A few months ago, Scott Roen reached out to our OPEN Forum Connectodex® members* to ask a simple question: “Want to Write for OPEN Forum?” The answer was a resounding “Yes” and many of you are now Forum contributors! I have been so impressed by the quality of posts and keen insights being shared. Who better to give advice on business growth than owners who are out there in the trenches every day—learning, connecting and growing successful businesses?
While our mission at OPEN Forum is to provide best-in-class insights and advice to our community, we also seek to provide exposure for our community members as you are advancing your reputations, building your businesses and driving more customer and client demand. In our new version of the OPEN Forum homepage, we’ve given prime real estate to our Forum contributors by including a “From the Community” area within the features highlighted at the top of the page.
Given the great contributions we’ve seen over the last few months, we are inviting additional OPEN Forum members with expertise worth sharing to become part of the program. Please e-mail me at Stacey@openforum.com if you are interested!
Here are some of my key takeaways from recent community member posts:
As Director of OPEN Forum, I was interested to see what Gabriel Shaoolian of Blue Fountain Media had to say about The 4 Biggest Business Website Mistakes. He says, “use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to engage your visitors (and) most importantly, provide ways for visitors to share your content.” OPEN Forum has lively engagement through @openforum and facebook.com/open. We’ve also taken Gabriel’s tips to heart with the redesign of OPEN Forum, which gives more prominence to the most popular sharing tools and also allows you to view articles by “Most Shared.”
Since visitors to Forum may also comment using LinkedIn, I was eager to learn from Jeannette Paladino of Write Speak Sell, in her post How LinkedIn Changed the Way I do Business, about the impact of groups—she belongs to more than 40 of them including The WordPress Group, The Blogger’s Bulletin and Bloggers Helping Bloggers. We’ll be encouraging our OPEN Forum contributors to follow her advice as they further their own blogging careers.
Lawrence Polsky of PeopleNRG says “sometimes it makes sense to fight” for your professional opinion in his post 4 ‘F-Words’ It’s Ok To Use During Conflict. But, he cautions, there are ways of doing this appropriately. He provides short exercises that can help you express a point of view about which you are passionate.
And Robyn Hatcher of SpeakEtc. offers some great tips to Stop Presenting And Start Engaging including how to create a strong opening (hint, don’t introduce yourself, they already know who you are!) and what to do if you see you are losing your audience.
Since I manage a team for OPEN Forum, I looked into Dominique Barteet of Onesole’s 5 Ways to Make Good Employees Great Employees to be reminded of what I try to do every day: “stop and take a look at what (my) employees are actually doing” and tell them how much I value it. Such a simple point that goes a long way for creating a positive attitude. Let me take this opportunity here on Forum to give a shout out to my team and thank them for the tremendous work they do every single day to make OPEN Forum what it is.
That’s what it’s all about for us at OPEN Forum: sharing professional insights to help businesses do more business and now, helping to build personal and professional brands with opportunities like writing for Forum. Like Gabriel, Jeannette, Lawrence, Robyn and Dominique have discovered: what you learn as a business owner is worth telling others about. At OPEN Forum, we’d like to provide you with a platform to share your message.
If you’d like to be considered as an OPEN Forum Member* Contributor, e-mail me at Stacey@openforum.com
* If you’re an OPEN Cardmember who is not yet an OPEN Forum member, join the Connectodex.
Image credit: Argo Translation, Inc, Peter Argondizzo, Glenview, IL, Member Since: 1995
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Prakash Shrestha 14 days ago
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