Core Habits for Internet Marketers - Listening

In case you’re visiting in the middle of this series, you can read the previous articles in the Core Habits series:

• Core Habit #1 - Reading
  

Yesterday we talked about starting to develop a set of primary habits that will begin to align you with success as an internet marketer. Core habits are really the building blocks for your own business ownership mentality… they’re the things you’re going to do every single day, without fail, to accelerate the growth of your business.

Today we’re going to talk about a core habit that isn’t just appropriate for internet marketers… everyone should develop this habit. It’s the habit of listening.

Listen to your market

When you actually stop and listen to people, you might be surprised at what you hear. In nearly every case, when people communicate, they’re expressing a need, a want or a desire. Sometimes you’ll see very clearly what’s motivating someone to communicate with you… other times, it may seem that the desire is only to speak and see that someone listens.

Professional marketers understand how incredibly important it is to identify the need, want, or desire of the people that they market to. That’s what makes purposeful listening such a critical core habit to develop.

Active listening

For the purpose of this lesson, I’ll describe active listening as “what you can audibly hear”. When you communicate with someone verbally, you’re really going to need to listen to what they say so that you can understand what’s driving their communication with you. If you ask someone a question, it’s important that your motivation is to hear what their answer is! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve answered questions to glassy-eyed, one dimensional faces that don’t take time to understand the need, want, or desire in me that their questions are meant to elicit!

Most people tend towards laziness when it comes to active listening. The problem is that it’s very easy to audibly hear something without taking time to process and understand what it means. After some time, people come to rely on instincts and patterns to help them process what they’re hearing subconsciously… this lazy habit helps to free their conscious mind to focus on things that are less familiar and comfortable, but it can also cultivate ignorance and shallow communication.

Inactive listening

Where active listening will pertain to what you can audibly hear, inactive listening is useful for identifying strong nonverbal cues and messages, or for understanding written communications. These might be visual cues when you’re speaking in person with someone. They might also be market survey results or statistics. In nearly every case, your inactive listening skill depends strongly on your sense of intuition… you’re trying to “listen” to identify a need, want, or desire, but you aren’t necessarily audibly “hearing” it.

Listen to other marketers

In the same way that I told you how important it is to listen to your market, it’s equally important to listen to other people who work within your market, whether they be partners or competitors. In a competitive market, you’re going to need to stay abreast of what everyone else is up to so that you can adapt or adjust your own strategy as needed. You’ll need to exercise your skills in active listening and inactive listening to accomplish this.

One good way to keep abreast in the internet marketing industry is by subscribing to and listening to audio podcasts. Lots of internet marketers produce both written and audio materials, and absorbing audio material is a good way for you stay tuned in when you aren’t necessarily in a position to sit and read a book or an article. Other marketers conduct regular conference calls for training or sales purposes… an aspiring marketer might participate in these calls to gather new ideas or investigate what their competition or mentors are up to.

Develop the habit of listening

Whether you’re actively hearing it from someone’s mouth, or you’re hearing inactively through inaudible cues and messages, listening to your market is all about identifying a need, want, or desire. When people communicate with you, develop your active listening habit by taking time to understand what their motivation is. Exercise your inactive listening skills by surveying or studying your target market to learn it’s needs. Finally, keep abreast of other competitive marketers by spending 15-30 minutes listening to their audio materials or participating in a conference call that they conduct.

Stay tuned for the next article in my Core Habits series… Networking.