Cindy King's International Business Blog » Summer Book Review

The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog

Cindy King — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:00:45 +0000

Book & Product Reviews

Now, I do read a few blogs on blogging. Not every week, but fairly consistently.

There is one blog that has been on my radar for a while. Simply because all the big guys always give it their thumbs up. I have always found a wealth of content there. But it never really got on my list of places I would automatically check out.

It’s the color purple. The theme makes it feel like an astrology site, or a women’s problem site. There is something about the color and first impression that signals to me that I am wasting my time.

But every time I go there I read pages and pages of articles. This website talks to its readers in a way that pulls them in. And it also does this to me. Even if I have a hang up with my own personal perceptions of this purple theme.

Which blog is this?

A Successful And Outstanding Blog

The other day I came across the author’s blog. For some reason I never landed there before.

Liz Strauss

It was only then that I got over the purple thing and became voracious. The Liz Strauss blog is not purple. It proves she really knows what she is doing online.

So I immediately got her e-book and thoroughly enjoyed reading during my break out in the sun today.

The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog

Liz Strauss knows how to create a community on a blog.

This is something difficult to teach others to do on their own blogs. After reading Liz’s e-book it became apparent to me that creating a blog community is a little like learning cross-cultural communication.

You need to jump in and learn to do it.
Detailed how-to instructions do not work.
The important part is in your own mindset.

If you get the right mindset you will teach yourself effective cross-cultural communication.

This book does an excellent job at putting you in the right mindset for creating a successful blog. I think it is an excellent read for beginner bloggers and also for bloggers feeling challenged.

Read this book and you will float back out to the right mindset you need to create a great community on your blog.

Communication For International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with communication for international sales:

A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs By Victor C. Pellegrino
Content Rich By Jon Wuebben
Get Content Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett
Letting Go Of The Words – Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish
Stories That Sell By Casey Hibbard
The Culturally Customized Web Site By Nitish Singh And Arun Pereira
The Magic Of Pre-Writing By Steven Osborne
The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog By Liz Strauss

International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international sales:

All of the Little Sales Books by Jeffrey Gitomer
Asinine Advertising By Herschell Gordon Lewis
Influencer: The Power To Change Anything by Kerry Patterson – Joseph Grenny – David Maxfield – Ron McMillian & Al Switzler
Sales Strategy From The Inside Out By Duane Sparks

International Web Marketing

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international web marketing:

Bit Literacy Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload By Mark Hurst
Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money Online By Stone Evans
How The Internet Works By Preston Gralla
How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders By Catherine Seda
Landing Page Optimization By Tim Ash
Mastering Online Marketing By Mitch Meyerson
Multichannel Marketing By Akin Arikan
Online Competitive Intelligence By Helen P. Burwell
ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
Stats Faceslap By Ed Rivis
The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy By Ed Rivis
Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Here are some Product Reviews:

All of the book and product reviews here are totally unsolicited… spontaneous …and without affiliate links. These are books I have read recently and only the ones that I share with friends. So all of the reviews you find here are on books and products that I highly recommend.

Also, as these are books and products that I have recently read since, this is not a list of my all-time favorite books. Hopefully I will get around to reviewing my favorite culture and international business books sometime soon.

Use these skills in your international tactics on the…
Get International Clients International Sales Road Map:

Guide To Multichannel Marketing

• Do you know how to communicate with different countries?

This guide shows you how

Guide To International Web Marketing

• Do you know how to pull all of your different international marketing pieces together?

This guide shows you how

Step 5 – Connect With Your International Markets

Connect…

• With culture customized content

• With trust and empathy

• With strong cross-cultural communication

International Business Success Basics

• Do you feel at a loss with regards to dealing with international business?

This guide gives you the background information you need right from the start.

The Magic Of Pre-Writing

Cindy King — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:00:31 +0000

Book & Product Reviews

I stumbled upon a writer’s website the other day. Someone recommended Steven Osborne’s article on

Speedwriting For The Rest Of Us.

My note taking has become a bit messy lately. Steven’s article on speedwriting hooked me into his website.

This is a place for people who write. And Steven writes well. He has 3 e-books for aspiring writers, very reasonably priced, at $7. During my break today, I decided to read his book:

The Magic Of Pre-Writing

Now first let me say, I do use pre-writing templates, often, but not systematically. A glimpse at his template got me intrigued. He knew more about using pre-writing templates than I did.

I enjoyed reading this book. A quick and easy read. I finished my break with a much deeper understanding of using pre-writing templates.

Steven does an excellent job at describing and teaching you how to use a template before you begin writing. He takes you through each step with detailed how-to information. You will never get writers block again if you follow his template. Everything is there.

The result is:

Your writing project writes itself.

As you go through the different steps in filling out your template you write an effective outline for your project. And it is even a step or two beyond an outline. All you really need is a few transition sentences to pull your project together in a final draft.

Steven breaks down all non-fiction writing projects into 4 different basic categories. He then takes you through each of the four categories in detail with an example.

I highly recommend this little 43 page e-book to anyone who wants to write non-fiction effortlessly, and wants to know how to use a template for great writing.

Communication For International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with communication for international sales:

A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs By Victor C. Pellegrino
Content Rich By Jon Wuebben
Get Content Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett
Letting Go Of The Words – Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish
Stories That Sell By Casey Hibbard
The Culturally Customized Web Site By Nitish Singh And Arun Pereira
The Magic Of Pre-Writing By Steven Osborne
The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog By Liz Strauss

International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international sales:

All of the Little Sales Books by Jeffrey Gitomer
Asinine Advertising By Herschell Gordon Lewis
Influencer: The Power To Change Anything by Kerry Patterson – Joseph Grenny – David Maxfield – Ron McMillian & Al Switzler
Sales Strategy From The Inside Out By Duane Sparks

International Web Marketing

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international web marketing:

Bit Literacy Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload By Mark Hurst
Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money Online By Stone Evans
How The Internet Works By Preston Gralla
How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders By Catherine Seda
Landing Page Optimization By Tim Ash
Mastering Online Marketing By Mitch Meyerson
Multichannel Marketing By Akin Arikan
Online Competitive Intelligence By Helen P. Burwell
ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
Stats Faceslap By Ed Rivis
The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy By Ed Rivis
Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Here are some Product Reviews:

Use these skills in your international tactics on the…
Get International Clients International Sales Road Map:

Guide To Multichannel Marketing

• Do you know how to communicate with different countries?

This guide shows you how

Guide To International Web Marketing

• Do you know how to pull all of your different international marketing pieces together?

This guide shows you how

Step 5 – Connect With Your International Markets

Connect…

• With culture customized content

• With trust and empathy

• With strong cross-cultural communication

International Business Success Basics

• Do you feel at a loss with regards to dealing with international business?

This guide gives you the background information you need right from the start.

A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs

Cindy King — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:00:56 +0000

Book & Product Reviews

Yes. I am working through the summer. Although working from home does have its advantages.

Regular reading breaks in the sun…every afternoon.

So this is the start of a new series of book reviews for as long as the sunny weather lasts.

My criteria for choosing what to read is based on:

Quick afternoon reads – short and easy to read
Useful for creating an international web business

Here is the first book I read. And it is a gem.

A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs by Victor C. Pellegrino

This book surprised me. So much in fact that I have been trying to remember who recommended it to me.

You see, this book is one of three books by Victor Pellegrino. I bought them as used books on Amazon, so they came in at different times. The first one to arrive was:

A Writer’s Guide To Using 8 Methods Of Transition

This is a slim book. Easy to follow examples. I couldn’t wait to read the other two books.
The book, A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs, came in yesterday. And yes, it is about writing paragraphs.

Light bulbs started going off in my brain as I read this. This is why I wish I could remember who recommended it – he knew about the light bulbs.

What I loved most about this book, is it is great to use as a guideline for writing web pages.

Yes, web pages.

Why? Well…

Web pages need to stay focused on one subject. So do paragraphs.
Web pages need to be written for one specific audience. So do paragraphs.
Web pages need to be written in a logical order. So do paragraphs.

And this book makes it all very easy. Victor Pellegrino teaches you with examples. He is a good writer. So learning is fast.

This is a fantastic primer for web copywriting. It is not the only book you should read on web copywriting. But it does teach you how to stay focused on one subject. You can easily pick one of the 30 different paragraphs and adapt it to one web page.

Just like in web copywriting, this book remains totally focused on your audience. You learn how to speak to your reader’s needs at that particular moment…in a particular paragraph. This is vital in web copywriting.

After a brief outline on how to write paragraphs, the main substance of the book is on 30 different types of paragraphs.

Yes, these are normal length paragraphs. Standard web writing uses shorter “paragraphs”. The 30 different examples show you how to structure one paragraph for one subject based on the reason for writing your paragraph.

Victor Pellegrino writes well. This book is very easy to understand. Perfect for a quick read. It has inspired me to do a series of 30 different paragraphs as short blog posts.

Oh, and the third book in the series…? It came in the mail today.

A Writer’s Guide To Transitional Words And Expressions

This is another gem I will keep next to me. It is a very slim book. It is a mini-thesaurus on transitional words. I have been battling with the word “but” for a few weeks. Its just seems to crop up too often. Hopefully this little book will help me get out of this habit quickly.

The book only took me a couple of hours to read. I enjoyed it and found it inspiring.
Watch out for some short blog “paragraph” articles soon…about 30 of them.

Communication For International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with communication for international sales:

A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs By Victor C. Pellegrino
Content Rich By Jon Wuebben
Get Content Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett
Letting Go Of The Words – Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish
Stories That Sell By Casey Hibbard
The Culturally Customized Web Site By Nitish Singh And Arun Pereira
The Magic Of Pre-Writing By Steven Osborne
The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog By Liz Strauss

International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international sales:

All of the Little Sales Books by Jeffrey Gitomer
Asinine Advertising By Herschell Gordon Lewis
Influencer: The Power To Change Anything by Kerry Patterson – Joseph Grenny – David Maxfield – Ron McMillian & Al Switzler
Sales Strategy From The Inside Out By Duane Sparks

International Web Marketing

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international web marketing:

Bit Literacy Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload By Mark Hurst
Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money Online By Stone Evans
How The Internet Works By Preston Gralla
How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders By Catherine Seda
Landing Page Optimization By Tim Ash
Mastering Online Marketing By Mitch Meyerson
Multichannel Marketing By Akin Arikan
Online Competitive Intelligence By Helen P. Burwell
ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
Stats Faceslap By Ed Rivis
The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy By Ed Rivis
Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Here are some Product Reviews:

Use these skills in your international tactics on the…
Get International Clients International Sales Road Map:

• With trust and empathy

• With strong cross-cultural communication

International Business Success Basics

• Do you feel at a loss with regards to dealing with international business?

This guide gives you the background information you need right from the start.