Here are The Stress Doc’s Seven Key Steps and Strategies for striking out on your own “netrepreneurial path.”

1. Hang Outside Your Comfort Zone. To overcome technophobia and release cybermania, I reached out to coaches, mentors and collaborators. Several experiences were pivotal. About six years ago I participated in an artist support group. Many of the visual artists were learning computer graphics. Each week as they showed off their efforts and marveled at the technology, I felt increasingly stuck in the Jurassic Period. Eventually, I hired a personal computer coach for one-on-one sessions in my office. This move shortened my learning curve and reduced significantly the number of extra sessions I had budgeted for my therapist.

2. Build a Website. My marginal role models were self-employed, entrepreneurial types, whom I encountered in a social/networking group called, “Home Alone.” Four to five years ago, the Internet and the World Wide Web were becoming the buzz in DC. (We didn’t have Monica and Bill and Ken and Henry to distract us.) And in this Home-Alone crowd, you were passe without a web site.

Stirred by the buzz, I nervously approached the Information Technology consultant at a local university. John and I had collaborated on providing my university-sponsored stress workshops. “John,” I declared, “You have all this arcane computer knowledge, I have plenty of psychobabble. Let’s build a web site.” John was starting up a Web design business and took me on as an experimental client.

3. Downsized? Break Out! Sometimes nothing succeeds like failure. Having been given the political hatchet job on a big consulting project in the Christmas season of ’96, I was more melancholy than merry. But it spurred me to explore AOL. A posting caught my eye as I surfed through a writer’s forum: an electronic newsletter was seeking humor writers. Surprise! My submission did not disappear into some black hole in cyberspace. The next day the editor of “Humor from the Edge” replied enthusiastically. The publisher, also gave me a green light for insightfully humorous stories on my work as a therapist, organizational consultant and workshop leader.

After sending my stories to America Online’s major mental-health forum, “Online Psych,” I received my own AOL page — Keyword: StressDoc — and a new moniker, “Online Psychohumorist”™ was born. Soon thereafter, an e-mail from a training coordinator at Texas Instruments in Dallas led to my inaugural cyber-generated contract — two days of training at $1,500 per day — I can do that!

4. Wake Up to Internet Marketing. John and I met almost weekly to create a site that highlighted my writings and services. My input was vital from informational content and marketing copy to graphics, icons and screen layout. (And I still was not a geek.) My new commitment was sealed with a maintenance fee of $100 per month for Internet server/Web design.

Eavesdropping on a coffeehouse conversation, I discovered Mary, an author and Internet marketing consultant at the next table. Within moments, I hired her to promote my baby. A young colleague on AOL/Online Psych knew other positioning tricks. (One of which resulted in the site receiving a “Four-Star” (highest) rating from a major Internet informational clearing house, Mental Health Net.

Placement and positioning are vital! When a World Wide Web engine did a search on a topic, for example, “stress,” would our site be discovered among the Web flotsam and jetsam? Of course, positioning isn’t the only factor. Upon asking a New Haven Register reporter, “Why call me?” he immediately replied, “Yours was the only Web site I found that didn’t look like it was designed by a wacko.” (Check it out: www.stressdoc.com )

Mary the marketer also handled some public relations, and a press release hooked a big fish. The “Stress Doc” site was featured as a USA Today Online “Hot Site” Web site, one of five sites from the entire web selected daily. (The first two sites featured were Barnes & Noble’s Online and a historic New York City jazz club, The Village Vanguard.) My “field of cyber dreams” was becoming increasingly real: “If you build it (and market it) they will come!” In two days, 2,500 folks visited the site.

5. Generate Cyber Spin-offs. New opportunities abounded. A reporter/photographer who heard my presentation at an insurance industry convention suggested that I send my writings to the editor of Financial Services Journal Online, I did, and a monthly column ensued. Worth mentioning, I don’t receive payment for my online writing. I view it as both public service and a robust marketing tool.
In addition, AOL chat groups invited me to appear as a guest expert. After a stint on AOL/Digital City-San Francisco, I realized again: “I can do this!” I had a lunch meeting with the chat coordinator of Digital City-Washington (a subsidiary program of AOL that provides popular “local” content in the fifty largest U.S. City markets). Within a month, in fall of ’97, “Shrink Rap and Group Chat” was streaking across the DC-Metro cyberspace. It’s a whole new group dynamic — intense, supportive, fun. Individuals raise questions and the group and I interact with the questioner and each other. We have between 10 and 25 in the group at any one time. There’s an ongoing core, people bond, and the sharing and caring is real.

6. “Stress Doc Goes Portal.” That was the subject line of a recent e-mail from my Digital City — Washington chat coordinator. (As a former stress and violence prevention consultant for the U.S. Postal Service, I knew about “Going Postal.”) Again, the warp-speed pace of change in cyberspace was evident. AOL had recently bought Netscape (the original Web-browsing company) to push more of its content on the World Wide Web. The regional Digital Cities began creating content for a variety of Web portals — gateways to multi-services and features on the Web. These cyber malls include, news, entertainment, weather, people and, of course, shopping opportunities. Suddenly, on the main page of five regional portals — from Netscape’s Netcenter to MCI and Compuserve æ one click of the mouse on the “Stress Doc” link (under “People”) and a new feature appears: “Ask the Stress Doc,” a Q & A on work-related stress.

In addition, media types contact me for expert information on a regular basis online and offline — whether it’s about depression in working women for the national magazine EEO or an inquiry from an LA Times reporter about the “multipally downsized.” This reporter parenthetically asked, “Did you know that according to “Hot Spot,” (a rating service which tracks Web site traffic) on the topic of ‘layoffs,’ yours was the fourth most visited site on the entire Web?”

7. Evaluate the Bottom-Line. Enough of this virtual-existential psychobabble! In addition to ego-aggrandizement, exposure and funny lines (if I get anymore exposure I’ll be arrested for indecency) what have been the tangible results of a hard-earned cyber presence?
Take a look:

• Speaking/Training. There’s a growing stream of inquiries and contracts for “Practicing Safe Stress” programs. Usually, organizations find my Web site through a directory search. In the past few weeks, serious requests have come from Lucent Technologies, a Florida network of Federal women employees, and the West Virginia Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors.
   
• Therapy/Consultation. I have not actively solicited therapy clients. One reason is my concern about how cyberspace bypasses state-licensing issues. I do think online support/clinical or consulting services as part of an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is a natural offering.
  
• Coaching. As a good netrepreneur role model, let me highlight a service attracting allied health professionals. My “Online Coaching” program, via phone and email involves one-on-one, “how to” skills and strategy sessions for developing and marketing various educational-training-consulting services, online and offline.
   
• Writing. An informal online syndication is evolving from slick e-zines to homegrown newsletters (both online and offline). All my e-mails and a free Stress Doc newsletter with 2,000 subscribers (growing daily by a dozen) tells me there’s a market for fast fun, accessible and insightful content. And this “fast fool for thought” creates clients hungry for more.
  
  For the allied health professional, cyberspace is a new system of connection and collaboration. The World Wide Web is aptly named, though the Web is less a structure of entrapment and more an electronic network challenging us to:
  a) upgrade our technological knowledge and savvy
  b) create dynamic linkages and synergistic partnerships among hi-touch and hi-tech individuals and groups
  
  Are you ready to help build a cutting-edge system that can inform, support, inspire and market to both an expansive and intimate community of consumers, clients and colleagues? It’s real, it’s virtual, and it’s out there. So, go for it. Go Web young cyberite!

Mark Gorkin, LICSW, is a therapist, speaker, trainer and “Online Psychohumorist” known throughout the Internet, AOL and the nation as “The Stress Doc.” He specializes in stress, organizational change, team building, career transition, creativity and HUMOR. He is a contributing writer for Treatment Today and Paradigm Magazine.