Why am I telling you about my foray into WF? Because some of you are also on the same forum and you can either waste time whining that no one will help you or use it to shorten your learning curve as a Solo.
There are forums like Warrior that really are worth the time for getting your questions answered by more experienced business owners. Doesn't matter if you run your business out of a hut on the beach or while sitting in the bathroom on the throne.
(That's one of the perks of being a Solo Entrepreneur and running your own show. You get to work wherever and whenever you want.)
Don't misunderstand, the Warrior Forum isn't the subject of my rant. It's the others that could take the best ideas from WF and make their forum better and won't do it!
I can bet you are definitely on one or two you consider a brain dead, time sucking waste of space. You know the ones...everyone is hustling the same "latest hot widget" or having a "mental meltdown" because their personal life is in a shambles and everyone must want to know about it.
I've been on those too over the years. They left me feeling depressed and of course, gave me an extreme dislike of the people on them. Why would I leave a job that paid the bills to surround myself with the very 'walking dead' I needed to get away from? No Thank You!
My next rant is the drive to hop on the "Social Butterfly" bandwagon. Maybe it's me but doesn't these things remind you of speed dating? 140 characters or less to 'build your brand' or 'make new friends'. What?! At least with speed dating you get 10 minutes to Hit-N-Run on a living, breathing person.
As a Solo Entrepreneur, your time is limited from the get go. Sure there are tools you can use to quickly 'hit' whichever social networking site you like but how effective are you being really?
Here's where I'm going with this:
Getting targeted and ready-to-buy eyeballs to your sites, including blogs is your goal. But that's only step one in the process of building long term wealth and marketing what you sell.
Let's be blunt for a moment: Who is going to be interested in 'marrying' you simply because they passed you on the street? These drive-by shooters from the social networks are those strangers passing you on the street. And some of them you pray don't visit your sites at all!
The spikes in traffic to your site might make your hosting company happy and that little thingy that counts visitors spin like a propeller, but how much of that is putting money in your bank account?
Think about how many people you're following or that are following you. How many of those 'friends' have spent money with you. 10,000 friends and you're still working a job to pay for your hosting and broadband account? What's wrong with that picture?
Can you do a better job of targeting who visits your site? Of course and you should have a solid marketing plan to do that. Does posting on forums just because you can mean somewhere in there someone might buy something you're selling? Maybe not.
It comes back to deciding why you are doing something, and not simply doing anything because someone you don't know told you it was the best way to do it.
Your time is limited, your funds are limited and so is your energy level. Pick your own battles.
If you get 1 out of 100 visitors from social networking sites buying what you sell, work out how you can increase sales with the same amount of visitors.
If you visit one forum regularly that brings in highly targeted visitors who signup for your newsletter, then that's the forum that's paying for your time.
That's if for today and I leave you with this -
Business is the art of extracting money from another man's pocket without resorting to violence~ Max Amsterdam
