39: Successful Blog – Interview with guest expert Liz Strauss

Liz Strauss, Brand Strategist, Community Builder, and Leadership Trainer

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com  for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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Interview Insights

Listen to this interview to learn:

  • How blog writing on the Internet is like “Little House on the Prairie”.
  • Why “location, location, location” matters on the Internet, but it’s not where you live or work.
  • Valuable tools to use to boost your blog and Twitter visibility on the Internet.
  • The importance of speaking the language that your target market is using.
  • The secret of using “co-opetition” to exchange insights with peer experts.
  • How focusing on a niche helps raise your reputation faster.

Liz Strauss Show Notes

  • 1:04 “SOBcon is closed, as in very small, workshop event in which people who do business online and offline meet together to discuss strategies for being successful in doing their business.”
  • 1:50 “I have 35 years in instructional design and educational publishing, and over the course of that time I eventually grew to a place where there were like 3 jobs left, and I didn’t want any of them, and believe me, they didn’t want me either.”
  • 2:14 How Strauss began her career in publishing and how she built her network “outside the publishing box.”
  • 3:40 “The learning curve goes way up when you start doing things online.”
  • 4:21 [On going digital in 2005] – “I did it a time when there were only 12M blogs, and now there are more than 100M blogs.”
  • 5:10 “A few years ago when there were only 12M blogs people came online pretty much one at a time, and they came online – I think of it as Little House on the Prairie – because they wanted to be there and they wanted to see what it was like.”
  • 6:03 The Executive washroom of the world.
  • 6:13 [On the advent of Twitter] – “I think of that as when the trains came, and the city people started moving online. And we weren’t living in long cabins anymore, and people started building general stores and main streets and downtowns and there are more things to do and more things to keep us busy.”
  • 7:12 “As opposed to being a person who comes in and learns the tools and uses them, corporation comes with its own culture, so it picks up the tools and tries to bring them back and use them in the way that they’ve always used them before.”
  • 8:57 “What often happens is that people will come to me and say, ‘I need a blog because I have a business.’ And I’ll say, ‘Why?’ And they’ll say, ‘Because that’s what I’m supposed to have.” And I’ll say, “Maybe not.”
  • 9:12 The story of Strauss’s father the saloon owner.
  • 9:45 “I use my blog as my sort of office. I have 4,300 blog posts so it’s like my 4300-page resume.”
  • 10:17 [On having a blog] – “It’s a good way of building trust relationships with people that are potential customers.
  • 10:25 “I use my blog to go deep and let people know who I really am.”
  • 10:54 “I use Twitter to go wide, to make sure that people know that I’m out here and that I exist.”
  • 12:15 “But it’s having a strategy around those things which is definitely built around where the people I want to reach are.”
  • 12:34 “Pre-internet, everything was about location, location, location.”
  • 14:47 How to choose platforms where your audience hangs out to have a greater chance of success with your business.
  • 15:50 “The more you narrow your niche, the more you widen your opportunity.”
  • 17:45 Using google alerts to find the right location for you to set up shop on the internet.
  • 18:21 [In using keywords] – “One of the keys is understanding not what you want to sell them, but what they are searching for.”
  • 20:24 How you can ask the right questions of established experts in your chosen field to help position yourself for success.
  • 21:42 “People try and serve too many people at once.”
  • 22:24 Why you shouldn’t turn your back on your original skill sets, and how all of your skills can give you credibility.

Expert Bio

Liz Strauss is the CEO and founder of SOBCon, a highly successful business bloggers conference. She is also the author of the popular Successful-Blog.com, as well as a speaker who works to help businesses become irresistible to their prospects and customers.

In 2011, Liz was named “Titan of Web 2.0,” a prestigious award presented at World Forum in Davos, Switzerland. She has also been named in the “Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers” list, the “Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2008,” and the “50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women of Social Media.”

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