Archive for the ‘Virtual world’ Category

My online life has gone through different stages. I’ve started with forums – mainly SEO-related ones, as it was my main field of expertise in those years. I’ve participated in several forums – been a moderator and even a super moderator, have tried to run my own forum – about my home city – but finally reached the end of that particular stage.

My next step into the online world was discovering business networking. My first business network was Ecademy; then I switched to BetterNetworking.

Stages tend to overlap: I still sometimes visit one of those multiple forums I used to be active at; at the same time, I feel like my business networking is far less active than three years ago. It could come back though: benefits of such activities to small businesses are hard to overestimate, and I’ve found a lot of clients through networking and hope to find more. I might even start running groups again…

It was fun, running groups (in those days they were called “clubs”) in Ecademy. People asked me sometimes how I managed to create decent communities within a few days without ever touching “Message All Contacts” – and if it was hard to review long dead clubs. My secrets were simple though – sending personal invites to every would-be member. Yes, personal – written from scratch every time, no copy and paste. Then, once people arrive, I did many things to keep them interested – daily jokes, contests, games (like creating a story together, each contributing exactly 5 words, or something similar). For business clubs, it could be something else – questions and answers, for example, or free website reviews offered weekly.

It required time and effort, of course, but friendships formed in the process have become unbreakable. They have survived my break-up with Ecademy. They have more than once brought me business. They have made my life better – emotionally and otherwise. They have been entirely worth it.

Now a few words about another stage I’m going through. It is called blogging – meaning not posting short stories on a social networking site, but having a blog on a separate domain. Blogging for business and blogging for fun – as a personal hobby. I’m discovering the art of bringing audience to a brand-new blog – once I figure it out well enough to share a few tips, I’ll post them right here, so watch this space.

There will be WordPress tips too, for those who’d like to DIY their blogs: every day I learn something new about this amazingly flexible platform. For now, just a simple advice: if you would like your blog to be popular, make it different. Your content, your design – everything should reflect on your own personality and be absolutely different from the next guy’s. Once you’ve achieved that, it’s the first step on your road to success.

This is my first post here, and I’m very grateful to Romany for inviting me to participate. I’ll do my best to be worthy of the invitation.