I was replying to a comment today about my recent post Facebook Ads Effectiveness and I had the thought: What is persistence? Especially, in social networking where persistence is such a huge part of success it is important to define persistance. When I first started using social networking back in 2007, I completely did not understand and fully invest the time needed to profit from social networking. That is why I never received any business from LinkedIn or Facebook when I first started. It was only when I started spending more and more time online with these sites, and later Twitter that I began to fully appreciate the ability to earn money from social networking. To me the question of what is persistence in social networking is everything.

It took me over 2 years, before I made my first deal in the mortgage business from social networking. Granted the first year and a half, I was hardly persistent in my efforts. Yet, there are rarely overnight successes. It reminds of me James Ray, who I once heard speak. He spoke of the 12 year overnight success that he had become. Now, that does not mean you will not have any success as you start. Just that the bulk of your success is determined by your persistence.

I was first introduced to blogging back in 2008 as a mortgage broker. I wrote one blog article and never understood why the traffic did not come poring in. It was not until the very beginning of this year when I made a commitment to blogging did I start seeing the rewards.

For the past year, I have vowed to blog at least 5 times a week. At times it has been a challenge, and at the same time I accomplished my goal. Including this post, there are now 219 blog posts. My first post on this site was January 20th, and according to the friendly people at CEU-Hours there are 68 days left in the year.

That being said, success is far from accomplished, because my blog still has yet to reach it’s full potential. There is an article on TechCrunch about Hub Pages, where they state that an article brings in more traffic over time, and has a shelf life of 3 years before the information goes stale.  In fact my site is just now starting to become a place where people come and discuss their social networking questions, because all of the articles that I have written in the past are starting to gain traction on Google and other search engines. This just encourages me to put in that much effort and start writing that much better content.

So, the question of what is persistence is something that every entrepreneur, who uses social networking will have to answer for them-self. It is a question that will take them many long hours to determine. The great news is that, because it takes persistence to succeed online, you have a much greater chance of success. The social networking is the easy part. Answering what is persistence and how much do I have to do to become a success online is the part that will separate you and put you in the top 2-4% of your business cohorts. What is persistence to you?