As our girls were growing up I always cautioned them about allowing themselves to become someone’s friend of convenience. I told them that the best friendships developed through compassion.  But those words were for a different time and a different audience. My audience today is no longer my daughters or the two throw-away kids that came into our lives (a story for another time). I have learned that throughout our lives we all attract and I dare say deliver different types of friendships and that doesn’t mean that any of them are less meaningful.  However in the world, I find myself at this time, the online business, I have also discovered that we all need both kinds of friendships I mentioned in the subject line. Before you hit delete, let me explain and demonstrate what I mean. First of all, as online marketers/coaches/creators we need friends who have what we need at certain times to share with our audience, hence a friend of convenience. A friend of convenience in our business is someone who can help up to grow in certain areas of our business.  It doesn’t matter how long or what type it is the online world keeps changing and keeping up is a challenge that is why we need friends that help us do that.  Being in this business for most has us working on our own. The challenge when working solo is that we often can provide information from one voice, ours.  One “friend” I use the term loosely because I never talked to her outside of reading her emails (but that too is a topic for another day), is Content Sparks, who has a lot of really good content related to our business such as this one that provides blog posts and emails.   Now, this is one you may say I need to bone up on given my rambling. But using well-written content from another source even if we change it to make it relevant to our niche the will. provide our reader’s information will be just a little different. So that makes her a friend of convenience for providing email content to make our workload a little easier.  Heck, 10 emails on relevant topics would make all of our lives simpler. It also helps to offer our own audience a perspective that is not just our own. The second part of that friendship path is one of a friend of compassion.  Which to me means we need friends who provide us with resources that can either be tools to help ourselves personally or that we can use help our friends or audience in a time of need. When I listen to what I hear from people in the groups I belong to I know that with all the things going on in the world with the pandemic, front line workers,  the loss of jobs, and concerns about parents is that many are running short on sleep.  Well, one of the great creators I follow and am an affiliate for (my disclaimer as always) is Lynette Chander who I know has a product on the topic that I view as a friend of compassion.  It is her sleep journal and as most of us in this space know writing and keeping a tracker of our issues is one of the key tools for overcoming them.  This is a tool that you could use yourself but as a PLR product, you can also, modify and use it to help your audience. Well, that’s enough of my thought meandering for today.