At least, not until I made the acquaintance of web strategist, brand builder and corporate trainer extraordinaire, Liz Strauss.

Liz, who has a great skill in creative business thinking, had taken the commonly objectionable term “SOB” and used it as literally a badge of approval for Successful and Outstanding Blogs.

As well as being a creative and disruptive (in the best sense) thinker, Liz Strauss is also an exemplary encourager of other bloggers, so there are now many blogs which have been given the nod to carry the SOB badge.

Happily for me, this Thinking Home Business blog is one of them.

But there is more to Liz’s blog than just listing SOBs.

Her Successful and Outstanding Blog(gers) site is a rich source of fresh thinking and valuable information for anyone in business.

Recent posts include:

Influence: How to Persuade Anyone in Business to Do What You Want

7 Outstanding Web Tools to Organize 2011 and Get the Right Information to You – a guest post by Lior Levin

How to Make Quality the Signal Above the Time and Money Noise

Not before time, I have just added Liz’s blog to my Top Sites page here.

If you have a blog you would like to see endowed with the SOB badge, check out If You Want to be an SOB for the details of how to get Liz’s attention on that.

The post Why Would I Smile If You Called Me an SOB? appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

This blog displays proudly the SOB (Successful and Outstanding Bloggers) badge.

SOBCon is the annual “Biz School for Bloggers” to be held once again in Chicago, May 1-3. What has always impressed me about SOBCon is the complete focus on helping participants develop viable business plans. It is also a manageable size – maximum 250 participants – with a faculty of very knowledgeable, very practical, business-focused blogging stars.

This year, as part of the preparation, SOBCon founder Liz Strauss and her colleagues have come up with an interesting challenge and a discount for those who join in.

The challenge is called “Blog It, Earn It” – i.e. earn a discount on the price of admission. And at $200 off the $795 full price, that is a very substantial discount indeed.

What do you have to do to play? You have to post something on what relationships mean to you, in business parlance the “ROI of Relationships”.

I’m going to join in, even though, regretfully, I am not planning to do the long trek to Chicago. I’ll apparently be able to pass my discount on to someone else, which is nice (see the note at the end of this post for what I propose to do about passing it on) .

I could write at length about how important relationships have been and are to me: relationships with my parents, my brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, nieces, nephews, teachers, and my wonderful partner of twenty years and co-author on this blog, Suzie Cheel.

But for the purpose of this exercise I am going to concentrate on relationships in business.

And especially on why one of my key operating principles is “relationships first, then business”.

So here goes:

What Relationships Mean to Me in Business

Thinking now about what relationships mean to me in business I feel quite moved, with deep feelings of gratitude especially.

Because it seems to me that all or most of the good business I have done over the past twenty years has stemmed from and has been sustained by relationships. And I can say with confidence that where the business has been good there have been good relationships and where it has not been good there has been a problematic or sour relationship involved. Not always at the beginning, but at some point.

When I speak of business as being “good” or “bad” I am not thinking of whether it paid well or not. In fact I have sometimes been quite well paid for business that with hindsight I could well have done without.

One example of a business deal that was bad is the time, early in my consulting career, that I was consulting to a government agency and with every draft of the report we submitted we were asked to make changes. I kept thinking that with one more lot of amendments we could be done, and indeed that eventually came to pass. But in the meantime, I had developed a twinge in my back  – it only bothered me when I sat down to type. It was very painful. When the report was done and handed in, the pain went away! Weird, but true.

A well paid project, but bad business. Why? My pretty confident assessment is that, although I had a reasonable relationship with the person commissioning the report, there were others behind the scenes “monitoring” the project from the viewpoint of a particular political agenda.  So what had looked like a project initiated on the basis of a reasonable relationship foundered because there were other, hidden and – from my point of view – unreasonable relationships at work which turned the exercise into such a bad project that my body actually revolted.

Of course, I’ve endeavored at times like that to buck myself up with the old “it’s just business” comment. But what sort of a life is it to have to “put up” with things, not enjoy what you do? No thanks.

Fortunately, I have many examples of business projects, past and current, which have been based on and sustained by good relationships.

I think for example of one client where I had an ongoing consulting role and who used to turn to me and my company when specific projects came up that might otherwise have gone elsewhere. He knew that with some of these projects I would not be doing the detailed work personally, but he trusted me to put together an appropriate team or outsource the details responsibly. Financially this was very worthwhile. It was also enjoyable work because of the frank, mutually trusting relationship I had with the client.

Other work has come to me “out of the blue” because someone I knew was in a conversation with others about a project that needed my skills and knowledge, which led to my being contacted and subsequently hired.

Yes, I did tender for projects and spent hours writing submissions, but because the projects I was good at were often the ones that did not fit neatly into regular categories of consultancy, much of that submission writing was, with hindsight, a waste of time. Maybe all of it – I don’t like to dwell on that too much!

In more recent years, as a coach, author, workshop leader and speaker, business has typically, and perhaps universally, come to me via a relationship, whether a long-standing, professional network relationship or via the blogging or social media community, or from something more immediate such as someone observing me and speaking with me at an event and then talking to me about business possibilities.

These experiences, the bad ones as well as the good ones, have taught me that doing business based on (positive) relationships – and by that I mean open, honest, trusting, constructive relationships – is now the only way I want to do business.

That works for me, not only financially, but in peace of mind, mind-body health and sense of contribution, and in terms of my picture of how things should be when life goes well.

In short, Relationships First, then Business, is a principle that serves me well, first as a filter to keep out the toxic experiences before they start and then as a basis and framework for doing business happily, productively and with mutual respect.

To qualify for the discount, I need now to provide a link to this site on Twitter with the hashtag #blogiearnit. Then I propose to pass the discount on to one of our readers here. If you would like to qualify, just leave a comment, perhaps share your own story and say you would like to go in a random draw to qualify. If you are doing your own blog post to qualify for the discount, note that the offer from SOBCon ends a couple of days from now, on March 7.

The post Relationships First, then Business appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

Liz Strauss at Successful-Blog is having a Blog Show this weekend It will be like a Car (Auto) Show.

Does your blog need a tune-up?

As Liz suggests, give it a polish and a trim.

Maybe unload some of those widgets? I won’t suggest a new theme unless you are feeling very adventurous.

Maybe there is something you have been putting off doing that will improve your blog?

Liz is is going to line them up and look them over. This is a great free promotion too.

Here’s what you do.

Write up the following information:
Blog Title
Blog URL link:
Blog Tagline
A sentence or two about what makes your blog worth visiting.

The post Give Your Blog A Polish and Trim appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

In her new ebook: The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog: An insider’s guide to the conversation that’s changing how business works Liz Strauss asks two key questions of her readers:

• Can you Hear The Internet?
• Can the Internet Hear You?

The first section addresses the question Can you Hear The Internet?

• Community – like minds, Us and them,
• Listening – are you listening?
• Business
• Conversation
• Connections: 10 reasons to write and publish every day!
• That first hello

The second section looks at the question Can the Internet Hear You?

The focus of this second question is on how to achieve great writing:

• an effective internet writer
• Finding compelling idea
• Writing voice
• Have you got writing rhythm?
• Word power
• Secret rules of online writing
• Great SEO info and more

Liz has high standards:

” A truly successful and outstanding blog also has meaning…… you might call that spirit. You might call that direction or focus. I call that soul.”

Do yourself a favor and give Liz a – one day late – birthday present).

This book is an outstanding guide for every blogger wanting to build their blog’s prominence.

I for one I will be paying much closer attention to the why and how of what I am writing.

Some other reviews and mentions for this book on how to be an outstanding and successful blogger.

The post Liz Strauss’ Secrets of Blogging Success appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

Liz Strauss is running a great series : The Ultimate Guide to a Wildly Sticky, Successful and Outstanding Blog.

Today’s post in her series is about Finding A Direction — Goals, Titles, and Taglines. Liz asks Surely You Have a Goal?

A blogging goal gives a blog a heart and a direction. It’s a powerful exercise in getting your thoughts focused in on why you’re actually doing this. In essence, a blogging goal provides a measure of success that is there to work toward.

Head on over: Liz has provided 6 questions to help you answer the question Surely You Have Goal? You will learn how to make your titles and taglines sing as well.

Does Your Blog have a goal?

Photo (c) Suzie Cheel

The post Does Your Blog Have a Goal? appeared first on Thinking Home Business.