The genesis of this blog came about when Darren at Problogger.com decided to set up a new Noob forum for his legion of followers to give advice to each other.  Now, on the surface this might not be a bad idea, but really who needs another group of Noobs telling other Noobs how to do Noobie stuff?  Griz and other have pointed out the futility of the Problogger.com forum as it is based on the faulty assumption that social blogging can make you money.  (It can’t.)

Others have jumped into the fray, throwing in a few gratuitous kicks and punches.   One of the better posts was by SEO Ignitor.  His take on the whole sorted affair is titled Make Money Online Reading Forums and is a really funny read on how many people get sucked into reading forums thinking that they are going to make money by doing so.

For that matter, even great forums like the one at TKA have their share of readers for money – willing to read every word that is posted there, commenting often, but unable to demonstrate that they are able to make money online themselves.

I’m no psychologist, but I suspect that these people do self-defeating things like this because they are afraid of failure.  What if…  What happens when… What am I going to do?!?  That sort of inner dialog is really dangerous and hurts any chance you have of making money online.  I don’t know who said this (and I’m to lazy to Google it), but someone once said ‘better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all’ or something like that.  The best way to conquer this fear is to just do something … anything (except read forums) to break out of this behaviour pattern.  Pick a simple strategy and run with it for a while.  Make 100 Hubs – that’s what I did and now those Hubs bring in several hundred dollars a month.  Do anything you can to silence the little voices  in your head.  Just do it!

Posted by Strathy / Forums