Everything we write has an audience. Even a private journal has the author to read it. The more we write, the more we get experience with words, learning what they mean in varied contexts. As we look back over what we have written, we listen, consider, and question its power and impact.

Blogging has an audience that responds and reacts. The comments let us know whether the message we send is received fully and intact. By blogging often we develop a voice that is consistent and more natural. As we learn our personal writing habits, we gain confidence that powers our message forward. As we listen to our readers, we more finely tune our message to communicate with them.

Blogging gets us closer to a clearer voice that people understand.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.
Get your best voice in the conversation.

Once upon a time when we were young our parents and teacher told us stories to pass on information. Long ago the oral history of nations was shared the same way.

Many of us blog for our businesses. Blogging allows us to share our expertise and our knowledge base. It can give us a podium on which to stand and deliver our message to the world. Don’t go there. Podiums make lecturers.

We might like to learn, but few folks like to be taught.

Great teachers share stories, and in that way, pass on what they’ve experienced. They follow the writers’ rule of “show don’t tell,” pointing out examples that bring home ideas and lessons that are meaningful in ways that principles alone could never illuminate.

I want to know how you know what you know so that I can be sure what you’re learned will work for me.

It’s my experience that telling stories lets people find their way into a situation or an idea without a wall of information between. Stories entertain without being intimidating or intrusive. We can see how to apply good story without feeling that we’re being judge for what we may have done wrong.

Stories are a sticky way of teaching and learning,

Share a story about how stories have helped you.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

1. Links are only valuable because people click on them. But they are valuable because people DO click on them.

   I would add to that. The value of a link that is not clicked on is a negative value. It takes space and is a missed opportunity for a link that might be useful to readers. A frivolous link also has negative value. Readers click and it wastes their time. So I recommend that you Think before you link.

2. Comment numbers are a more accurate measure of you success than the number of visitors you receive.

   I would add to that if you are engaging your readers to the point where they comment conversationally, i.e. interactively responding to what is said both in the post and within the comment box, then they are probably also talking about what they read after they leave your blog.

3. . . . there is such a thing as Blog Rage. . . . And the real villain is probably an overabundance of testosterone combined with too many hours of inactivity sitting in a chair blogging!

   One more case in which the solution is to breathe.

4. Finally, building relationships is about trust. So determine to become an expert on how trust works online. People will trust you when you are credible, consistent, considerate and cooperative. They will trust you when they see other people trusting you.

   I might add that people trust you when you’re willing to trust other people. Why not be first?

Relationships are the key to business and the business of blogging. They are the key to any social endeavor. Learning to communicate with fluency and comfort is as much a part of being comfortable with ourselves as it is with interacting with others — it’s from a base of self awareness that we know how to respond to the actions around with grace and respect.

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM

See also Work with Liz! at Successful Blog

I’m pleased and honored to say he included this blog and comment at position 4.

Liz Strauss’s Successful-Blog: This blog has some amazing insights into the craft of writing.

But, I must say Mr. Stelzner list is incomplete in that it could not include his own blog.

Keep this in mind when you check out the entire list.

Michael A. Stelzner’s Writing White Papers Blog THE blog by the man who wrote THE white paper on white papers and then wrote Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged. There’s a reason his newsletter has 20,000 subscribers.

Always deal with the best.

Thank you, Michael.

Liz Strauss

That leaves the decisions that require judgment to people, not machines. The inherent problem is that judgment calls get called differently based on the person who faces the decision and what that person brings to the table.

The outcome will be a result of the decision — without regard to the person who made it.

That fact is stressful. It means I am held to the same standard as folks who have much more knowledge and experience than I might ever have.

Leadership: Turning Ambiguity into Motivation

To be a leader, one can’t flinch at decisions. A leader has to look through the gray to evaluate a path. Effective leaders do that with confidence and success. Here are some ways they accomplish that.

• They understand the goals of the organization and test decisions against how outcomes might support those goals.
• They understand the priorities for their team and use them as decision-making tools.
• They frame gating questions that would make or break the decision, i.e. they look within a decision to find which parts are indeed black and white.
• They check history for data on similar decisions and their outcomes.
• They check their own experience — have they made this decision before? How did it turn out?
• They gather information from widely diverse sources in a limited amount of time, evaluate it, and use only what they need to make their decision.
• They continuously test the outcomes of the decisions they make so that any decision limited risk.

All of these actions, habits really, lower the stress of ambiguity in making decisions. When leaders use and model them, teams pick them up as standard procedures in problem solving. Flexibility in thinking and testing assumptions becomes the norm. The ambiguity becomes a positive motivator rather than a stress factor in the environment. Team members learn how to be leaders in the process.

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding manager. –Perfect Virtual Manager.

It’s my experience that most folks don’t have training or confidence in how to put what needs to be said into writing. This not only causes miscommunication, it also reflects on job performance, projecting a lower image of competency than is reality. The gap in training and confidence also steals time and causes stress as people work and worry over how to express their ideas and issues in writing.

Even teachers have this problem.

Though enthusiasm and job commitment help to overcome hurdles in other situations, at the juncture of writing without confidence, experience, or complete training, enthusiasm, and commitment can often cause additional stress and be debilitating. Writers begin to self-edit before they have even started writing, and they get what folks call writer’s block. What they really have is a major case of stress cause by a fear of failing. It’s dangerous to miscommunicate in writing.

How to Lower Stress When Writing

I offer this checklist to help writers refocus, to bring their thinking back to the writing, it’s purpose, and the audience it will be serving.

1. Make the work area visually clean.
2. Think about the person that is the audience. If the audience is a group, imagine a prototypical individual from that group to write for. Let’s call that person your reader.
3. Consider your reader’s traits and characteristics — know that your reader is intelligent, but doesn’t have the information you are about to share.
4. Decide what you want your reader to remember. Write that out in words your reader might actually use to say it.
5. Prepare notes — bullet points — to organize your thoughts around what you want your reader to remember. Most informal communication should convey less than three bullet points. One idea or bullet point is perfectly fine in an email.
6. Use the right tool to communicate. Know the heirarchies of business communication. Understand which is most appropriate and effective for the information you have to share.
   Instant Message > Email > Business Letter > Formal Proposal
   Instant Message > VoIP/Telephone > Meeting
7. Write up your message, using your notes and a clear mental image of your reader and the venue as you write.

Follow this checklist and you’ll find that stress will fall away. Writer’s block won’t be a worry, because you’ll know what you want to say, who you want to say it to, and how you want to say it. You’ll know the type of communication and the venue. You’ll be able to imagine your audience and get to what they need to hear from you to understand your message.

Almost always writer’s block is caused by the fact that we don’t know what we want to say or who we’re talking to.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding manager. –Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz Strauss

What seems to happen in most cases is that we get working so hard that we find ourselves entrenched in too much work and too much stress. Long before we realize,.we have started to work from one minute to the next. Forward thinking, planning into the future gives way to those critical tasks that must be accomplished each day.

We are in tactics mode. Strategy is gone completely by then. Our to-do lists are managing our time, not the other way around.

When someone says get some help, the reply often is “I don’t have time to teach a person what we’re doing.”

STOP! When you hear yourself say that, stop. Think. Will you have more time in three weeks to teach someone? If the answer is no, take the time to teach someone now. Then in the next two weeks after he or she knows what you’re doing, you’ll not only catch up, but you’ll have another trained person who can move the project along.

Seriously. Stop to do that now.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager – Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz

In his book, Beyond Code: Learn to Distinguish Yourself in 9 Simple Steps! Raj Setty talks about how professionals often chase the “hot skills” of the moment rather than building a complete and well-rounded professional profile. In an interview at Successful-Blog Raj says

I am of the firm belief that most technology professionals are in a trap. They go after learning “hot” skills that have a short shelf-life just because everyone else around them are going after those “hot” skills. When these skills become obsolete or “out of fashion”, they go after a new set of “hot” skills. They repeat this cycle and think that they can continue to repeat this cycle (3 – 5 years) forever.

When these same people leave the traditional organization, they find that their wide and varied skill set offers many general business possibilities they might pursue on their own. Too often what happens is that they look for external factors to decide which skills are important on which to build a business.

These would-be entrepreneurs define what they do in a new way to each person they meet — in essence each time putting a new “fishing pole into the water,” hoping that one of the definitions will catch a client. That client will become the foundation from which the new business will grow. Unfortunately what most often happens is that the proverbial fisher ends up with 18 fishing poles in the water. He or she spends valuable time running up and down the proverbial riverbank, checking to see whether anything has happened. If the answer is negative, he or she might even add more.

As time passes, the fisher’s effectiveness at defining a skill set or attending to any one pole becomes more and more diluted. He or she gets more confused and less attention from people who might have been interested in someone who focused on a single goal.

The illusion here is that more fishing poles means more options are open. But in fact, that is not remotely true. The 18 fishing poles in the water mean it is 18 times harder for the fisher to respond to a real offer. The illusion of 18 fishing poles makes decisions seems 18 times closer, but in fact each decision is just as far as if it were one, and the fisher’s time is over invested in attending to things that haven’t caught any attention.

Do you have 18 fishing poles in the water? If you do, find someone who can help you determine which 3 or 4 are worth investing real time in. Pull the other poles out. Use the time that you would have spent tending them focusing your direction and defining your plan.

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful small business there is an Outstanding Manager. — The Perfect Virtual Manager

Just the idea of not knowing who is reading can be an overwhelming state for some writers. How to decide on simple things such as writing voice and style can become looming questions. I suggest that as the blogger, you make a choice that your reader will be an intelligent person who doesn’t knowthe information, a single most important reader, who is very much like yourself.

To make the audience take form as a person, which will make the writing easier and stronger, ask yourself these questions;

• Who am I writing for?
• How is this reader like me and how is this reader not?
• Why does this reader read blogs like mine?

One helpful thing to do is to sketch a written profile of the person who might be the average reader, that single most important reader that you will be writing for. Then with that reader in mind, you can write with confidence and care, in a conversational tone of voice, choosing words and phrasing that is appropriate for that reader to understand the content as well as to get a sense of who you, the blogger, really are.

Liz Strauss

When I first started blogging, I often tried to do too much. I’d write a post that carried the load of too many thoughts at one time. Those blogging posts went both deep and wide. They were so complete, I left no room for readers to add their thoughts.

It’s not a conversation when all a reader can say is I agree with you, Great post. or You covered that subject really well. There’s just nowhere for a conversation to go, if I don’t leave room for a reader’s thoughts to squeeze in between my own. Now I know to think about the conversation when I write.

Here are a few things that I do differently now.

• I ask more questions without answering them.
• I don’t try to think through every possibility as I once used to do.
• I’ve backed off on holding myself accountable as an expert on the what I write about and instead, think of myself as one of the audience talking to another reader about an idea, waiting to hear his or her point of view.

Right now I’m wondering what you’re thinking about most blog posts. What is the thing that pulls you out? What changes you into a person who writes a comment, who wants to add to the discussion, who feels your thoughts are important, will be valued, and will be heard?

Those are questions I think about when I blog . . . only readers can answer them.

Liz Strauss