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Effective Online Forum Usage

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- Herbert Simon

Online forums, message boards, and newsgroups are now ubiquitous. These powerful communication tools offer many strong benefits. However, forum participation can also become a destructive addiction, where the benefits are overshadowed by negative side effects.

Here are some potential benefits of regular online forum participation:

* Intellectual exchange

* Learning new ideas and refining old ones

* Enjoying community membership

* Influencing the forum’s evolution

* Contributing to others

* Making new friends and contacts

* New business leads

* Keeping up with current events

* Learning about new opportunities

Here are some potential negative effects of excessive forum usage:

* Reduced concentration and focus

* Reduced productivity

* Chronic procrastination

* Increased pessimism and/or apathy

* Being distracted by endless debates and idle gossip

* Gradually substituting tribal group think for your own intelligence

* Impaired social skills, neglected relationships, and a weakened social circle (a consequence of substituting online socialization for face-to-face conversations)

* Reduced energy (forum participation is sedentary compared to more active social outlets)

* Reduced self-esteem

* Career and income may suffer (including loss of employment)

* Forum addiction

Since the early 1990s, I’ve participated in many different online forums, message boards, and newsgroups and have experienced many of these positive and negative effects at various times. I ran a popular game developer forum for almost two years, so I’ve had experience both as a participant and a forum operator. On the positive side, I’ve learned many great ideas, made valuable new business contacts, and even met my wife on a local computer bulletin board system. On the negative side, I found excess participation to be a huge time drain (and very addicting as well).

Here are some suggestions for using forums effectively and avoiding the negative side effects:

1. Take a Forum Fast

First, if you’re currently active in any forums, go on a forum fast. Stop visiting all forums for a while; don’t even lurk. I recommend a fasting period of 30 days, with a bare minimum of 14 days. This will help you break any unconscious habits and regain your perspective, so you can intelligently evaluate the role forums should play in your life. Otherwise, you may be coming from a place of unconscious habit and will likely overestimate the value of continued participation. If you’re currently a forum moderator, take a forum vacation, and enlist someone to temporarily assume your moderation duties. Redirect the time you would have spent in online forums to something positive like exercising or reading books. If you don’t think you have the discipline to do this, simply make a post in each forum explaining that you’ll be taking the next 30 days off, and if any forum member catches you online, you’ll pay the first person that emails you about it $100. This should give you enough leverage to stick with your fast.

2. Reassess Your Forum Usage Habits

Once you’ve completed the initial fasting period (and not before), take a fresh look at your forum participation habits. Imagine that you just discovered each forum today for the first time. What are the pros and cons of participation? Is this the best use of your time, or can you imagine something better? If you’re using forums to get specific information, would it be better to simply read books, articles, or blogs? If you’re using them as a social outlet, would it be better to join a local club and meet people face-to-face? Looking back on your previous pattern of behavior, would you say you were addicted? Did your usage pattern become unconscious? If so, how do you intend to prevent that from happening again?

3. Clarify Your Expectations

If you decide to participate in online forums, clarify your expectations. Whether you intend to use forums for market research, to make new contacts, or as an outlet for your humorous wit, get clear on why you’re there.

4. Establish Reasonable Boundaries

To limit the risk of forum addiction, set clear boundaries for yourself and write them down. You can limit the number of times per week you check each forum, the total amount of time you spend participating, or the number of posts you’ll allow yourself to make each week. Track your weekly usage on a scrap of paper to keep yourself consciously aware of your participation habits. Don’t go dark and succumb to unconscious habituation. Establish clear boundaries such that if you cross them, you know you’re at risk of falling into a pattern of addiction. And if that ever happens, it’s time to immediately begin a new fasting period.

5. Let It Go

If you find yourself repeatedly succumbing to forum addiction or other negative usage patterns, you may decide it’s best to simply do without. At the time of this writing, I no longer regularly participate in any online forums or message boards. When I clarified my intentions, I realized my #1 reason for participation was to contribute and to help people. But using forums as a contribution outlet was inefficient, since it would too often lead to lengthy (and mostly unproductive) debates. I found that sticking with one-to-many outlets like writing articles and maintaining a blog were a much better use of my time. Blog comments still allow some interactivity, but the time required to manage them is reasonable and the personal relevance of most blog comments is extremely high.

6. Replace Online Socialization With Face-to-Face Contact

Regarding the social aspect, online forums are a poor substitute for meeting people in person. While there’s certainly some social benefit to forums – many people have met their spouses in online forums, including me – it’s important to physically spend time with human beings instead of via a computer screen. If you need a new social outlet, join a local club or association, especially one that meets weekly. I found that when I joined Toastmasters International and began attending meetings and competing in speech contests, my interest in socializing via online forums fell dramatically. Even the best online communication pales in comparison to face-to-face, belly-to-belly contact.

7. Be a Dabbler, Not a Fixture

Another tip is to treat forum participation as temporary. If your goal is to make new business contacts, then dive in and participate actively for a while, maybe 30-90 days. Make new friends and contacts, collect private contact info, and then abandon the forums. Continue to develop your new relationships via one-to-one communication like email, phone calls, and if possible, face-to-face meetings (such as at industry conferences). Temporarily dabbling in many different forums is a more effective way to build contacts than pushing a single forum far beyond its usefulness.

You can also use the dabbling method to gather general information on a subject. Seek out a number of relevant forums and bookmark them. Then spend a few hours scanning each forum once every six months to soak up the current wisdom. Whenever you have a specific question, pop in and search the forum archives. If searching turns up a blank, feel free to post a new message, harvest the answers, and disappear.

8. Avoid Addiction

Online forums are tricky beasts. At the time of this writing, my feeling is that ongoing daily participation in any single forum for more than a few months is almost invariably unproductive. Eventually the initial benefits like gaining knowledge and making new contacts produce diminishing returns. And then the negative effects like forum addiction set in. Regular participation (even from unconscious habituation) will still provide some benefits, but the longer you participate, the less efficiently those benefits are realized.

Close cousins of forum addiction include online gaming addiction, web surfing addiction, blog addiction, email addiction, and news addiction. The common pattern is that unconscious habituation overrides conscious, clear-headed decision-making. If you ever find yourself with such an unproductive habit, take steps to reassert conscious control. Use a period of fasting to regain your perspective, reexamine your motives, set clear boundaries, and find alternative outlets. Manage your forum usage consciously to serve your goals, and avoid the trap of addiction.

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3 Reasons Why Newbie Internet Marketers Should Only Focus On Building A List

Let’s be real here. Newbie Internet marketers have it rough. They come into an industry that is glamorous for promising riches in 30 days or less and they are told they can push a button and let the system do all the work for them. They arepromised lifestyles of sitting on a beach with their laptop running their multi-million dollar empire with nothing but an Internet connection and maybe a phone.Plus, there’s also a lot of bad information out there telling Internet marketers they need to be doing this strategy or that strategy… and ultimately none of them work. The real problem is newbie Internet marketers don’t get told the truth and they don’t get a full understanding of how the ‘big picture’ of Internet marketing really works.Here’s the reality. Succeeding in Internet marketing comes down to 2 basic things… building a list and selling products or services to that list.So what happens after a newbie realizes this is they spend all their time doing one or the other instead of doing both. But here’s the good news. When you’re just starting out, you should only focus on building a list, and that’s it.Here’s why…You don’t need to focus on creating products in the beginning – Until you understand how to create a product, just use ones that are already created. Yes, I’m talking about affiliate products. Pick 3-5 affiliate products that are related to your niche and use those in your emails that you send out to your list.One of the things newbie Internet marketers do is they spend time creating a product, but once it’s done, they don’t have anyone to sell it to. That’s not what you want to do. You always want to have an audience to sell to, thus you should always start with building a list.Relationship marketing always pays more in the long run – As you build your list and you send out emails, make sure the emails are filled with content that provide true value and true insight. Why? Because when you give people good stuff, they will like and trust you. When this happens, they will buy from you time and time again.Think about it. How many products have you bought from people you didn’t know versus people you’ve followed and who you trust? I bet I already know what the answer is.Ask people what they want, and give it to them – Once you’ve built a relationship with your list, ask them what they want to learn about. When they like you and trust you, they’ll tell you what they want to learn. When you find that out, create a product based on what they want to know.Here’s an example. After you ask your list what they want to learn, take every response and organize the questions into a logical order. Use the questions as an outline to your product. Make the product about answering their questions and you’ll give them exactly what they want.As you can see, it’s far more important to build your list first before you create a product so you know exactly what they want to learn.

Small Business Online? Using Affiliate Programs to Make Money Online

Small businesses online are the future of the economy and will most likely play a large part in getting it out of the current recession. With the world going virtual and more of the economy shifting to the internet, each new online small business creates more competition and the possibility of helping the economy get out of the current recession. The shape of the financial world is changing and the ‘nobodies’ of yesteryear are leveling the playing field online.

What exactly is a small business online? Is it the cottage industry of the past or is it the local businesses that go online to create a ‘store front’ on the internet? The answer is neither. An online small business, today, includes the hundreds of thousands of web owners who have blogs, forums, and websites and make money online using their talents, providing their services, and using the various affiliate programs to capture a share of the market.

Online Marketers-? While the traditional small business owner provided only a service; today, a small business owner can market various services and make money online. The service providers have realized the competition online is simply too much. No one company can easily capture a large slice of the market., which is why the service providers work with many affiliate programs simultaneously, providing lucrative percentages to individuals and companies who act as ‘resellers’. This way they are able to capture a large portion of the market without geographical limitations or increasing overheads.

Through becoming an online marketer, any person can become a ‘small business’ owner and create a small business online.

The virtual world provides tens of thousands of opportunities online. Some are scams, some are genuine; and while every article read online has to be taken with a grain of salt, if you read enough and research enough, the best affiliate programs in the business will get your attention. There are names like ClickBank and Commission Junction, which will be repeated over and over again, proving within the realm of fantasy, some reality remains to make money online.

There is no guarantee of success and there are too many variables in the whole scheme of things to allow even the best financial wizards to create predictors of success. Yet, there is so much scope, so much vision, and simply so much opportunity for growth that anyone who does not take advantage lacks the foresight to capitalize.

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