Writing
Editing: Just Some of My Very Different Thoughts
6-Minute Transition to Writing
Sample 6-Minute Transition
Don’t Fear the Blank Screen – Be a Miner
4 Writing Tips I Learned from Peter Gabriel
Writing for Readers – What’s My Promise as the Writer?
Content or Copy: Ignore the Difference at Your Own Risk

6+1 Traits of Effective Blog Writing
6+1 Ways to Compelling & Elegant Blog Posts
6+1: The Ferrari Analogy for Organized Writing
6+1: Writing Voice the Sound of Your Brand
6+1 Traits: Word Choice – Writing & Business Power Tool
6+1 Traits: Sentence Fluency – I Got Rhythm
Myth Busting -Write as You Talk – OR How to Write Conversationally
10 Sure-Fire Ways to Stop Making Writing So Hard
How Evil Pronouns Cause Arguments
Ever Try Capturing Ideas as They Form?

6+1, 2, 3: Save Me from Beginners and Experts NOW!
6+1: How-to Blogging – Stomp Out Swiss Cheese Knowledge
6+1 How to Write Without Self-Consciousness
6+1 Traits of Search Engine Relevant Content

More Writing Classics
9 + 1 Things Every Reader Wants from a Writer
9 + 1 -The Sequel – When Big Words Go Bad
12+1 Things Every Reader Wants from a How-To Article
The 9 Rights of Every Writer – Peer Pressure Is for Jr. High School
The Problem with Writing . . . 25 Things to Know BEFORE You Write for a Living

Power Writing at Work

Can’t Write? Improve Your Skill Set to Improve Your Job Security
Business Blogging – Business Writing: Can You See the Elephant on the Net?
10 + 1 Things to Make Me Love Your Business Email
10 +1 Sure-Fire Ways to Get My Best Work – and the Best Work from Everyone – Every Time
No One Kills a Messenger who Writes for Readers – 8 Sales Rules for Writing
4+6 Things to a Product Review Even James Bond Would Trust
10 + 1 Reasons to Write Well, Not Perfect-ley OR Save the World with Realistic Expectations

Fiction: 301 List Links in a Story

A List Becomes 301 Links in Story - Chapter 1
301 Links in Story – Chapter 2 Lizzie Meets Fred
301 Links in a Story – Chapter 3 Lizzie Reaches the Paris Hilton
301 Links in a Story – Chapter 4 Lizzie, Jean, and Etch-a-Sketch
301 Links in a Story – Chapter 5 Lizzie, Americans, and French Bread
301 Links in a Story – Chapter 6 Intrigue and Romance
301 Links in a Story – Chapter 7 Lizzie, Rue Dante, and Who Hal Is
301 Links in a Story- Chapter 8 Lizzie, Amanda, Arianna, David, and Jeremy
301 Links in a Story – Chapter 9 The Lists of 10 and the CanCan

Business Ideas

Customer Think

10 Reasons Readers Don’t Leave Comments Introducing Customer Think
Customer Think: I’m Not a Kid, I’m a Person
Customer Think: Saying Things without Talking
Just Say YES!
An Open Thought: Please Take the Keys
Did You Drive My Blog Yet?
Bloggy Life Question 9
Do You Know a Customer When You See One?
There – No Putting ME in a Box
Don’t Hijack My Attention
Pick a Number – Just Make Sure It’s a BIG One
Better Than Hi! How Are Ya?
Don’t Pay Attention – Are You Curious?
Customers and Credibility
Quality, Schedule, Budget
Don’t Read Your PR, Read Your Marketing Copy
Getting Customers to Stop by to See You
Helping Clients Get Past Blogaphobia
Feeling a Customer’s First Response
How Was Your Day as a Customer?
How THEY Work -Why the Heck Do I Care?
Customer Solve Your Own Problem
Don’t Read Your PR, Read Your Marketing Copy
Why? Because – How Much More Do You Need?
Do You Know Where Your Eyes Go?
Always Choose for Your Readers, Right?
Airplanes, Airports, and Ideas
Service with a Smile

Much, much more to come. 🙂

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mp3 search enggine
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baju couple
Kaffee, Tee & Kakao
Brat- & Schmorpfannen
LaufbÃ¤nder
Generatoren
Rohlinge & Leermedien
Waschmaschinen
Topfsets
TrekkingrucksÃ¤cke
Styling ZubehÃ¶r
Topfsets
Pflegeprodukte/a>
Jacken, MÃ¤ntel & Westen
Waschmaschinen
Woks & Wokpfannen
HARGA MURAH,DISKON,JUAL MURAH
Harga Harga Murah Meriah
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jual kamera murah dan alat memasak

Did You Drive My Blog Yet?

April 17, 2006 by Liz

Grab the Keys, Take a Spin

Yesterday I wrote a few words about the Path of Favors–how they multiply and come back in lovely, unexpected ways. I was lucky in that through a path of favors a problem I’d been thinking about had been mentioned in passing. That lighted a doorway where I was able to walk through and enlist some help to move toward solving it.

I did. I asked folks who were reading yesterday to take the driver’s seat. I threw out the keys to my blog. After a minute or so getting used to the steering, we had quite a dialogue. It was fast and furious and filled with ideas that every blogger should know. It’s still being added to.

Whoa! Am I learning a lot. It’s thrilling to hear what people really think.

Thanks Again

Here or there it doesn’t matter where you write if you have comments. What matters is that your ideas are important to me. If you don’t want to drive my blog now, that’s okay. Do read what’s there from those who did. There’s great advice all through those comments. This blog got better just by having them.

Thanks to everyone who did, or will, take the keys and drive my blog.

Brand you and me is made of two.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related article
Introducing Customer Think

Customer Think: I’m Not a Kid, I’m a Person

April 12, 2006 by Liz

Grouping People Doesn’t Work

Each year when my son started school with a new teacher, I would wait about three weeks. Then I would make an appointment to see her. I would bring along a few cool books I had carefully selected for her classroom as a gift. I gave her the three weeks because I wanted my son’s teacher to have a chance to get to know this rare and brilliant child on his own–we needed a common place to speak from. I brought the books because I wanted my child to move from being a “boy in class” to being a person–a child with a name, whose mother knows about books and cares about him.

I did those things because I was a teacher once. I know how easy it is to think of those faces as “the kids in my class,” not as individual people. Teachers are human beings and when you’re faced with 20-30 small people to get to know, it doesn’t happen very fast. The sad news is that extreme cases get center stage. Think of the names you remember from your early school days–they’re the extremes: the kids who were really smart, really bad, or really good friends with you. The rest become a blur. We’re human we make groups and unfortunately, we like to group people too.

Grouping people doesn’t work for getting to know them as individuals.

My son taught me that when he was all of three. I said, “Hey kid, let’s go.”
He stopped cold in his tracks, looked at me, and said, “I’m not a kid. I’m a people.”

We Have Relationships with People

We don’t have relationships with customers, or with users, or with eyeballs. We have relationships with people. It may sound like semantics, but it’s more than that. How we use words points to how we think and how we value ideas. If we think customer first and then person, we’re thinking backwards. Humanity wins out every time. Take care of the person and the personal relationship, and the work will take care of itself. Try it. It’s true. When we show people that we value them, they hardly ever let us down.

The reason that humanity wins is because real customer relationships are built around customer needs and desires. Needs and desires are individual human things, packed with individual human quirks and nuances. Sure there are patterns in any human group. You can even pile those patterns into demographics if you want. Stay at that level, and you’ll be skating on the surface where there’s only information and no heart.

I can’t begin to know my customers, if I don’t know what’s in their hearts.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Customers, visitors, and readers are people, not users, traffic, stats, or any other word that steals their humanity and steals our own humanity as well. It’s brand YOU and ME–together. My three-year-old customer-son was right to set me straight when he said, “I’m a people, not a kid.”

Who doesn’t want to walk into a restaurant where everybody knows your name? Who wouldn’t rather work with someone who knows who you are and cares about the things you care about? Who hasn’t had the experience of being treated like less than a person by a clerk, a doctor, or a boss? Didn’t that make you want to say, “Hey, I’m a person I have a name.”?

Do something small today to show a reader, a customer, or a visitor–someone who’s just met you–that you know that he or she is a person of value. See what happens. Then see how many times today people treat you–a customer–in that same personal way.

A business that values me as a person has my business and my brand loyalty from minute one. By week three, they’ll have the business of all my friends as well. There is no better promotion than valuing customers as the people that they are.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Writing Ugh! 10 Reasons to Get Jazzed about Writing

March 26, 2006 by Liz

Writing Is Easy When It’s Over

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

—Gene Fowler , Screenwriter, Director, Author

Let’s face it. Everyone can think of things we’d rather do than write. Writing is work, even when it comes easily. We have to get the words down in the right order. We have to check that they’re all there and spelled correctly. We have to make sure that they make sense to people who aren’t us. Those are a lot of things to do when we might be doing something more fun, such as having a life.

Why do I write?

I just can’t let opportunities fly right by me.

10 Reasons to Get Jazzed about Writing

Why do folks write? They know that words have power. That a word well-placed and well-written can bring visibility and attention to them, their business and their brand. They know that writing is an incredible tool that reaches farther than other forms of conversation do. Even video, well-done, is written first.

We write because writing is power. Here are 10 reasons to get jazzed about writing.

1. In today’s universe, writing is your voice. Not to write is close to having laryngitis. The ability to write is critical. You learn it same way you learn to play the guitar–by practice. If you want to communicate when the spotlight falls your way, you need to be writing “solos” now.

2. Writing can reach an unlimited audience. More people can access what you have to say when they can read it. Your audience can read what you write on their own terms, in their own time frame.

3. Writing allows you to think before you speak. One beauty of writing is that you can edit before people hear what you say. The uhs and ums, the wild digressions, and off-base thinking can stay a secret between you and your delete key. You end up looking smarter, and your audience ends up thinking you are too. That’s power.

4. Writing lasts to become an asset. The words you craft today will still be available to you again and again. One investment pays you back with many returns. You can repurpose your writing to fit new situations. You can make it last to serve you and your business as long as you need it to.

5. Writing is free promotion. Offer quality, relevant content to an audience who needs it, and they’ll be coming back to see you again. Your name, your business, and your brand will gain a following from the writing that you did.

6. Writing increases the visibility of your brand. Writing great content means search engine ranking and link popularity. Whether you’re looking for a new job or promoting your business, high visibility is currency in the knowledge universe. Employers and clients are using search engines to check out relationships. You do it. Don’t you?

7. Writing lets people know you as an individual. You become the one and only you. If I never wrote a word on this blog, how would you know who I am? Need I go on?

8. Writing forces you to think through ideas. When you leave your ideas in your head, it’s easy to think you know them inside out. Often after writing something, we know it better than before we started.

9. Writing lets you define the big idea of your brand. Whatever subject you write about will soon become what you are thought of as an expert on.

10. Writing is networking with content. Writing opens doors. People read and answer back. All people tend to see others who think like they do as being smart. Some of those readers will become friends and business contacts.

I can think of so many reasons to write, and I get jazzed about the doors that each piece I write might be opening. Now as I finish this post, I have one more page in my archives. It’s like one more dollar in my promotional bank account. I can repurpose it and use it again and again. People can read it whenever they want to find out more about who I am.

Funny . . . . I’m even more jazzed about writing now, than I was when I started this post.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Search Results for: Introducing

Why Powerful Writing Is Important

New Feature: An Editorial Makeover

Net Neutrality Links

10-Point Plan for Building an Internal Community of Brand Evangelists

Tailoring Twitter

Building a Solid Business

Inside-Out Thinking

Blogging for the NonBlogging Customer by Scott McIntyre

Personal Identity, Personal Development, Branding

Questions to Get Closer to You

One-2-One Conversation

Change the World

Questions to Get Closer to You

Brand YOU

Thinking

10 Most Critical Skills — Future Skills

TRENDSPOTTING 101

Creativity at Work

Finding Ideas Outside of the Box

Writing

Power Writing for Everyone

Power Writing at Work

Fiction: 301 List Links in a Story

Business Ideas

Customer Think

Grab the Keys, Take a Spin

Thanks Again

Grouping People Doesn’t Work

We Have Relationships with People

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Writing Is Easy When It’s Over

10 Reasons to Get Jazzed about Writing