THIS is the secret to growing your audience:

Every time someone tells me that social or content didn't work for them, I ask the same question:

How long did you do it?

...and pretty much every time I ask, the answer is under one year - and quite often the answer is around 3-6 months.

Though there are a few 'overnight successes' here and there, it's pretty far and in between. The majority of the people who have big audiences today may seem like they came out of nowhere, but when you take a closer look, you'll see that there are many many years of consistent effort put into this outcome.

Everyone wants to be Gary Vaynerchuk, but fail to see that Gary didn't even become 'Gary Vee' overnight. He worked hard in his family business to learn the ropes for 7 years before starting Wine Library TV (2006), which he did DAILY for 5 years (2011) before he really hit the mainstream. When he rants that people don't work as hard as him, which he credits to his success, he is right. Most of his fans watch him to learn quick fixes and shortcuts to get to Gary's level.

One of my heroes, Brené Brown, seemed like an overnight success when her 2010 TED Talk came out, but this success was 46 years in the making. As she told the Telegraph in 2012:

'I waited tables and bar-tended for six years. I didn’t graduate with my bachelor’s degree until I was almost 30. I was on the fricking 12-year plan!’

Even after she finished her degree, she studied and presented and grew her academic reputation for 16 more years until she would give that talk at TEDXHouston and another year before it would go viral online, propelling her profile and her career.

But time isn't the only consistency factor. In this week's video, I discuss several dimensions of what it means to be consistent and why it is incredibly important to your success.

In it, I share my own experience with being both consistent and inconsistent and several other stories of how inconsistency stunted the growth of others.

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Truly Social is a web series that you can share with your boss or client when they're not really "getting" social. It's also the name of my company - where we work with clients on helping them develop their own content series.

I've been working on this social stuff for over 18 years and I've been a participant in the social web since 1992. My videos (usually) come out every week ...with ~5 minute "lessons" on what are truly social practices (and what are NOT).