RE: Stop Chasing Followers

I am quite unsure how I stumbled upon Zeldman’s article titled “Stop Chasing Followers”, however it struck quite a chord with an article I have been prodding the odd word at for weeks and now have the opportunity to finish.

It would appear that by and large the internet community is split between those who care about their follower statistics with their shallow, selfish and quite often big-headed discourse on the subject in contrast to those who don’t or rather whom take the high-horse and say that they do not; now please do not misunderstand me, statistics are incredibly useful and in truth I myself keep a keen eye on those collected for photogabble, however they can be easily misunderstood:

It is the quality of those whom visit you and not the quantity that at the end of the day truly matter, it is entirely irrelevant even if you are receiving ten thousand visitors a month – as if only three of them have left a comment or engaged with you in some other way then realistically you have only reached out to those three individuals.

It is a shame that the internet has become the playground of those whom wish to “1-up” one another with meaningless statistics of follower numbers in their twitter and facebook pages, visitors on their blogs and even phone numbers in their address books. None of this matters because at the end of the day you are simply just adding more noise into an already noisy auditorium and those whom are the movers and shakers within this online domain, those who you want to read can’t see the field for the corn.

What you want to do, rather than focus on meaningless statistics, is put your time and effort into building up discourse with other people who share similar interests to yours. If you run a blog on parenting, go and read up on other blogs within the same genre and become an active reader on their websites, commenting and even guest posting where available. Eventually you will yourself become noticed as people follow this bread crumb of interest back to your blog and begin directly interacting with the knowledge you publish.