Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket!

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re all doing great. To be honest, I’ve had a terrible week. Before I talk about today’s subject of traffic generation and building your brand, I want to just fill you in about a couple of things.

I’ve really been struggling health-wise since about last Thursday and it’s made everything feel like an uphill struggle. For those of you who don’t know, I suffer from a condition known as M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), also known as C.F.S. (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Although the term, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, is somewhat of a misnomer as the name isn’t medically accurate, M.E. sufferers usually prefer this identification as opposed to C.F.S. as chronic fatigue is only one aspect of the illness and the name often gives the impression of just being ‘tired’ when, in reality, it is so, so, so much more than that.

There has been a lot of stigma connected with M.E. over the years, with many people and even doctors not recognising it as a legitimate illness and wrongly labelling suffers as being “malingerers” or the condition being “all in their mind”. Well, as someone who can actually notice symptoms occurring in my sleep, getting up out of bed and collapsing on the floor due to a complete loss of strength and balance, at worst not even being able to get out of bed, experiencing sudden and excruciatingly painful muscle spasms that render me immobile and a variety of other debilitating symptoms, I can assure you that the illness is quite real! If you want to know anything more about M.E. you can read a brief synopsis by clicking here or please feel free to ask me any questions.

The Loss of a Dearly Loved Friend

For about a month now one of my cats, Marley has been poorly. To cut a long story short, she was suspected of having kidney problems but after receiving an anabolic steroid injection, antibiotics and being put on a fluid drip she picked up and seemed to have a whole new lease of life. However last weekend she began to appear to be unwell again so I took her to the vet on Monday and this time he was sure that she most definitely had a severe kidney problem. Again, she received a steroid injection and I was advised to see how she faired after a couple of days.

Although I was able to get her to drink water, she refused to eat and spent all her time just lying on the chair, not going out and not going to drink any water through her own initiative but only when I took the bowl to her. I would have expected her to have picked up by today, but sadly no.

This afternoon she was asleep on the chair when she suddenly woke up and looked as though she was about to sneeze, but then seemed to have some sort of seizure. So I took her to the vet and he reckoned that she was really at the end and had likely had a mini stroke due to the build up of toxins in her body. So it was time to say goodbye to my dear pussy cat and make the upsetting decision to have her put to sleep 🙁

So, on top of my not feeling well, I’ve had a worrying few days followed by a heart-breaking day today. So all this has set me back somewhat and, to be honest, apart from a handful of blog posts I haven’t been able to do any work today. Yesterday wasn’t much different. As a result, my traffic for both yesterday and today dropped quite a bit. But that’s okay because, you know what? It shows that there has been a direct relationship between my forum and blog posting and my traffic flow. When I analyse my stats in detail it confirms this as I can see from where exactly my traffic has been coming.

Right then, on to today’s subject. This might be seen a bit of a controversial topic but as I always maintain, I am always open, honest, ethical and will tell it how it is. If something is awesome and to be recommended then I won’t hesitate in hitting you guys up. Likewise, if there’s something that needs to be said about something and it involves a word of warning or it’s something that merits a negative review then I won’t water things down because you guys have the right to know.

So let’s get on to the main focus of today’s subject….

The Warrior Forum – Friend or Foe?

Now, I can almost hear the gasps of disbelief, anticipation or excitement at the subject line. Why would I pose such a question? Well, perhaps because it needs posing. I would say that there would certainly be no point making a post like this at the Warrior Forum itself as, judging from past things I’ve witnessed, it would likely be deleted.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Warrior Forum. I really do. I have met some amazing people by means of the Warrior Forum and have established, what I hope will turn out to be, some fantastic, valuable, long-term contacts. Also, I have only recently purchased my membership to the War Room section and I am blown away by the value there. In fact, the whole atmosphere is different in that section, so much so that it’s almost like a totally different forum entirely!

I’m sure I don’t need to explain what the Warrior Forum is. For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know, the Warrior Forum is considered pretty much THE place to be for anyone involved or interested in Internet marketing, a place that’s viewed as the Holy Grail of IM forums somewhat. I think that it’s this view that serves to make the Warrior Forum both an amazing but also a frustrating place to be.

Some good points: there are thousands of users and, along with this, a lot of fantastic, helpful information is available. There are some brilliant products made available for sale or for free, there are a lot of top marketers registered on there, the forum ranks high in Google so it’s a good place to build backlinks and, as I said, the private War Room is a fantastic resource of free information and products, a veritable Aladdin’s cave of wonders.

Now for some bad points: aside from the scammers and sellers of poor products that are bound to be expected, there are a lot of trolls. If you don’t know what a troll is in this context, it basically refers to a sad, immature person who has nothing better to do than to only come out from under his/her ‘bridge’ to make sarcastic comments, find excuses to elevate themselves and show off how much of an expert and how clever they are and to generally be an unwanted pain in the butt. I appreciate that you get these types of people all over the Internet, but sadly they seem to be in abundance on the Warrior Forum.

I have been shocked and appalled at some of the things I’ve witnessed over this last week or so. I see them from time to time but never quite to the extent as I have recently. For example, an enthusiastic new member started a thread inviting some comments on a question he posed. Amongst the genuinely helpful and appreciate comments he found himself greeted with a ‘you posted this in the wrong section, you have now been reported’ comment and received an infraction. Did he get a helpful pointer in the right direction first? No. Did he have someone kindly explain to him that he’d posted in the wrong section? No. Was this a repeated action on his part? No. And you know what the biggest annoyance was for me? He had NOT posted in the wrong section! There was absolutely nothing wrong with his thread or where he placed it. He was absolutely 100% correct to post it exactly where he did. The result? He felt embarrassed and discouraged. Is that a way to treat a new member and encourage them to contribute and settle in? Evidently the trolls think so and clearly don’t have anything better to do.

Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Furthermore, when you spend any amount of time on the forum, what soon becomes apparent is that there are certain names that you don’t generally see in normal, constructive discussions. But as soon as there is an opportunity to come out from under their bridge and lumber into the thread, making themselves look big and clever then sure enough, along they come with their egotistic, sarcastic, patronising comments.

There is also a lot of favouritism on the forum. If you’re not the right person then if someone taddle-tales to a mod about something that they feel needs to be reported about you then, no matter how innocent you may be, you may find yourself with a temporary ban. No explanation, no discussion, no appeal. The disclaimer given is that the mods just don’t have the time to explain to each person individually as to why they’ve been banned. Twaddle. I have been a member of, and have been a moderator or owner of, a lot of forums in my 15 years on the Internet and I have never, ever come across that kind of inability. If there are so many members receiving bans that the mods can’t keep up, shouldn’t that tell them something about how they’re running the forum? Here’s an idea – appoint more mods. Plus, bear in mind the issue that if a member is wrongly banned then he is having a service wrongly withheld for which he has paid. Doing that on a free forum is one thing but doing it to paid members? Hmm, well let’s just say that I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes if someone actually escalated a complaint to the relevant regulators…

But why would I say that there is evidence of favouritism in this? Because, if you’re the ‘right’ person then there is a good chance that you will find yourself protected. Here’s a personal example: about a year ago I purchased a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) from one of the biggest names on the forum. Just for the sake of example we shall call him, “Mr X”. In fact, this individual is a well-known, major player in the Internet marketing industry. He gets rave reviews about his courses and, perhaps, rightly so. I wouldn’t know as I would NEVER purchase another product from him due to his unprofessionalism. The product sales page was misleading and bore little relevance to the actual end product. The product was incomplete, didn’t come with any of the promised training and did nothing other than to serve to drive automated junk traffic to my website, generate automated forum comments and, possibly worst of all, some of those comments were labelled as coming from me and were sometimes downright vulgar and offensive, containing obscene language. Now, anyone who knows me knows that this is not the sort of language that I use. Would I really want to have my reputation tarnished in such a way?

Now I wasn’t the only one to experience this. There were a lot of complaints about the product and the way that Mr X dealt with the complaints. One unfortunate purchaser, after making the mistake of voicing his dissatisfaction, had an insulting image of him posted online. Hmm, very professional… Furthermore, the squeeze page that I bought from was soon taken down and replaced with an obscene, sexually graphic picture. Now imagine what this could do to the reputation of any affiliates who were using that particular affiliate link to promote the product. The affiliates would likely have been blissfully unaware of this. Is this any way to run a business? When I contacted Mr X’s help desk about all this, of course they denied all knowledge and said that they didn’t know what I was talking about. What? Even though I included the very link in question? They still had no knowledge? Okay, whatever. What’s worse is that the link was STILL up months later. So evidently Mr X and his team just couldn’t care less.

So why have I explained all this? Because, due to the fact that Mr X is, well, Mr X, he can apparently do no wrong. So even with the evidence presented, anyone who complained was the bad guy. Anyone and everyone could click on the offensive link, for example and anyone and everyone could see the insulting picture that was childishly posted of the Warrior that I mentioned above who complained. But no, it was Mr X and he could do no wrong. So if anyone complained, they were chided and castigated. Eventually the thread was deleted and another was opened which was conveniently filled with praise for the appalling product from Mr X’s shills. As soon as the genuine comments started to come through, guess what? Yep, the thread was deleted. A discussion thread was opened by the recipient of the insulting picture to warn people against purchasing the product. Again, he was made out to be the one at fault and, although it wasn’t deleted this time, the thread was locked.

Now, this is not an isolated incident. I (and many others) have witnessed this kind of unbalanced, biased behaviour time and time again. If you dare to speak out then woe betide you – you’ll either be made to feel like a naughty schoolboy or you’ll find yourself at the mercy of one or more of the forum’s resident schoolyard bullies. The same goes for those who are newbies and dare to post a question asking for help. Thankfully, most members are kind and helpful, but invariably you’ll find that a troll has got a whiff of an opportunity to lumber out from under his bridge and start slapping around the poor person who dared to be new.

I Recommend the Warrior Forum

What, wait a minute – haven’t I just been giving the Warrior Forum an utter bashing? Well actually no, I haven’t. I have been recounting experiences of mine and of other members. These things are simply observations, nothing more. I have no interest in bashing the Warrior Forum, otherwise I wouldn’t bother visiting and posting there.

On the whole I really like the Warrior Forum. Bear in mind that there are thousands of people on there. At the current count, there are 596,948 members. Now if only 1% of those were twits then that’s almost 6000. That’s a heck of a lot of twits! Sure, they’d only be 1% but 6000 is still 6000 and that’s a lot of trouble-causers and bullies. I’m not saying that the number is even as high as 1%, I’m just making the point that, with such large numbers of members you’re bound to get a large number of idiots, unfortunately.

So whether you’re a newbie, you’re not yet registered on the forum or you’re an established member, try not to be discouraged. The forum can be a fantastic tool and resource and if it wasn’t for the Warrior Forum I likely wouldn’t have had a clue on what to do, where to go and who to seek out in IM and would likely have still been limping from shiny object to shiny object. It really is a good place for traffic generation to your website and for building your brand.

I have found the vast majority of members on the Warrior Forum to be kind, helpful, appreciative and genuine. I have had the pleasure of buying some great WSOs from some fantastic Warriors and I’ve also discovered some fantastic people with whom I’ve been able to build relationships, relationships that I hope will be mutually beneficial in our online businesses in the months and years to come.

As I said before, the War Room section of the Warrior Forum is fantastic and I highly recommend that you upgrade your membership if you haven’t done so already, especially if you’re a compulsive WSO buyer. The value that you’ll get in the War Room will make you wonder why you’ve spent so much time and money on WSOs as there are so many given away for free in the War Room. To use the well-worn phrase, it really is a ‘no-brainer’.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Now, as good or as bad as the Warrior Forum can be, one thing is for sure – it’s not the only IM forum out there. Just like anything else in IM, you don’t want to be putting all your eggs in one basket for your traffic generation and building your brand. Find a few other good forums. sign up to them and get involved in them all, not just the Warrior Forum. It might well be the biggest and most well-known , but it isn’t the be all and end all of everything. There ARE other options and it’s worth exploring them.

So in summary, just to emphasise again, I am not anti-Warrior Forum, I am not intending to speak out of turn about it and I am not interesting in bashing it. But as it’s a place that I use a lot and refer to a lot on my blog, I can’t just avoid telling things how they are. After all, if you’re intending to pay for membership on the forum then you deserve to know not only the good points but also the bad. Just like any sort of review, I’m not interested in one-sided views and you will never get a biased view from me about anything. If something’s good, I say so. If it’s bad, I say so. The Warrior Forum has both its good and bad points but it’s definitely a place that you should use as an Internet Marketer.

With all that said, just because the Warrior Forum is hailed as ‘the place to be’ it isn’t without its faults, some of them glaringly obvious, and there are, at times, grossly incorrect practices there. But don’t let this put you off. Just like anything, forewarned is forearmed and if you go in knowing what you can expect then you’ll be better prepared and less likely to be put off by any nasty surprises.

I realise that this post has been longer than usual. I hope you’ve found it beneficial 🙂

For my next post, hopefully tomorrow, I will be speaking to you on a subject with another potentially controversial title: “Don’t stop buying WSOs!”. Now, there are two points I wish to mention about this: 1) No, I have not gone insane! You shall have to read my next post to see the point of the title, and 2) please don’t just go ahead and start buying WSOs just because I have said this! There is an important point to be made, so please check out my next post to see what it is and hopefully, you may be a little better equipped as to what to/what not to buy.

Until next time!