Learning By Doing vs. Getting Help From an Expert

I’m the kind of person who wants to know how to do everything. Lately, I’ve been extremely interested in the blend between business and technology. I’ve bought quite a few books on topics like new media marketing, entrepreneurship, etc.

Currently, I’m reading Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff and I’ve recently read Free by Chris Anderson.  Both of them have taught me a lot about where the business world is heading, and how technology will play a major role.

I’ve also been interested in learning how to build websites and how I can start some of my own projects.  I’ve started by dabbling in blogs.  First, I started on WordPress.com with The Idea Exchange.  It was fun for a little while, and I started getting a few comments here and there.  I learned how to submit my new posts to Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon and it was pretty exciting when I got a wave of traffic from those sites.  I just kept getting frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t really customize my blog the way I wanted to on WordPress.com.

I graduated onto Typepad.com with my Career Kickstarter blog about a year ago.  My goal with the new blog was to provide a resource for college students and recent graduates on everything I was learning as I started my career.  I planned to document some of the things that went poorly and some of my own success stories.  I learned how to add my own HTML to pages, bring in 3rd part widgets, and put Adsense ads on my site.  I learned quite a bit about how things worked together, but I was still frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t really customize things any way I wanted.  I would see some cool new functionality on another blog that I wanted on mine, and then I couldn’t figure out how to make it work or it just wasn’t possible with Typepad.  Plus I couldn’t have my own domain…it had to be careerkickstarter.typepad.com which I never really liked.

Now I’m here on my own hosted WordPress platform.  I haven’t done everything I wanted yet (far from it).  But I feel confident that I can make changes when I find a new idea that I want to implement.  I still have a lot to learn, and I plan to take some tutorials on PHP so I can really get into customizing the WordPress templates.  You’ll probably be seeing a lot of changes to this blog while I tinker and experiment with everything I’m learning.

That brings me back to the original point of this post.  I would have never gotten to where I am now if I just took classes about blogging or read a book about it.  I probably would have been able to talk about blogging , and been able to understand what most things mean but I wouldn’t have been able to actually do anything on my own.

I’ve gotten a lot of value in experimenting and learning how things work on my own.  However, sometimes it gets to the point where I really want to make something work, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.  That’s where I think it’s valuable to talk to an expert or someone who has more experience than you.  I changed my blog over to a new domain because I originally installed it at www.bryanpovlinski.com/blog.  I didn’t have anything that I wanted to put at www.bryanpovlinski.com so I set out to move everything over.  It ended up being a lot more complicated than I thought.  I ended up having to go into the .htaccess file to make changes.  Now I had read about the .htaccess file before and I knew what it was, but I had no idea that I needed to go in and edit it.  The installation of wordpress has hundreds of individual files, and I never would have known which one to go in and change.  Luckily, my friend and co-worker Brandon Corbin is just across the office and he knew what I needed to do.  Now I know it’s not always possible to have an expert of whatever you’re trying to learn sitting right next to you at work.  If you do, perfect, ask them for as much help as you can.  Here are a couple more resources that I’ve used to get expert advice.

LinkeIn Answers

I had heard about this, but I didn’t realize how active people are on this site.  There are experts out there that subscribe to keywords that they are experts in so that they can respond as soon as someone asks a question about their expertise.  I asked a question about ecommerce and had 7 answers in the first day from people who are experts in that field.  If you have any business or technology related question LinkedIn is an outstanding resource.

Twitter

Twitter is another great resource because mostly everyone on Twitter is extremely open to responding to questions and helping each other out when they can.  Again there are people on Twitter that use search and RSS to subscribe to keywords that they know a lot about.  These people are eager to answer questions and help others out when they can.  Twitter is also a great way to reach out to others in your local area that you might be able to meet up with to talk about your project.  Services like Twellow are great because you can search for Twitter users by city and by topic to find people in your area that might be able to help you.

Online Forums

When I first got my hosting account with Bluehost I had an issue with uploading images and video so I posted in the help forums.  I had a response by the next morning that helped me solve my problem.  Another forum that I’ve used a few times that is popular with the web marketing community is the Digital Point Forums.  There’s a forum for any single topic that you can think of so it might be a useful place to go when you’re really stuck on a problem.

What other places do you know where you can get specific expert advice quickly?