Looking back to when I started taking my freelancing online, I
realized that there were a number of things that if I had known sooner would
probably have been beneficial for my mental health. Some technical things,
like how the internet ≠ the web, are important to know, but this knowledge alone won't make the
transition to going digital any easier. Some things we only learn by
doing.
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cost to you. Read my Disclaimer Page for
relevant details.
1. You don't need to be homeless, dying, or broken to be asking for money.
If you're not used to asking for things in real life, due to
confidence
issues, ego, cultural/language
barriers, like me, then you need to start accepting this as a fact of life.
The web is not all black market, hacking, pornography, or phishing.
It's still all that, but it's also a realm of people supporting other people, people looking to
advance their causes, groups of people looking to network, forums, and people
looking to help other people.
We don't need to be homeless, dying, living below the poverty line, or be
locked up abroad first to get people to financially support us.
Using platforms like Patreon,
Ko-fi, and Buy Me a Coffee,
creators
are offering their fans, friends, family friends, even strangers, something of
value for their support.
I find this crowdfunding concept super hard to grasp.
Growing up middle class, I was under the impression that asking for
money from friends would automatically terminate the relationship. (I'll get
into that in a separate post soon.)
2. Great posts are no substitute for being social.
Being social in real life is no substitute for being social online.
There is no substitute for being social.
A person likes your post, shared it, watched your video, became a subscriber,
but you're not engaging back with said person. If you're not returning the
likes or at least following back, then you're not being social.
It's called
leeching. That's one term for you.
Leeching is where you profit off of an unbalanced (or selfish) relationship,
where a party gives and gives and gives while the other party does not
reciprocate.
Today's postmodern society have brought their children up thinking such
constructs are normal. We learn to tolerate them.
Celebrities and large corporations do it to us all the time. They exploit our
attention, time, and money while we're in the position of having to consume
everything they have to offer.
Multi-level marketing schemes exploit the economically vulnerable into
"relationships" where they are used and financially abused.
We're made to believe that these multi-level marketing relationships are the
relationships we should be having and the ones we should be keeping.
It's normal to be busy and overwhelmed by life and all of its problems, but
it's not normal to be completely and utterly ignored in a relationship.
We just have to take the time to be social with our followers, other social
media influencers, members of our social media groups, and don't expect any
super great, super fantastic posts (e.g. religious posts, wedding photos,
selfies, etc.) to make up for any essential social engagement.
3. Invest in a professional email account.
I can't believe I didn't figure this out sooner.
For cold-pitching, job search, negotiating influencer deals with foreign
brands, or blogger outreach, it's a good idea to use a professional-looking
email account.
No need to go big on the first day, but maybe stay away from the
XXXDragonBallerZ@gmail.com
type of email.
Get an email forwarding for your domain and have a separate email address
for each business process. Maybe start with something like hello@yourbrand.com for public
relations, and then branch out to
course@yourbrand.com for email courses, etc.
4. The best way to find the right answer is NOT to ask the right question...
The internet is the place to go for shared knowledge and information.
But it's also a huge and lawless place. We'll never find anything if we don't
know where to look. So what do we do?
|
|
How doth one asketh a question? |
According to the father of Wiki, Ward Cunningham, the best way to get the right answer on the internet is
"to post the wrong answer."
People publish collectively on a Wiki to an audience who directly can edit and
manage the pages from their web browsers. A Wiki is living proof of how the
theory works.
Hopefully, by demonstrating that you have the wrong information, someone
somewhere will stay up late to correct you online.
People will go above and beyond in the forums and in topic groups to show how
wrong they are in order to find the right answer. It can get really obvious
too that no one is obligated to correct you if you are indeed wrong, so
be active.
Scour through places like Discord, Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow or other
question and answer sites to see if someone out there already has a percentage
of the answer you need.
5. Being safe and legal online is a legit skill.
When it comes to going digital, we all need to be looking at everything from
the first-time beginner's perspective, because even the most advanced internet
whiz was a noob at some point.
Governments and their organizations will tell you to be careful but will
rarely elaborate on what they really mean by "being careful online".
We are mostly at the mercy of security experts in order to stay safe online.
You've got to do your own homework:
⭐ Read up on tips and how-tos from the blog of leading security
companies, like the ones whose products you might use: McAfee or Kaspersky.
⭐ Take online courses from reputable providers on
Udemy, Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning), or BitDegree.
If nothing else, the recent coronavirus disease pandemic has shown us that
colleges and universities are really no experts at being careful online.
They were canceling classes, pushing deadlines away, exposing students'
personal email addresses, as they moved their classrooms online to make the
shift.
It's been a few decades since I was a teenager, and I haven't been a
teenager for a long time now, but I think the best way for us to learn about
privacy is to think like a teenager. Their main concern is not the NSA, but
they are experts in hiding information in plain sight—from parents,
teachers, school principles.
Be extra careful, like teenagers.
Another thing that we should do is consult the website of other countries'
government organizations to learn more about internet safety rules and
online safety measures.
Read up on their public-facing blog posts and check out their social media
handles for FAQs and best practices. If you're a parent, learn from
Common Sense Media or organizations like
the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
6. Whatever you do, learn excel.
It doesn't matter what your profession is, learn excel. Want to succeed as a
digital marketer? Learn excel. Want to someday be a published author? Learn
excel. Want to be a world-class chef and maybe open your own restaurant?
Learn excel.
Bored out of your mind with nothing to do? Learn excel. Tired of your daily
routines and looking for some adventure? Learn excel.
Bottom line is, the future is yours...if you learn Excel.
@miss.excel FACE OFF: VLOOKUP vs. XLOOKUP 🤜💥 Comment below - which team are you on?! ##howto ##skillbuilding ##fyp ##excel ##exceltips ##edutok
♬ Timber - Pitbull/Ke$ha
[Please follow me on TikTok. I'm new
👉
@lovellifuad]
7. We really do need to state the obvious.
Believe it or not, when you go online,
you need to be willing to state the obvious. Not to be rude, but
because people need to be told the obvious. Because obviously we're not mind
readers and because it is obviously one way
to avoid legal problems.
|
| Meoweth |
We're practically among other foreign tourists
when we are online. These are people with different languages and
experiences that don't know many of the things that you know, unless you
share them. What's obvious to a group of people might not be so obvious to
others.
8. People don't just ask questions because they want to know the answer.
If they did, they’d just go straight to the FAQ page, wouldn’t they? Wanting
to know the answer is just one of the many reasons people go online and ask
questions.
On the internet you can Google anything at any hour of the day. It’s
therefore pretty reasonable to expect a person to have done a bit of an
internet search before asking a particular question in the forums or on a
community page.
Our wild guess is that that the person asking the question already has some
idea of what the answer is. Maybe she just needed to confirm something?
There’s also the following common possibilities:
⭐ To make a statement. Questions
are a way of expressing concerns over an issue that you're following.
People can ask a question as a way to direct attention on a matter that
needs consideration. For example, timing. "Why now?"
⭐ To sell something. Business
people direct attention to themselves and their products by asking
questions about issues related to what their products can solve. It could
be that the questions are to build up a hype prior to a product
campaign.
⭐ To get you off their back.
When a person asks a lot of questions about a topic, demanding a lot of
data, and making you do a lot more "library work" for them, it's very
likely that they are just trying to get you off their back.
Can you think of other reasons to ask a question that do not involve
looking for answers?
9. Our intellectual property rights need to change ASAP.
John Naughton, a professor at the Open University, recently explained in an
article published by The Guardian why the current intellectual property (IP)
right does not fit the purpose when it comes to the digital world. According
to the author of “From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the
Internet,” our present copyright laws would only fit a world where copying is
difficult and imperfect.
Well, flash news: such a world doesn't exist anymore!
Computers have to make copies of an entire web page to be able to load on a
device. It’s basically the way it works. The act of copying to computers is
what breathing is to a living being.
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, everywhere you look you’ll find some
type of copyright infringement. Our current lifestyle and acceptable use of
technology will continue to make IP laws irrelevant. To exist online people
are essentially becoming digital publishers.
10. There are more things to do than music.
|
| Kitty anthem ♭ |
Maybe back when The Sex Pistols just launched "God Save the Queen" the only
cool thing to do was music. But today there are hundreds of things we can do
together on the internet that does not involve giving your soul away:
- watch TV
- watch live stream of sports events
- take online courses
- look at/learn/make/sell/discuss arts
- play online games
- live stream your own gaming show
- attend online gyms & sports camps
- take online tours of world's prisons (or museums)
- attend Broadway shows and encore theatre shows...
You can even do various other things online that you weren't able to do on
campus. For example, you can take online courses and learn at your own
pace. Or, you can mentor others online.
11. Your web search results are influenced by your previous web searches.
Search results for a similar keyword can be completely different not just
because of where you are in the globe, but because of what you have searched
before. If in the past couple of months you’ve Googled for things like
symptoms of your illness, your name, or anything criminal, the results of
what you’re searching for today might look completely different than if you
have only been using the web to look at cat videos. Even if the keywords are
the same.
12. Failure is to be expected, but only if we can learn from it.
Failure is the easy bit. Failure is good for success. Failure is expected
and accepted.
In order to learn from failures, however, we need data. We need to be
consciously documenting every step of our action plan, so that we have some
type of data to look at. This is where excel skills are put to use.
When you actually break down, don't get caught in an emotional turmoil.
Instead of playing with your emotions, you need to devise an action plan.
It’s okay to take a deep breath every once in a while, because when things are moving too fast,
our vision can become blurred.
Have your project planning sheets ready and make notes of what you did and
the results of your actions. Experts suggest using various productivity
models that require you to have conversations with yourself:
⭐ The SSK or Stop, Start, Keep.
Note what you should stop doing, what you need to start doing, and what
you should keep doing.
⭐ If you're not already using
productivity tracking tools, take the
time to learn one. There's plenty of ready-made spreadsheet templates to
download and use in excel or in Google Docs. Use them to help you work
smarter.
13. We're inside "filter bubbles."
We used to think that people around the world were missing out educationally
and socially because they didn’t have internet access. Well, now we have
internet access and people are still missing out on opportunities.
We’re not more open-minded. The social media does not make us more open to
other’s opinions. We’re still not accepting of changes, things that are
different or new. And instead of interacting with people who are different
from us, we’re still judging them. So what gives?
It turns out that the way the internet works is that it edits out things that
aren’t “relevant” to us. The algorithms are designed to make sure that we’re
only shown the Facebook posts, the articles, the Twitter ads, the stories that
are similar to the ones we interact with on a daily basis.
It only feels like the internet is keeping us connected together, but that’s
not what’s really going on. What’s happening is we’re not being exposed to a
healthy flow of information. The internet is “self-censoring” that we are only
shown things that are comfortable, non-threatening, and “important” to us.
So if we keep liking things that we like, without reading other point of
views, we’re just spiralling backward and backward. According to Eli Pariser
in his Ted Talk on the subject of “filter bubbles”, which he also elaborated
in his book 📚 The Filter Bubble (2011), it was already the 1915 all over again.
So you know what we need to do, right? We need to burst our bubbles.
⭐ Talk to people who hold different views.
⭐ Use databases that are not influenced by our previous web searches, such
as government libraries and websites.
⭐ React, correct, and object to things that we do not agree with, but also...
⭐ Seek credible information from both sides of the issue.
⭐ Challenge ourselves with new ideas.
And with that, we've reached the end of this post. Those were my list of 13
things I wish I had known before going the digital route.
How about you?
What things would you like to know more about before going online? Let me know
in the comments...
