Disclaimer: This is no knock on the Warrior Forum itself. I like it, and actually recommend that internet marketers join it here.

Let’s go in reverse order, from the third biggest to the first…

Number Three (the bronze medal winner): Kills My Productivity

I have to make myself avoid the Warrior Forum because it is incredibly big and there is some really good marketing advice posted. If I wanted to, I could literally spend the entire day just reading what very experienced and successful internet marketers post to the Warrior Forum and review old past posts as well.

There are several areas of the Warrior Forum that only more advanced marketers visit. Many of the better posts can be found in the Copywriting forum and of course, the private paid-only section The War Room.

Getting into the Warrior Forum gets me really interested in a lot of what else is going on throughout the internet marketing industry. I’m up to date on latest trends and strategies, but I don’t accomplish much of anything practical related to my own business. And that’s why it can be bad. It’s like being addicted to heroine or something like that, because I’m excited and motivated to do all kinds of things, but I’m distracted from my carefully planned business tasks necessary to meet my daily/weekly/monthly goals.

Solution? I have to limit my usage, but just like a drug addict, once I’m involved I stop acting rationally and get caught up in all the great content – losing track of time.  The only really sure solution is to avoid the Warrior Forum.

Number Two (silver medal winner): The Plugin Profit Site

The second reason I avoid the Warrior Forum is because it makes me feel guilty for my past mistakes.  I see a lot of posts from people associated with the Plugin-Profit Site by Stone Evans, the first ‘make money online’ program I ever joined. I learned a lot from this program, and my affiliate link to the program even still works...but during that initial phase I made so many embarrassing mistakes that it’s a page in my professional journal that I’ve ripped out and burnt to nothing. I don’t like mulling over all the money I lost during this time, (among several different programs, about $6000 lost) and it demotivates me to work to mope over how big a loser I was.

The PIPS program still encourages its members to join the Warrior Forum and participate, making posts with links to their sites in their signature.  The forum members themselves have long become blind to any kind of advert for the PIPS system, but I confess that I joined and even ‘kind of’ spammed forums in the past just to try and get people to join the program under me. I do NOT recommend it as a good online wealth-building program.

I do, however, recommend it as a good training ground to learn basics about internet marketing and a lot about what does NOT work. PIPS helped me make lots of mistakes to learn from and allowed me to fail fast so I could move on until I arrived at what worked. The 30 days to success program is worth following, Stone Evans has evolved the program over the years to keep it up to date and change some of the affiliate programs over the years, but it was an excellent starting point for my digital marketing business.

Number One (gold medal winner): I Become Too Generous

One of the real reasons hanging out on the Warrior Forum becomes a time and productivity killer for me is because there are so many new and less experienced internet marketers and entrepreneurs who use it, that I have a lot of answers to questions. Eight years in the business has taught me a lot and I’ve seen the landscape evolve. The specific tools and technology has changed but the principles have not.

I actually see myself becoming more like the marketers I looked up to when I was first getting started. The top affiliate marketers were the subject of my envy, but it all seemed so impossibly to obtain at the time. I know now that it isn’t actually very difficult, if it’s done the right way, and most of the advice I give now is the same stuff I heard before I left my last job as a janitor.

The economy went sour, and lots of people turned to the internet to solve their financial problems. This huge influx of internet marketing hopefuls created a lot of opportunities to be generously helpful, but the problem is that I still have work to do and a business to run. Projects and team members need managing, campaigns need creating, content needs creating, etc. I don’t do it all personally, but I do supervise and coordinate it all personally, plus the time I spend working directly with clients.

I believe I have a lot of positive karma for the help I’ve given others, and I can attribute 80% of my current business to being helpful in forums in the past. It worked for me but we can’t all take the same path, we don’t all have the same aptitude, time, talents, and abilities.  Needless to say, it can become easy to lose a lot of time with the ‘tire-kickers’ who just waste your time and don’t do any actual work. So the top reason I avoid the Warrior Forum is so that I don’t become helpful to others at my own expense!