You know, I firmly believe everything happens for a reason. It’s astonishing how one incident can spark off a whole train of happenings that lead to, well, big huge mind expansions.

Take a month ago. I was banned from a particular diet and fitness forum because my blog was deemed too commercial. To wit:

Due to forum policies regarding external links, advertising, and self promotion, and the fact that we honestly can’t tell where your membership ends and business begins in your posts, we have decided that your account is no longer within the boundaries of our membership and it will be closed. All of your previous posts, including the links, will be removed.

And so, all of my 200+ posts were removed (and I had spent quite a long time answering people’s questions as well). All of my hard work - poof. Gosh that was maddening! I loved the close from the moderator too:

I’m sorry it had to be this way. Given the nature of your business, I’m sure you’ll understand.

Of course, it’s their right, it’s their forum. They want people to provide content to bring more visitors to the forum…but don’t want those contributors to benefit their own businesses themselves. It was maddening to me, mind you, but in the final analysis….their right.

But instead of giving into that anger, I chose instead to redirect my efforts, and thus began a 2 week odyssey that had me pulling 18 hour days, teaching myself php programming and imbibing 5 cups of coffee every, oh, 38 minutes. Okay, that’s an exaggeration but truly, it made the term ‘all-nighters’ seem like a lovely skip through the park.

After lots of MacGyverisms, I released the diet/fitness community Big Huge Minds. Remembering what frosted my petunias in the past, I made sure to offer win-wins to members including:

Letting snippets of their blog postings be included for free

Encouraging them to include links to helpful sites

Offering free diet/fitness blogging tips

And what’s the end result, I hear you ask? It’s growing great and I’ve been receiving some extremely positive feedback as well!

In hindsight, it would have been so easy to just sit back and complain…but it has proven far more valuable to take control instead.

The resources I used to teach myself include:

• Vbulletin Community
• VbAdvanced Community
• VbSEO

Prior to this, I was just a community member - now I’m a community guider. Let this be an example if you run into such issues - you don’t have go get mad, you just have to take control of your future. It could be one of the most beneficial things you do.

ThankYouVeryMuch!

Owlbert