Are you listening to me?

If you are in the woods you may hear lots of birds singing. Or, if you listen closely, you may hear the distinctive chirp of a bluebird.

Hearing something means you are collecting sounds from around you through your ears. You are receiving sounds.

Listening to something means you are paying attention to something you hear. The implication is that you are making an effort as opposed to passive collecting.

In online social networking you are often "hearing" things typed into a keyboard. Reading an article uses your eyes rather than your ears but the effect can be the same as hearing.

When you seek out the words of someone you admire in your social network (often through their blog posts), you are more likely to listen to that person as opposed to reading something from someone you don't know much about.

My point is that you need to make a huge effort to get people to listen to you.

If you are a blogger you know how difficult it is to get people to post a comment. You may need 100 visitors to your blog to get one single comment. To me it is obvious that you need visitors who trust and listen to you to get them involved enough to comment.

One of the most successful social network people I've met on the web is Chris Brogan. If you look through his blog archives you will find that Chris started blogging about physical fitness back in 2004. Chris changed his focus to social networking at the end of 2005.

Here is a very short history of Chris Brogan's blog activity since 2004.

Chris's February 2006 posts address del.icio.us, podcasting and other topics but physical fitness has disappeared. At that time most of his posts were not getting few, if any, comments.

A full year later in February 2007, Chris's posts were getting up to 12 comments and some still had no comments. In February 2008, all of his posts received comments. One post had 28 comments. In February 2009, one post had 73 comments. In May 2009, "The Next Media Company" had 83 comments.

Through tons of hard work and total dedication, Chris became a very trusted individual in the social and blogging spheres. He was and is relentless in his devotion to social networking.

It took Chris more than 5 years to gain a significant foothold on the Internet. Now people listen to Chris.

There are many others who have found success on the Internet. Not all of them are involved in social networking. Not all of them are good writers. Many don't have blogs. But they do have determination and stamina.

Moral? No matter what you do, keep on keeping on.

Chris Brogan added via Twitter: "and that doesn't count the stuff in 1998 until I moved to WP in 2004. Never get love. I tell people it took me 8 years to get 100 readers. : )- back then in 1998, there wasn't RSS, there wasn't comments. I was using Trellix, Dan Bricklin's WYSIWYG web editor."



Greg Cryns

The Mighty Mo Website Design and SEO Promotion

20 Ways To Make $100 A Day Online
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