Listening Instead of Monitoring

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

Markco's Corner

You may have noticed that there are double the subscribers on this site than there were a month ago. I'd like to take this week's Markco's Corner as an oppurtunity to share with bloggers and readers alike how I managed this incredible feat. Care to guess why JMTC has doubled its readership?

Newfound interest in World of Warcraft?

Currently the game is in the biggest lul it has ever seen and most people are looking for other things to do to pass their time while they wait for cataclysm. No, try again.

Markco spamming sites with his gold guide pitches?

Haven’t done that in over a year haha. I learned my lesson, providing valuable sites and resources is how you sell any online product well. But still, not a reason for subscriptions to double.

Paid advertisements?

I tried using google adwords to send traffic to this site in the early days but the market is so saturated with gold sellers that it just wasn’t worth my time/money. Wrong again, come on you can do better!

Wait a second, the title says “listening instead of monitoring,” does that have something to do with it?

Bingo. Perhaps you didn’t really think about the title of the article in the context of my question because you simply read it quickly and moved on. This proves the point I’m about to make.

It’s important to listen instead of monitoring.

When readers in general monitor information, in this case while you inquire about gold strategies on this site, you probably are speed reading and moving from page to page searching with great haste for the answers to all your gold making problems. What I am asking you to do from now on is exactly what I did to double my subscribers: Listen instead of monitoring.

There I’ve said it three times, now to explain it. I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, after all you did come to this site for help and are most likely a reasonable person. A few months ago my pattern each night and morning went something like this:

• 
  
  Check that post went live with no issues.
• 
  
  Publish non-spam/useful comments.
• 
  
  Check twitter for @posts and post something new.
• 
  
  Check facebook for comments and post something new.
• 
  
  Check forums for new posts and link to noteworthy ones on twitter and facebook.
• 
  
  Check and respond to all emails.

Here’s what I do now, see if you can spot the subtle differences between listening and monitoring:

• 
  
  Check that post went live with no issues.
• Publish non-spam comments and respond to them with my own comments.
• 
  
  Comment on other blogs with posts similar to my recent ones (all it takes is a simple google search).
• Check twitter for @posts and respond to them. Craft new post in such a way that it incorporates feedback from followers. Ask questions and follow up with answers.
• Check facebook for comments and respond to them. Craft new post in such a way that it incorporates feedback from friends. Ask questions and follow up with answers.
• Check forums for new posts that relate to feedback received then relay them to facebook and twitter.
• 
  
  Check and respond to all emails. Check for suggestions sent from email newsletter.
• Take all feedback and catalogue it into categories. Compile list of ideas for future posts.

As you can see it takes more time to listen to the readership here and answer posts than it does to simply monitor and vaguely respond to them.

Take my lesson in social blogging and apply it to reading in general. When you read posts on this blog and many other gold making resources do you skim read looking for information or do you actually take the time to read between the lines and get a grasp for common questions, common answers and where the gaps may be in the information? Do you look to listen and interact with the community here or just lurk and find a solution to your problems? Trust me, it’s more fun to comment, post, tweet, friend, like, etc. Warning: Addictive and Informative. Take a moment to explore the links at the top of the site and see what I'm talking about.

The Blogging Carnival for October is going to be about "Your Favorite Niche Market" so blog owners send me your already written and posted articles for inclusion on October 2nd.

If you aren't already a subscriber to the RSS Feed or the Free Newsletter (on right side of site) then perhaps you should try one of them out :-)

For those of you interested in the results of Blizzard's investigation into the QA3 Plugin so far after wow.com featured it, please look into the blue responses on the thread here.

Vrakthris was pretty clear on the subject with this statement:

"If it is a normal addon, which operates within the LUA framework, then our developers can disable its functionality if they wish to."