Simple Dollars

Adsense me, Rabu, 2008 Desember 24

Given how the usage of The Simple Dollar spikes during the normal workday in the United States (this phenomenon occurs on many other blogs, too), it’s easy to conclude that many visitors visit the site during downtimes during their workday, seeking information to improve their financial lives and their career.


While this is an effective way to use downtime, with just a little bit of planning and forethought, you can make that time spent finding and discovering useful information for yourself and for your career quite a bit more valuable without a lot of additional effort. Here’s the game plan - try out some of these tactics for yourself.

Share information you find.
Let’s say you find a brilliant article on The Simple Dollar (or another site, but I’m sure the best stuff is from TSD). You read it, find things you can actually implement in your own life, and are really inspired by it. That’s a very good thing - it’s the reason you’re surfing the web for such information, right?

You can increase the value of that information even more by sharing it. Think of a person or two who might really enjoy reading that article and send them a link to the article, along with any comments you might have. If they find value in the article, not only will it improve their situation, but some of their positive feeling about receiving that information will be attributed to you, the messenger. I have a few friends who regularly send me brilliant links on a regular basis with their comments - and I really appreciate it. Those people are just web surfing and sending me the good stuff they find, but by doing that, they’re becoming more valuable to me and cementing our relationship.

Ask follow-up questions of the person who distributes the information.
Whenever you receive a really good piece of information, whether it be from finding an article or from someone sending it to you, ask some good questions. Get the person that wrote the article (or the person that sent it to you) to think about it a little bit more. This is another way to provide value - quite often, a well-constructed question opens the door to a whole new train of thought, and it is those new trains of thought that the information economy thrives on.

Whenever I read a good article on a blog somewhere, I leave a comment that says thank you for the information and also either provides specific new information or asks a relevant question. I do the same whenever I get sent a really interesting link - I reply to the email with a nice thank you and also with a question or an additional thought. This usually spurs discussion - and discussion builds connections and relationships.

source

coyright from http://www.thesimpledollar.com