Do you like me?

How do you build loyal subscribers?

Maybe the question is more, WHY do you build loyal subscribers?

We all want to be liked. No one wants to be disliked. But there’s a difference between the desire to be liked, and the need to be liked.

For many people, today, being liked is not something optional; it’s become a matter of survival. And it all starts with parenting.

For many years, the thinking on parenting has revolved around cutting out child abuse, and that’s a good thing. No one deserves to be harmed in any way, whether physically, sexually, or emotionally. But this focus on eliminating abuse has taken parenting in a strange direction.

Many children now grow up with a feeling of entitlement. They’ve rarely been refused any request, let alone unreasonable ones. We are told that we shouldn’t say anything negative to a child so that we don’t destroy their self-esteem. But this has caused a problem.

Now, young people grow up without experiencing any form of negative consequences. But let’s face it, life is full of negative consequences. When you get it wrong at work, your manager isn’t going to commend you for the effort and ignore the mistake. He’s not going to walk away and let you keep your job after you caused serious damage to the enterprise. He’s going to sack you! Young people, today, don’t understand that. They’ve never experienced that type of negative reaction. Entering the world of work is a huge reality check. And they don’t like it.

So, they turn to “influencing” people as “content creators.” Yet, again, they can’t understand rejection. They pore over their social media statistics and, if they don’t get enough “Likes” in the first ten minutes, they panic. They feel rejected and worthless. They’ll delete the post because “no one likes it.”

Life doesn’t work like that. A long time ago, getting published was difficult. You had to pass so many tests of approval before any publisher would even consider printing your book, or before any producer would make you movie. Today, it takes minutes, with no approval process whatsoever. The sheer volume of junk videos that are forced upon us by the social media companies testifies to that.

And blogging is no different. We bloggers don’t need an editor to read and critique our posts. We just write them and fire them off with no thought to whether they are any good. And when no one “Likes” them, we feel rejected, and we ask questions such as today’s prompt – How do you build loyal subscribers?

Why would we want to? Because of the monetising potential. What happened to just sharing our thoughts and letting them hang there, either to be accepted, laughed at, agreed with, and approved, or to be rejected, criticised, frowned upon.

In real life, as we have these conversations, we quickly learn what is acceptable and what is not. Online, we feel impregnable, invincible, until we fail to get enough subscribers. Then, we feel like a failure.

We’re not a failure just because no one “Likes and Subscribes.” The failure is in not even trying.