I know the headline sounds ominous. And I’m not talking about a technique that can get you slapped by Google or labeled a spammer by AOL.

No, I’m talking about the risk of complete lack of action due to information overload. Between the constant flood of email messages with valuable information, as well as those offering to sell you the latest marketing technique you absolutely must know about, it’s enough to keep you surfing the web seeking to learn more and more for the rest of your days.

Of course, the huge problem with this is that you’ll have lots of useful information that you never have time to use because you’re off looking for the next nuggets of knowledge. So, you spend time - and probably money - attaining all this know-how and what I want to know is, “When are you planning on using it to make some money of your own?!”

Now before I get too preachy about this, please know that I am as bad an offender in this area as anyone reading this. I don’t even want to count how many programs are in my office, many of them unread (or listened to or watched).

If you’ve been learning about internet marketing for any time at all, I’ll bet you have a long list of ebooks on your computer right now that you’ve paid for and never read. Nevermind the expensive multi-media programs on your shelf. Be honest now!

Rich Schefren calls this getting information “just in case”. He believes that many of us in online marketing already have plenty of information to make our businesses more successful and shouldn’t be so worried about missing something. He’d rather we got our information “just in time” rather than “just in case”.

I have to agree with him. The marketers out there selling this information make it sound like we’ll be losing out on a one-time opportunity if we don’t buy their current product. That’s the power of a persuasive email campaign, joint venture partners, and good web copy.

But think about it… Have you ever seen online marketing information offered that wasn’t available, often in a new, “better”, revised version sometime later? After all, these guys aren’t going to let “important” content be sold once only to languish forever unsold in the future.

Yes, I know there are huge packages that have been offered for great prices recently by John Reese, Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, Andy Jenkins, Jeff Walker, Rich Schefren, and seemingly every other big name internet marketer out there. And I’ve bought some of them. But these guys aren’t going anywhere. And the information they’re offering will continue to be offered - if not by them, then by others who’ve often learned it from them.

So what I suggest is that you stop reading every marketing email you receive. Unsubscribe from most of them. I promise they’ll be more than happy to welcome you back later.

Also, don’t buy every great marketing package that comes along. If you really want to learn more, pick one marketer whose business model and style of teaching resonates with you and focus just on his material for awhile. Try to pick material you can implement right now in your business. When you feel like you’ve gleaned - AND PUT INTO PRACTICE - his material, then and only then might you want to find your next guru.

I love learning and never want to miss out on anything, so I’m a terrific prospect for the talented internet marketers. However, we all need to find the right balance between learning more and accomplishing more.

One of the reasons I’m writing this is in the hope that if I’m persuasive enough to convince you, I might follow my own advice.

With that in mind, I resolve to focus on one program at a time and schedule an hour a day to work through it. That’ll allow me to digest the information and implement it in my business as I go. And please Lord, don’t let me run across sales letters for any more “must have” marketing products for awhile! Neither my schedule nor my bank account can afford any more “help”.

What’s your plan to balance learning with action?

Did you know that you can browse blogs and forums your target market reads for about an hour a week and be marketing your business? You can!

First, find blogs and forums that attract your target market. The topic should generally be related to your business in some way, but probably not published by a direct competitor. The objective in selecting these sites is that your actual or prospective customers are reading them on a regular basis.

Next, read through recent entries to find posts where you have something useful to add to the conversation - preferably on a topic that’s directly relevant to your business.

Your goal in your comments is to be as helpful as possible. You want to do more than add a comment just agreeing with someone else or making a generic comment. You want to use your business expertise to assist the readers. The benefit of doing this is that people reading these sites will begin to see you as knowledgeable in your area and may choose to check you out further.

When you add a comment to a blog post, you’ll have a hotlink on your name that points back to your site. Forums often allow you to create a signature containing your site address that’s automatically included at the end of each post you make. Not only do these links help readers find your site, they may also help you build additional links back to your site that search engines see and value.

The more links to your site that exist - especially from ‘popular’ sites - the better your organic (non-paid) search engine rankings will be.

Note that some blogs will have the ‘nofollow’ tag set on their comments. This tag tells search engine spiders not to give the commenter credit for the link to his site. Blog publishers do this to discourage spam comments that have only the goal of getting links back to a site and not providing anything of value to the websites they were posted to.

While adding quality comments to blogs not using the ‘nofollow’ tag will help you with both readers clicking through to your site as well as search engine rankings, you don’t need to avoid the blogs that do use this tag. As long as you’re adding valuable comments, readers will click through to your site, and that’s who you’re trying to attract, right?

Also, the ‘nofollow’ tag does not stop search engines from following the link, it just prevents any of the weight being carried from that page to the page it is linked to; the search engine spiders still do follow the links.

I use a tool called Comment Kahuna (http://www.commentkahuna.com/) to find relevant blog pages by using keywords I specify. It will show me which blogs use the ‘nofollow’ tag so I can decide whether or not to post comments to them or only to ones without it. I can specify the minimum page rank of each blog page and how many results I want.

Once the program returns the results, I can go to each page to decide if I want to add a comment. If so, the system will auto-fill my name, email address, and web site URL and I’m ready to add a comment. If not, I can tell the program to skip this blog and move on to the next one. I can stop at any time and the system can pick up where I left off next time.

The best part about this tool is that it’s free, so give it a try!

There’s another tool available for finding relevant blog pages, Fast Blog Finder (http://www.fastblogfinder.com). It’s features are similar to Comment Kahuna, but it adds a few, such as displaying the page rank of each domain and page found. You can download a free trial and upgrade to the Gold version if you like it.

For finding appropriate forum threads, I use another free tool called BotSurfer. With this tool, you must find a list of relevant forums and input their URLs into the tool. It will then find threads within these forums that contain the keywords you specify.

To find relevant forums, just go to Google or Yahoo and type in your keyword topic: Online forum + Keyword

You can find this tool at BotSurfer (http://www.articlemarketer.com/affiliate_forum3b.php). Check out the forum posting tutorial links at the left, too. While they’re oriented toward affiliates of Article Marketer, the principles are applicable to anyone wanting to use forums to attract visitors to her business.

It goes without saying (I hope!) that you shouldn’t post comments to blogs or forums that are just links to your site. They will be considered spam, almost certainly be removed, and may cause you to be banned from the site.

I put aside about an hour each week to comment on blogs and forums. You obviously could spend much, much more time doing this, but remember this is just one of your marketing strategies and don’t get too carried away!

Give this technique a whirl and over time you’ll see the results yourself.