“Man is an animal that makes bargains, no other animal does this – no dog exchanges bones with another.” – Adams Smith

Introduction: Oh please can’t you see how much I’m begging you to follow me.. Lol Just Joking.

It’s important for us to have followers and for a blogger like me or you, followers are our main & biggest audiences. Whenever we publish something new, it’s our followers who are the first to view our contents because it appears directly on their feed, and we writers hope that they will read it before others and like & share (upvote & resteem according to Steemit terminology) and tell others to check our work in a process that opens up the door for us to reach more audiences. Thus a greater part of our success depends on the recognition or approval given to us by others, thus the opposite is also true. We are rewarded posting our contents on Steemit, but we don’t get rewarded only for posting but when people accepts us and upvote those posts. That’s why we always seek people to follow our accounts and try harder to increase the count of our followers.

BTW in my previous post, I mentioned about my hobby and passion for gardening, so I was thinking if it’s acceptable if I try to display the flowers from my garden, which will make this article appear very colorful. At first I thought an article should be based on one particular topic, but what if I try to mash two genre and that too something totally opposite with one another. I mean the system offers us to use maximum 5 tags in our post, and usually when we write about Bitcoin, we also add tags like blockchain, altcoin, crypto etc. so generally its accept when one tag is related to another, but how about Steem & flowers? But anyway since I suddenly got this idea, I think the best way to find my answer is to do the experiment and find it out myself.


I heard viewing flowers can make our mood happy, so this is a special service for my readers, my home grown flowers fully bloomed, and I took this picture earlier today thinking if any one of my Steem family member having a hard day dealing with life, then at least looking at these photos can make you smile.

Thus, we have the question, “how do I get more followers?” And the answer to this question is the answer to another question, “what makes me follow someone?”
The first and easiest way is to ask people directly to follow me, and that’s what is actually happening to many people. I’m spending hours to organize and complete an article with the hope that my unspoken words, which I was never able to speak before now has a wonderful opportunity to be expressed through written language, with the hope that there is someone who is out there interested in listening to what I have to say.

Photo Source: Fairy Tail Anime, Original Artist: "Hiro Mashima"
Photo Description: Juvia (Blue Hair Girl) following her crush Grey (that shirtless guy), It's more like she is stalking haha,
and I pray beautiful hot ladies to stalk me like that..ahh what a dream that is...

Is money the real reason?

Money is everything; money has the power to buy us things which we need and want. Some people are willing to do anything for money, yet there are some people who will never do few “things” no matter how much money you offer them. As for bloggers like me and you, yes we need money, but that’s just one of the many reasons why we try so hard to complete a blog post. The real reward is the positive remarks which I get from my audiences, unconditionally. I see lots of people telling me to follow them, add them to friend list, like their posts, or subscribe to their channel in different social media.
So the question now is, why do we need people to follow us online?
We all know the answers already, it can be because our self-esteem increases when people likes our posts or photos on Facebook or Instagram. It could be because my followers will upvote my posts on Steemit and I will be getting some money as rewards. Yes I wish to buy a new car, so that I can ask many beautiful ladies out on long drives with me.

The next question is why would others follow me and why will I follow him? The few basic and silly answers are: because I followed them? Because they followed me and I have to repay my huge debt by following them? Like For Like or Follow For Follow is some of the models which is now obsolete, but some people still does it. I personally think it’s a bad practice and now getting rejected. As a matter of fact these days the first rule in almost every Facebook group says “whoever will post a message saying ADD ME” will be banned from the group. Every day I keep having these messages of people asking me to follow them, my question is oh please tell me why would I bother to do that? It’s not like I have signed a contract which says I’m obliged to follow you if you follow me. Somebody please tell me if there’s any kind of contract like this?

What happens after I follow someone?

All of their updates appear directly to my homepage/newsfeed. The more people I’m following, the more my homepage will get flooded, so I just don’t want to follow any random person whom I don’t know at all, or those who are not publishing anything good to read. At this point you might be building opinion about me and my characteristics, thinking oh this guy must be very rude, but I’m okay with it and I know myself better than anybody else.

I spend more time reading posts compared with the time I spend in writing. Usually it takes me 25 minutes to read an article of 2000 words. Yes I have experimented this using a timer clock and read the article after pasting on MS-Word so that I can also know about the total words of the article. Maybe some of you can read faster than me and some of you may be slower. The point here is my time is limited. I can’t spend 25 hours reading articles within 24 hours. I have other priorities also. Even the greatest bookworm won’t be able to complete reading all the books published on earth before his death. So he will first read only those which interests him more than the other books, and in case if he is already done reading his favorite ones, then maybe he could read others and sometimes checkout authors whose book he have not read but is curious to try out new authors, like searching diamonds in coal mines, and I’m positive it’s the same feelings which most of my senior Steemians feels. Publish good materials and I promise I will read till the final conclusion of your article, but some people are probably mistaken about blogging and instead end up writing Tweets on blogging platforms.

Similarly, I want to keep having updates of my favorite bloggers on my homepage, so that I can immediately check their articles as soon as they publish their work. Hey I have no interest in seeing your seductive selfie here, that’s not why blockchain was made for. For that we have Instagram. No wonder why I got no responses when I used to upload my selfies trying to find a date on Steemit.

Then how in the world will I grow my followers?

So, then how will I get people to follow me and fulfill that dream of mine to buy a helicopter and go on dates with hot babes, it’s not possible without people who will constantly follow me and upvote my content. Oh wait something feels wrong, oh yes my dream was to buy a car, how did it suddenly changed to a chopper, now I’m not sure if it’s a chopper or a private jet.
Some of the articles I read here tells about making friends and improve quality of contents. I agree with both these points. But there are two problems about these two points. First of all you can’t be friends with someone in a day, friendship takes years to make, and sometimes even after 5 or 10 years of friendship, it can easily be broken. And quality also improves after putting big efforts learning and doing the work again and again. It takes years to build and few minutes to break. It took 20 years and 20,000 people to build Taj Mahal, but it won’t take more than few minutes and few people to drop a nuke and completely turn it into dusts. It’s hard to increase reputation on Steemit, but with just few flagged post it won’t take much to have zero reputations.

Branding and establishing your own Niche.

As you can see there’s a big list of tags on Steemit. These tags represent a genre. Genre is important for specialization, and for a person it’s not advisable for an individual to be the Jack of all Trades, because then it makes them Master of None. We can see specialization in every field, there are some disadvantages of specialization which I’m not going to mention here, but I will focus on the advantages.

A specialized person will have a vast knowledge on a particular subject, making his productivity higher and efficient. A chef is cooking expert but he will mess up if you suddenly ask him to make a dress, even if he takes training and learns to sew a shirt, then he will make compromise by dividing his time in order to simultaneously focus in two different things. That is why when we have skin trouble we go to a specialist, when he have heart problem we see a cardiac specialist, we go to dentists for issue related to our teeth, BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY we don’t go to a brain surgeon when he have tooth aches or vice-versa.

This is why I’m suggesting, every bloggers should specialize on a particular field, which will grow his skills and knowledge about a particular subject, this way he will become a brand and will have his own niche, and his fans will be those people who are involved in the same niche. A scientist will be more interested in science journal, most scientist are so busy with their research that they don’t even have time to go out shopping. Do you think scientists have any interests in fashion? My opinion is they don’t give any damn about fashion, let alone read a fashion journal. I’m not saying all scientists are like that, there could be few exceptions, but it’s a silly idea, fashion brands can’t find its way to create an image in the scientific community, maybe a scientist might be interested because he might want to buy a present for his family…


Sadly, these oranges don't taste sweet at all, it's stronger than lemons

Know your customers – Target Audience.

You cannot reach 100% of the populations no matter who you are. According to a recent report from World Bank, the total population of United States is recorded to be 323.1 million. But president Trump only has 40.2 million followers on Twitter. What does that mean? Everyone knows President Trump is addicted to Twitter, then why not even half of US population still not interested into following their President directly to receive first hand news? This is because his Twitter followers belong to his niche, either they really love their President, either they are directly or indirectly involved with politics, or they are people like me who wants to Troll Mr. President by following him and making memes about him.

Marketers would spend months and years to study their customers and come up with product planning, designing, distribution channel etc but they would spend more on studying the customer wants and needs. If you want to grow your followers, offer your potential-followers what they are seeking for.

Can you stop fighting please?

It’s hard and challenging for any writers to complete a good article. But it’s very easy to criticize someone, sitting at the comfort zone of your home and hiding behind the mask of computer & having the advantages of being anonymous. The best way to hurt someone’s feeling without even having the need to drop a small piece of sweat. I must tell those people if you can’t appreciate someone’s hard work, at least keep your bitter comments away. Yes I know there are billions of people out there who can write an article much better than me, and maybe even in the next few hundred years I can’t reach that level, but hey I’m trying here, I’m giving my efforts into this. If you can’t make someone feel happy, at the least please don’t make anyone sad. I would never follow anyone who insults me, and as for safety, I would also prefer to stay away from someone who insults others in front of me, or even maybe punch his nose, or maybe not.

Shared values, respect, and vision?

Yesterday I read an article saying Steemit has now reached 400,000 registered accounts. So who are these 400,000 people? Where do they come from? Why did they create an account? Do I know these people? I only know just a few people with whom I have already interacted, and the rest of them, maybe I will interact with some more in the future, and there would be a huge number of people with whom I would never have any direct or indirect communication. But then, there is one special thing that connects us all together. We are all bloggers, some of us are expert bloggers and some are amateurs like me who have just started, perhaps out of curiosity or perhaps the way we promote Steemit on other sites. I’m saying there are few values and traits which we all have in us that connect us together. We are one big family. We love and respect each other. However, that small 3 letter word we call ego can even show up on the internet space, ok fine we respect each other, but the other party has to show the respect first, then I will give him respect in return. Yeah! Why do I have to be the one who has to show respect him first? I won’t offer you any help, you got me? You help me first and then maybe I will help you back. That’s one personality trait which I have seen in majority of people, both in real life and over the internet. Take the initiative first, offer a helping hand first, and then you will see how others start to help you.

We talk about karma; we talk about sins, we talking about hell. And whenever we talk about these things we mean it in negative ways. There are two types of Karma, do good & get divine rewards; do bad things & get divine punishment. In my entire life I have met only few people who said they want to go to heaven in the afterlife, and majority of the other people said they don’t care about heaven, they are fine going to hell, and a couple of them said neither exists so they don’t care. FYI: this is not a religious debate so if you have plans to make a comment about this paragraph, please don’t. It’s just an example.

Always pray for others, keep well wishing others, help the needy, guide the lost, every good you do will be returned back to you, if not today then tomorrow. I can’t tell exactly when but it will for sure. Newton’s 3rd can be applied universally, not just only in science but everywhere including philosophy, economics, business, finance and every other field. No one was ever able to find any loopholes about this law. And perhaps no one will. Keep loving and even if your love is unrequited, someone else is out there waiting for you with all the love you need.

This post is not a “how to attract 100K followers in one day.” This post is about my personal feelings & emotions towards the world & cyberspace.

You will see tips and guides here about how to grow on Steemit. How can I give you advice about something which I myself was not able to achieve yet? Last week I search lots of articles related to Growth Strategies, and I ended up with so many articles, and most of those articles were written by people who are struggling for their own growth and I’m also the same, therefore I believe I have no rights to tell others how to do something which I couldn’t accomplish yet.

But what I know is you can grow by building relationships with others. Then the question is how to build a relationship. It’s not like you meet someone and tell them “hey are you interested in being my best friend starting now” or have you encountered with someone for the first time and had a crush and go directly to them without even knowing each other’s name and just propose?

Actually once upon a time I saw a very beautiful girl on the street, and I went there and told her “hey I think you are beautiful and I had a big crush on you ever since I first saw you, will you be my girlfriend” (oh the first time I saw her was 5 minutes before I proposed her)

Are you curious about her reply? First of all she was silent for a while, well it came as a shock to her, she was giving me this look and her eyes were telling me “eww what a creepy guy this is” afterwards she said a big no and walked away. Tbh she is very beautiful, I had a real crush on her, and I kept thinking about her again and again, except that I don’t know her name or I don’t know where she lives or anything about her, I didn’t even verify is she was single or her boyfriend was nearby, right now I’m imaging what could have happened to me if her boyfriend was there, or even worse if her father or elder brother were nearly. The father and elder brother of girls is the number#1 enemy of men like me who wants to date their daughters/sisters. Ah my nose might get broken by his punch? Or what if they called the police and send me to jail for sexual harassment?

Wait, wait, this post is not about my miserable love life, the reason why I shared my story is that so I can explain why asking something to a random strangers are not encouraged. Every day I keep receiving so many messages from people asking me to follow them; the thing is I’m just fed up with the same thing day after day. Do something creative, charm me with your work and I will follow you without even you asking me to follow you. There was once I got lost and I asked a passerby for location to the station but there was no response from his side and I had to keep looking street signs for hours before I was able to find my destination, most keep aways keep their guard active with strangers, and it's the same on the Internet too.

What if I knew her name, who she is, what she does, is she a student or she is working, what if I knew where she goes for recreational fun, what if I knew which is her favorite restaurant, what if I knew if she was single or in a relationship or even married? What if I could start our conversation with a simple eye contact and smiles, what if I got to see her every day, what if I start with a polite conversation, what if we could be friends hanging out together every day and finally what if on one day when it’s just her and me alone and I slowly expressed my love? Would she give me a proper answer? Or would reject me so easily? Everyone will agree this method has a bigger chance of success compared with what I did when I first saw her. Friendship and relationship both formal and informal is same as growing flowers which requires efforts and nurturing.

As a blogger, my followers are my biggest asset. They are the ones who closely monitor all my online activities. And they all do it for a reason, different individual could have different reasons to follow someone online, but I think it’s because of the value which I provide to them. If you are a person who have read this article all the way to this paragraph, it means I’m giving you something nice which you enjoy reading and will want to read more of what I have to write. So can you create a value for your followers? Can you give them something from which they will directly or indirectly have any benefits? If the answer is yes then no don’t need to worry about your follower counts or thinking of different growth strategies. But there could be other reasons also. Have you heard of Digital Thieves? I’m not talking about hackers, I’m talking about real thieves, what they do is follow people online and research on their activities, a lot of people would just report their every hourly activities on their Facebook status, the thieves can easily know if the house is empty or not, the thieves will easily know when they went out for holidays leaving the house totally empty. Technology is actually providing benefits to every single people including thieves/buglers.

Word of Mouth & Recommendations From Close Friends & Family

Marketing MBA spend so much brain power thinking about all types of promotion strategies. Making television advertisements and then broadcasting them in prime slots are also very expensive. But let me ask you, how many people actually find the time to watch television? People are so busy with their life and work that they barely finds any time for watching television, and then watch an advertisement during the commercial breaks? And with all these shitty stories and acting, channel producers are facing big challenges to maintain their TRP.

Instead of paid advertisements, the fate of a product depends more on the free advertising which satisfied customers tells about the product to their friends and families. When new movies arrive at the cinema the box office success or failure totally depends on the word of mouth from the people who have already seen the movie. For cinemas paid advertisement works when the trailer of the film is released at first, once the movie hits the theater it all depends on how we share our experience of the movie to our people.

Similarly, paid resteem bots or paid upvote bots work in the short-run, but after some time when a blogger reach a stage of maturity, relying on these paid services no longer provide much help.

We all have that one follower who closely monitors our activities; I call it the stalker-crush. Give them the value they seek, give them something which they could cherish, then you don’t need to pay others to gain attraction, the very few people who are following you will resteem your articles for free if they think it’s worth it, you will start getting more upvote, and newer people will be attracted to you and your following list will eventually start to grow. And in case if you have some SP, upvoting the comments which you receive from others will also bring you more followers, but then they will only follow you for the reward, same as buying followers. The best thing for any blogger is to have people who genuinely love your contents, and will follow you just for the sake of love.

First Read, Then Comment

Nice, Good, Wonderful, Amazing, Pretty, Beautiful..bla bla bla..
I can spend few hundred hours gathering data about people who wouldn’t read the first paragraph of a blog but will definitely make a one word comment. Hey look if you are not interested in reading my article just because you think it’s so big then I can’t forcefully make you read. But that doesn’t mean anyone gave you any right to abuse my comment box with your spam.

In my previous article, someone was complaining that my article was very big for him to read and I should just write small articles. Well personally I think it’s my choice how many words I should put into an article, and I also think it’s your choice as an audience if you want to read a bigger article or a short one. But my point here is, this is a blogging site, not an instant messenger, and a blog must look like a proper blog. So my targeted audiences are fellow bloggers, perhaps your niche is on short stories. So the choice is yours, if you want people who enjoys short article, then only those who enjoys short stories will be your follower, and you will follow people who are similar to you and vice-versa for me

Trading with others

I started this article with a quote by Adams Smith. I’m a big fan of him. The only reason why I decided to buy those big Economics books is because I once read an article that was based on the works of Adams Smith.

Most of the modern day world economics are based on the works of Sir Adams Smith which he suggested hundreds of years ago. But we still follow them, no matter how much our technology has changed, but there remain some values which will never change. But first I would ask you a question, what exactly value means to you? Don’t give me a dictionary meaning, I want you to look deep into your inner thoughts and tell me the meaning of value.

So why did I quote Adams Smith here and start this article with his quote? This is because we humans have the opportunity to do trading. And this also applies here on this Steemit platform, but now you might say that I already rejected the idea of buying upvotes/followers. But this is not that kind of trading I’m mentioning, what I’m saying is trade values with each other. I have always believed that it’s not necessary that we must learn everything from school, and only professional teachers and professors can teach us. Learning can happen anywhere, any moment, and from anybody. There are so many good writers here who can write thousand times better than me, I learn from them and get inspired. Similar there are people who can also learn one or two things from me. This is what I call trading on this space. There could be many other ways to make trades, and it’s you who has to decide what sort of trades you want to do.

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Sometimes we can get a bit lucky

I told you earlier that I once proposed a girl and got refused. But what if I get lucky next time? What if I propose 100 girls like this way? Will all 100 girls reject me? Then what if I do the same with another 1000 girls? There could a chance of 0.000000001 % probability that I might get lucky and perhaps one girl would agree to date me. Similarly if we do like4like follow4follow we could attract few people, but again guess what? Before I get to complete proposing 1000 girls who are just random strangers, there’s a high chance that one of them might charge me for harassment. Similarly, if you continue follow4follow, maybe some people will follow you but chances are high that someone might get so pissed at you, and will flag you till your account loses all its value.

Active v. Ghost followers

Have you ever thought how many followers you have, and how many of them are actually giving you feedback? E-commerce website always tries their best to attract traffic to their site. Mainly these E-commerce sites are the ones who made Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire ever. They put their advertisements on other websites to attract people on their landing page. But do you think all traffic is equal? How many are buyers and how many are just surfing. When I surf the net, I saw banners of this Chinese site Alibaba, their ad appears like 100 times on my monitor every day, but whats the point? I have zero interest in buying anything from a Chinese websites. But still I keep seeing their ad again and again and again and again. The fact is, those sites will have some permanent customers, who will come again and again to buy product from them, and few people like me who would sometime check out their site but won’t buy anything due to various reasons.

Similarly, we should not just focus on increasing the numbers of followers, but the main focus should be on how we can have followers who are interested in interacting with us, not just one who once clicked that follow button but later forgot about my existence. I have seen many people with 10,000 followers but usually get less than 100 upvotes and less than 50 comments. That’s why I’m mostly interested in people who have interest in what I do, the quality of my work, and how much they want me to continue writing, and looking forward for my next publication.

After all, one of the reasons I’m writing this is because there is someone who wants to read. If you don’t read, then what’s the point of me writing? As long as there is just one person who is willing to read, I will continue putting my efforts, but if I don’t have even one person who is willing to read my story, then it’s time for me to retire.

Conclusions: We are best friends forever

I remember making vows with many people. I have made the best friend forever promise with a lot of my friends. Now that I remember, what happened to that guy from my junior school, wait he was my best friend and we promised we will always be together, arreh arreh this is weird, how come I can’t recall his name, what was his name again, and wait what happened to that girl who was my best friend during high school, yes we used to spend so much time together sharing our tasks and do it together and would spend hours in the library doing research, at one point people started teasing us by saying we look like a perfect married couple, but wait what happened afterwards, how come I don’t even have her cell number now.

And what happened to that girl I dated, we used to have dates almost every day and those long conversation over the phone, wait we used to send “I love you forever” message every single day. But wait, I heard last year she married that guy, oh yes, but then what happened to our love, our love was supposed to stay forever.

What I’m trying to say is that there is no such thing as forever. So just because you managed to gain a lot of followers doesn’t mean that they will follow you forever, I can hit that follow button on your profile page, but then again I can also hit that unfollow button, right? While I was researching some of the top Steemit elites, I noticed something, at some point they were receiving so many feedbacks everyday from their followers, but at some point the average rate of responses started to decline. This could happen to anybody and everybody. That’s why be careful. That young powerful hunter Tiger is so strong now that everybody else is so scared of him and obeys him as their King, but what about that old grandpa Tiger, lying on his death bed, the moral of this story is that treat people with respect and they will honor you back, just because you have greater power at this moment doesn’t mean you should fall in the dark. The reason you are King today is because others have accepted you as King, but life is short. Even the most powerful King on earth couldn’t stop his death.

So my dear bloggers and potential future professional bloggers, don’t take your followers as granted, provide them the value they seek from you, and sooner or later they will also provide you what you seek. It’s very similar to playing a game of mutual benefits where it’s a win-win situation for all. Hope you had fun reading, and viewing these beautiful flowers