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Do You like Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone?

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Beach Notes by Guest Writer Suzie Cheel

gday logo

I was walking on the beach this morning thinking about what I would write for my first post on Successful Blog. Liz and I have been talking for a few months now about my doing a regular post from Down Under.

I came up with Beach Notes, Liz said : “like messages in a bottle.”

Today as I asked Des (my life and business partner) what I might write, the words getting out of your comfort zone, came.

Interesting I thought as last week I put My Big Hairy Audacious Goal to the world and yesterday really stepped out of my comfort zone with the launch of a new blog where I have asked for help from my readers. So how am I feeling about this today, scarred but excited, the adrenalin is flowing and I feel finally I am moving forward. Getting out of the groove is looking very positive.

I wasn’t even distressed when the blog wasn’t flooded with comments or link love. In the past that would have been so discouraging. I am growing 🙂

I then thought about other times in my life when I have stepped out of my comfort zone and it has been life changing.

  • Going to work in Nigeria when I was 22.
  • When I left full time teaching to build a full time business with my art.

This time I feel will be life changing and will enable me to  make a difference to my life, the lives of others and empower people to live lives full of joy, freedom and creativity.

Do you like stepping out of you comfort zone? How does it make you feel?

See you next week with another note from the beach.

MinuteFix: Computer help is only a click away

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I’m pleased to announce that this week while I’m in the UK,

Phil and Diego will be hosting
Tuesday Open Comments
Come Ask Them Questions!!

Minute Fix and Diego Orjuela
Guest interview by Phil Gerbyshak

Recently I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes chatting with my friend Diego Orjuela, founder and CEO of what will hopefully the world’s greatest tech support company, MinuteFix. Full disclosure: I got to know Diego at the 2007 Successful and Outstanding Blogger Conference, and have been working with him at MinuteFix since December of 2007 as the Customer Experience Officer.

I wanted to share this interview with the audience here at Successful Blog because a service like this can really help you out if you’re in a pinch working at your home office and you need tech support. If you don’t want to pay $50 or more to take your computer into your local computer shop, give MinuteFix a shot.

Without further ado…

Tech support from MinuteFix

An interview with Phil Gerbyshak and Diego Orjuela

Phil Gerbyshak: So tell me Diego, what is MinuteFix?

Diego OrjeulaDiego Orjuela: MinuteFix is the first provider of tech support that is powered by a community of experts. Think of it like a Geek Squad combined with the power of a community model like Wikipedia or eBay. Customers can get help for any computer problem, no matter how big or small, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. The service is very affordable, at only $0.99 per minute. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, our certified community technicians will do
their best to fix it. And, if we don’t fix your problem, the session is free.

PG: Wow, why didn’t I think of that? Seems like it could be very useful for anyone working at home or with a limited budget.

DO: Absolutely! Imagine you are at your computer and you are having trouble with a
simple task like downloading an image from the Internet. MinuteFix can help you complete such a simple task in a few minutes, which otherwise might have taken you an hour to figure out on your own, all the way to more complex issues like virus or security problems. One customer last week lost her entire iTunes music library. We were able to help her recover it, and get her on her way, saving her tons of lost time and money.

PG: I hear you guys are very big on customer service. Why is that so important to you?

DO: Well, we are a company built by a passionate community of technicians who love what they do. With tech support from MinuteFix, we empower technology experts to work from home, at the hours they choose. Because they do what we love, we can offer a superior service. We deeply believe that technology should help us to interact seamlessly with the people we care about, produce tremendous results while making us more productive – and not get in the way in the process. We are your friend, and maybe even our neighbor, so we want to treat you as that. All Certified MinuteFix Technicians are thoroughly screened and tested, and must pass a customer service exam. Great customer service is the foundation of MinuteFix. [Read more…]

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.

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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!

Great Find: Diigo

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A New Kind of Social Networking?
Guest Post by Phil Butler

Diingo

Diigo is one of my favorite startups of what we have termed “Web 2.0”. Whether Web 2.0 actually ever existed is irrelevant, for one thing it has brought us all is innovation for Web users – and plenty of it. A question I always ask myself and my readers is: “But does the innovation actually do anything for us?” I think I have tested and reviewed over 300 startups in the last couple of years, and I can honestly say that most of this innovation has been directed at entertainment or rather useless “cuteness”. Diigo is one innovation that does not fall into these categories. Diigo has continually adapted and developed into what is effectively the Web’s best research tool. Now, with their launch of Version 3, Diigo has refined a social annotation and collaboration service into an even more effective “personal and group oriented tool”.

The Vision

The Diigo platform was developed around a utility (the Diigo browser add on) that enables people to actually highlight and perform functions on sections of or whole Web pages. The vision was and is to help people grab relevant content and effectively aggregate, save and/or store this data. Diigo has transformed the bookmark into a more usable and effective data collection tool and has also enabled a very unique and positive community aspect with V3. Diigo basically enables people to study and research as one would in a library – by taking pertinent pieces of the knowledge puzzle and putting them where they are accessible, functional and more easily utilized.

Version 3 – Beyond Bookmarks, Way Beyond!

Diigo has been erroneously classified as a social bookmarking community by TechCrunch and others. Calling this deep and diverse research and annotation tool a bookmarking service is really ridiculous – akin to comparing putting a cardboard placeholder in a book with actually understanding what is in the book. Being able to grab, store, manipulate and organize data and knowledge and the abilty to work on it in collaboration has nothing to do with bookmarking. Judge for yourself, here are some of the features of Diigo’s Version 3 upgrade.

Diigo’s Personal, Collaborative Research Platform – This is the premise on which Diigo was built, a platform for gathering, using and sharing information. Not just any information, but highly filtered and relevant information beyond the weightiness of full Web pages and extraneous data. Diigo allows users to add, gather or extract from pages of information and then share or work with others to further refine knowledge. Users can define their content on a group, community and ultimatly on a personal level via this even more enhanced UI.

Social Content Site – The aggregate gathered annotated data on Diigo provides a collective repository quite unlike any other. Data becomes knowledge refined at Diigo because of the human filtering aspect inherent in the way people can “slice” or refine their annotations and bookmarks. Essentially everything gathered on to the Diigo platform becomes either a personal or communicative volume in the Diigo library. In this was Diigo content is perhaps more social than on any other site. Searchability and the host of Diigo user tools make endless the possibilities in utilizing this storehouse of information.

The Power of Suggestion

Version 3 has more than 100 refinements to help users more efficiently interact with knowledge and data. Perhaps the best of all these tools is the new sidebar that makes it simple to see your annotations, links, notes and even the suggested or similar data of other users. The sidebar interface is much more visible and interactive than even Diigo’s previous interface and light years ahead of the closest competitor. Combined with the Diigo toolbar makes Diigo an even more powerful collaborative tool. Users now have the ability to search and select suggested data from other users as well as suggesting relevant knowledge to their friends. Suggestion, when presented by like minded users, can effectively act as a knowledge filter which narrows search to a fine point. This is what Diigo can be best at, presenting relevant knowledge in a much more filtered and refined way.

I have succumbed to using bookmarking sites out of the necessity of networking needs myself. None of them have anywhere near the capacity Diigo has. Diigo is a complicated tool however, and new users will need to familiarize themsleves with the interface and tools there. However, this is the case with any powerful Web application, the difference is that Diigo can actually help you get something important done, while others simply help us play at doing important stuff. It is always a pleasure to work with such tools once we get used to them. It is my pleasure to be able to present just one of my favorite applications to Liz’s great readers. Liz has always been about putting people together in the most positive way, and innovations like Diigo aim towards people as well. Check this cool tool out when you get the chance and let us and Diigo know what you think.

For screenshots and more see Phil Butler Unplugged.

Thanks, Phil!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Knowing what to do when you get to a network the trick. Work with Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Hear Muhammad Saleem speak on which social networks are right for you! Register now!

How To Win At Blogging and Keep It Real

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by Guest Writer Alex Shalman

I have been blogging actively since December 15th, 2006, and have gained a world of experience while doing so. If there was any technique or trick for increasing visitors, or comments, or captivating an audience, I have tried it.

Some people would say forget the tricks, and stick to content, after all, content is king. I’m not here to say whether or not content is the ONLY thing that matters, but I’m here to let you know how to take your content element to the next level.

Be the content. In the beginning of my blogging career, not everyone in my life was actively involved in what I was doing or knew about my blogging. The more I became a personal development blogger in my life, the more that reflected on the blog.

Personal development, meaning constant and never ending growth, is part of who I am in every facet of my life. People close to me no longer think that this is a passing hobby, it’s more of an identity now.

Tell the people. If you don’t tell them, they won’t know. I took responsibility for people not knowing about my site, and actively began telling my friends about it. I would enroll them into all the possibilities of what the site is, and where it is going.

They became excited to be on that journey with me. My friends jokingly say, ‘Hey Alex Shalman, from www.AlexShalman.com.’ I think that’s hilarious! My girlfriend tells everyone she knows about the site, I think that’s precious.

Be your word. Not everyone took what I do seriously, not even after I told them. Two of those people were my parents. Over time, the more I became this personal development person, and the more this made our good relationship a great relationship, the more they believed in the validity of what I do.

The other day we had relatives staying with us, and I caught my parents telling them about the website. My dad even asked me about my Alexa traffic. Now that’s funny, and heartwarming.

From the heart. I remember Liz told me that when I write, I sometimes sound like I’m talking down from a podium. It wasn’t personal. I think this was partly due to me being an inexperienced writer and not having control of what my writing voice sounded like.

Now days I try to incorporate my life, and get as personal as I can, in order to give a part of myself to my readers. This is a much more engaging form of communication, because I’m talking to you, my friend, instead of a crowd of people I don’t know. I want to know you.

Remember to be proud of your work and tell people about it. Be the content, be your word, and blog from the heart.
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Alex writes about personal development at AlexShalman.com.

Thank you, Alex.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Change the World: One Pound at a Time

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Hey, Karen, How Can We Change the World?

changetheworld8

This guest post was contributed by friend and SOB, Karen Hanrahan. I had the joy of meeting her in October. What an inspiring and delightful person she is! Karen writes of an incredible change in her own life. –ME “Liz” Strauss

One Pound at a Time

by Karen Hanrahan

‘ Tis the season for eating!!! I can hear my indulging commentary “Oh why fight it”, isn’t the holiday season all about the food? “ I’ll be really good after the holidays” (in holiday forked tongue that really means 6 weeks of being bad) “I’ll binge now and worry later” (sort of like I’ll shove it in faster than I did before because in January I am going on a diet)

Welcome to my world. One year ago I was a whopping size 24 or XXX (not the steamy sexy kind of XXX either) It’s one thing to hit 200 lbs, it’s another to go above and beyond 200lbs. At 240 lbs how could any weight loss make a difference – 230 lbs now what? 100 lbs to go?? Forget it.

One brownie became 3 brownies simply because what difference did it make. In the bigger (ha!) picture of things – I was already big.

How did I get to be so darn BIG? Some of it was circumstance (car accident — 2 years of pain), some of it was chosen sedentary-ness (if I didn’t move then it wouldn’t hurt) and most of it became utter and pathetic apathy (it’s just too darn hard.)

For those of us who have been of size, there are details to being fat that are never discussed. Those of thinness take for granted the horrors we of girth endure.

In my minds eye, meaning without ever looking in the mirror, I was skinny. My true self (or the person I could seemingly relate to) would walk down the street see the reflection in the glass window and completely ignore who she saw. What I don’t acknowledge won’t hurt me

I could never sit neatly in my chair. Those of thinness kindly observe that when you sit in a chair, volumes of you don’t roll over the side. I affectionately called it sitting in the round.

After a recent 60 lbs of weight loss, I got on a plane and buckled my seatbelt – without even thinking I sat in the middle seat, something I could never do as a woman of size. I burst into tears when I realized that my thighs were not invading someone’s personal space. Nothing worse than sharing thunder thighs with a stranger. (I then had to explain to 2 strangers why the heck I was crying.)

Ever go in the Woman’s Plus Department? See anything hip you’d care to wear? See any natural fabrics? Can you say S-T-R-E-T-C-H, synthetic land? Can you see that the #1 color choice is black? Can you imagine the feeling of black synthetic stretchy fabric on a balmy humid summer afternoon? Thunder thighs wrapped in plastic. Lovely huh?

I once had to walk through a crowd. A young man in front of me – a thin young man pushed his way through the crowd shouting “WIDE LOAD coming through”
WIDE LOAD. I thought I would simply die.

How bad does it have to get to shift from hefty to healthy? How horrible did it have to be?

For me, I got scared. I also got embarrassed. I looked in the mirror. I faced my skepticism, took on some products that helped the process, but mostly I allowed myself room for being real. What monster had I created and was I willing to look at that creep face to face.

5 things made a difference for me

  • water –- the only beverage of choice
  • snacks –- in this order; protein, vegetables, fruit, carbs
  • movement –- like get up and just walk – forget the gym membership – save that for later when you’ll actually go
  • immediate success –- seeing some weight come off was truly inspirational
  • habits –- notice them –- boy, I didn’t even know the bad habits I had created. Do something about them.

Not rocket science and not something that everyone doesn’t already know.

I had 2 immediate goals. Kick the 200 lb mark, and get out of the plus department.

I celebrate today my size 16 – ness. (not age 16 goof, SIZE 16!) and officially I am so out of the plus department!

In the world of thin-ness and ultimate BMI I have about 30 lbs to go. I lost 60 lbs in 12 months – slowly and steadily. No up and down yo-yo stuff, and the best part is I feel really swell.

Do we hear weight success stories all the time? Sure. Perhaps you see a bit of yourself in mine. More than anything perhaps you find a bit of inspiration to give yourself that kick in the size ah-hem pants and get on the path to health. Best yet if we all took on weight loss, we’d alter a frightening epidemic issue. One lb at a time.

— Karen Hanrahan

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Thanks, Karen! You’re an inspiration.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss