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I’ve written about this before, but it seems inevitable that the issue of trolls in forums will be forced upon me again and again. What is the motivation of these people who seem to be on every forum and message board all the time with a sarcastic comment for each and every poster ready to go? And where the heck do they get the time? And why do they care so much? It seems to me that a person would have to be leading a pathetically empty life if they are able to take the time and effort to “put everyone in their place” on a daily basis. And these people usually have more than one alias that they post under, often answering or agreeing with their own previous posts. What an absolute waste of time. And what a waste of my time and every other person’s too! On a board that I visit several times a week there is a prime example of this type of loser. This person posts under many different aliases, has no real website that I know of, and constantly discredits the expresses purpose and function of the forum. But there he is every day, smugly making his comments and bullying newbies. He never misses a post, and has hateful remarks in response to almost every topic. What is the problem with a person like this? I can only think that he was probably bullied as a child (or continues to be) and feels the need to compensate for some shortcomings of some sort. He is probably single, and most likely if he works at all he does so with children or the elderly, the better to enable himself to bully them. He is undoubtedly a frustrated know it all, afraid of real world confrontation or competition. For a person like this, a forum or message board is not a means to an end; it is the ultimate destination- a playground where everyone is the same size, a classroom where every student can get straight A’s, and a party where he actually has a chance with the girls. A guy like this probably never grows up; his mother’s basement is a perfect place to live and the bus stops right on the corner down the block so he has met his domestic needs, and the forums and message boards he frequents are a perfect fantasy playground for his false bravado and repressed anger over his stolen milk money. So what is the solution? How do we deal with these pathetic losers? Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to do. He is like the younger sibling that your mother always made you baby sit; or the hopelessly unskilled and lost co-worker (who happens to be the bosses son); or the despicable classmate that is the teacher’s pet with perfect grades (but you know for a fact that they cheat and lie). I am afraid that the internet is still such an open platform that the only thing that can really be done is to ignore them. After all, the web is a wonderful thing, and part of its charm is the fact that it is one giant, open forum for all to use, with little censorship and few limitations. The same freedom that allows us to participate freely in online discussions allows the trolls freedom too. So I’ve learned to accept the presence of these pitiful people, I skim over their posts, ignore their remarks, and continue on with my own business at hand. As much as I would like to “put him in his place”, I don’t have the time to waste or the inclination to make that effort. I have better things to do with my time, and I don’t want to end up being anything like him. So I say let him rant- the perfect response is no response at all. It has to be unsatisfying to him to get no response to his poisonous posts. Will he go away? I doubt it, at least not for a long while, but the fun could be taken out of it for him and that is progress.
- Web Traffic Tips: Forum Marketing (internetmarketingformommies.com)
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The internet is a great place; you can learn anything you want, reach out and touch others at great distances with ease, and access audiences far larger than you could before. In most people’s minds, the connection between these powerful attributes and operating a business online is obvious- more customers! And it is true, without a doubt. In this day and age you can start with an advertising budget of almost nothing, and access all the great features of the web to make millions while you sleep. All you need to do is buy my ebook/blueprint/manuscript/manifesto for only $179 and use my patented matrix/funnel/spider web/powerline/binary/1-up/2-up/rotating whatchamacallit/ to earn a passive income while you sit by the pool drinking mimosas and admiring your new Rolls. And I can prove that I have blazed that trail in front of you because I quit my job as a as a taster at a food carcinogen level testing lab, and within six months I had funneled, fiddled, flung, wrung, and migrated enormous wealth to myself. You know its true because there are pictures of me on my website that show me and my house and pool and luxury cars and gorgeous people all around. And now, because I am a great and benevolent man, I will offer you the exact same secret methods for $129! Did I say $129? I meant $79, and if you buy now you will also receive my free report on how you can personally take Google down to its knees and whip them like a government mule as a punishment for them canceling your AdSense account. So don’t hesitate, at $17.99 this offer will not last! You must act now! There are only 11 digital copies of this report left, and we don’t understand how to make a pdf file so when those are gone, you will never see this offer again! Remember, at $7.99 you will be receiving information that has taken years and years of study and trial and error to create. It is imperative that you buy now because you will never see this offer again! Next week I will be moving to an Island I bought with all of my money to start a new life without phones tv’s or computers, so I repeat- this will never be offered again!
Well? Are you ready to buy? Even though the paragraph above is somewhat exaggerated (not much), you are likely to see “opportunity” offerings hundreds and probably thousands of times during your internet marketing career, and the statistics say that you are likely to try one or more for yourself. And even though there is no proof that a program works, or even that the spiel you’ve been given contains a grain of truth. But you’ll follow the instructions,implement the strategies, probably spend some money, and then it will all come crashing down in disappointment and unprofitibility. Then you’ll feel a little foolish, but live and learn, so you keep looking and maybe even try a few more of these things. But in the end what you will most likely learn is that the way to make money online is to work hard selling real products or services. I personally have concentrated on affiliate marketing for a long time now and it really does work if you learn how to do the right things. I have also worked with others offering seo services and other advice to customers who want to reduce the learning curve in their online business. The point is that I figured out that there are no really easy ways to make money online, and most people don’t make any. The question is, have you learned it yet? Don’t waste your time trying to use some guru’s system to get rich quick- it isn’t going to happen. Decide on a product or service you think you can sell (that’s a whole other topic)and implement a real business plan to make it happen. Put in the necessary amount of learning and labor, keep going when everyone else quits, and THEN you might start to see some results. Internet marketing can be very rewarding and profitable if you are realistic about the amount of effort and planning it will take, and there is no reason that you can’t be one of the people who succeeds.
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Once again I’ve just received a tongue lashing in a public forum for disagreeing with some puffed up, pompous know nothing who only cares about being the leader of a conga line of fools. As much as I try to remain objective and not become personally invested in these little wars with those little people, I have to confess that there is an almost irresistible urge to wade in with factual lefts and rights to the chins of these people and kill off the very premise of the thread. Thread killing (that’s when you post to a thread in a forum in such a way as to make any answering post appear less than knowledgeable and maybe even stupid, which in turn keeps others from posting) is something that I have been accused of in my time, and I promise, even pinky swear that I have never done it on purpose. I am the type of person who really hates to place foot in mouth, even though it happens to the best of us, and therefore I very seldom post on any thread when I am not sure of my facts. To be sure we all need to distinguish between facts and opinions, and once in a while I will post a thought or two that I know isn’t popularly shared, but mostly I post what I know or I do not post at all. Getting back to the issue at hand, picture if you will a webmaster forum where there are clearly defined categories in which to post so that there is not too much overlap in the threads of each section. So you browse through the recent posts, looking at threads you have posted to in case there was an answering post and also looking for anything else that interests you. First, in the web development section, you find a thread on which type of electric guitar is best (I kid not); then you see three posts in succession asking how to get a higher page rank, with the same discussion going on in each thread between separate groups of people; for me, it is interesting to see if I can help at all even though I am certainly no expert on anyone else’s business, but I try. So I look at the posts and try to give a simple answer that I know to be factual. Stopping by the next day to review the responses to my post, I see a long line of complicated and lengthy answers beneath my post, which has been ignored as if it were an excerpt from the satanic bible or something. Here is the rub; its no skin off my nose if people prefer complicated and fruitless quests to accomplish something that they should have learned on their own, but just what in the heck are we even there for? There are more people in that particular forum that want to strut and pretend to be experts than there are those that really want to help. I think it is just another example of the Internet’s anonymity creating a lack of accountability for those people. In my brick and mortar business I could not get away with spouting wrong information all over town because my customers would quickly put my feet to the fire at the very least. But here on the web, any so called Internet marketer, and anyone that wants to call themselves a business person can pretend to know all the answers and claim that their business is doing great because of it. We don’t have any easy method to expose the pretenders so we have exactly what we have over at forum X. It is a shame too, because I happen to know some very talented, knowledgeable and most of all successful web based business people who are more than happy to help anyone who wants it. Boy, do I digress. Back to the issue of me getting called out again by a bully wannabee, meh, it isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last, but man does it keep my desire to spend time helping out down to a minimum. Years ago the Internet marketing community was a much smaller place, and it was nothing for experienced web based business people to hang out someplace online and offer advice and assistance to anyone who wanted it. Now the same places (if they still exist) are filled with bullies and idiots and other people who refuse to do any learning of their own, and instead they take any information, even the bad, and run with it, spreading it like the plague. The kicker is that the bad methods and strategies are usually easier to swallow for some reason and thus much more agreeable to the average online marketer who still believes in fairy tales of easy instant riches. Oh well, I need to go and defend myself; I’m pretty sure I won’t win this one, lol!
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Once again I sit in wonder of the awesome spectacle that is the average webmaster forum. I truly do no know whether to laugh or cry as I wander through the thread and see all of the inexcusable questions and their colossaly stupid answers. I want to make it clear that I in no way hold myself up as an expert on any particular topic when it comes to being a webmaster, and I certainly lack in some areas; web design is one that comes to mine, but I am talking about people display their ignorance almost daily and compound it by taking some of the worst advice given by the most clueless posters. I told you in the first post here that I was going to vent, and this is it. People, for the love of God Google what you want to know before asking the question in a public forum. At least then you have given yourself a chance to ask an intelligent question or tell the other posters exactly what the problem is. Take some pride for pete’s sake and act like you know a thing or two. You can ask anyone; I am one of the most giving people you will ever meet, but I run a business people, more than one actually, and I like to cut to the chase! Do I have time to help you? Absolutely. Will you need to do some homework? You’d better or all you will see is my backside as I walk away. Sorry, but you’ve heard the old saying that “some people make things happen, some people have things happen to them, and the rest just wonder what happened” right? Well I try my darnedest to be in the first category, and every now and then I find myself in the second, but I avoid the third like the bubonic plague. Why? Have you ever had the plague? Seriously, if you are in the third group there is an awfully good chance that no one will help you at all. There are several reasons for this, and one is time. Time is my most precious commodity; a lot of days have too few hours in them as it is, I don’t need the extra drag that a person in the third group produces. Another reason is a selfish one, but so what this is my blog so I’ll say it- I don’t need the frustration. If you come to me come with guns blazing or stay home. I don’t deal with free hosting, canned affiliate pages (they are useful but not enough to warrant my spending any time on yours), or people who disappear when they don’t like what they hear. And by all that is Holy do not ask me to tell you how to get rich using Adsense! There are Guru pretenders for that- go buy an ebook and leave me alone! I can’t help you if you can’t understand the difference between Page Rank and SERPs after I have explained it to you in detail, and I will drop you like a hot potato if you refuse to take good sound advice when I give it for a good reason. Like you were told in school, if you want to be a good student it is up to you not the teacher.
Now let me tell you what I do like and what I will work with. I like it when you question what I tell you, because sometimes I forget to tell you why something needs to be done. You can call me names; yell at me, tell everyone else I have a loose screw, or anything else you want, and as long as you do your homework I will still help you. I like people that have some personality and aren’t afraid to venture into the unknown, come on it’s fun! I have a whole list of things I would like to do with my business when I get the time; I love learning about new ways to make a little scratch here and there. Come to me children, open your mind and you will be amazed at what can happen. Visit us at WAHH, be polite, respect your business elders, and you too can have a moneymaking internet business.
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