How to Get More Clients from Online Discussion Lists and Forums
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If you dislike face-to-face networking as much as I do, perhaps networking online might be more your style.I'm still trying out some online networks like Ryze and Open BC, so the jury is still out on those. What's bringing me the most success at the moment is online discussion lists and forums.
The discussion list, also called a LISTSERV, comes in the form of an email broadcast to which you subscribe. You can elect to receive each message as it's posted, or receive a daily or weekly digest of all messages posted to the list. To keep myself sane, I typically subscribe to the daily digest version to reduce the volume of emails I get every day. This is my favorite, as I love the immediacy of email, rather than having to take a few additional steps to participate in a forum. Unfortunately, with the ever-increasing problems of email delivery, I have seen the use of this tool decline over the last few years. Many of the discussion lists to which I belong have been replaced by online discussion forums.
The discussion forum is typically hosted on a web site, and it might also be referred to as an online bulletin board or message board. The messages and replies are referred to as "threads", and all posts are maintained on the forum so that you can go in read the threads at any time. Some forums offer you the option of being notified when there are any new posts to the forum, or you can select to be notified only if there are posts to topics of interest to you or just to questions or replies you have posted in the forum. I prefer the forums in which I can see a short description of the original post and short descriptions of the replies so I can quickly determine which threads I want to open and read and perhaps respond.
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