I got an email the other day inviting me to join a website where artists get together and "network." This means showing off our work, helping one another with our work, and generally the James Bond approach to networking, which includes spying on one another. The web is exploding with such type websites. So, I gleefully upload some images of my artwork, along with a lengthy bio, and all of a sudden the "new guy", me, was on the homepage in all my blazing glory.

Here is how it works: Artists look at my work, and I look at theirs. If we like what we see, we click on a button that says "FOLLOW THIS ARTIST ", and that way each artist builds up a count of, what they call followers. Of course someone leads the pack with the most followers, and, naturally, guess who thinks he ought to be the one at the top of that list.

Anyhow, the website immediately began sending me an email every time I got a new follower. Because I was listed on the homepage as the new guy, my email inbox started getting flooded with the notification that I had gained a new follower. I could not keep up with the emails! My follower count began to rise as dramatically as my heart rate, and I don't mind telling ya, I was feeling pretty good. I just knew that given time, I was bound to be top dog. I just didn't give much thought to how much time that was going to take.

Wouldn’t you know it, a new member signs up (the world wide web ought to be a little smaller I guess) and yours truly gets bumped right off of the home page as the fantastic "new guy." Needless to say, the emails dwindled down to a trickle, and my follower count eventually hung as still as a full moon in a calm, midnight sky. I knew then, that in order to lead the pack, I had to actually hang around awhile and really earn it. So much for instant success with a minimal amount of effort.

So there we all were on site, everybody following someone, but nobody really going anywhere. Well, to be honest, we were all going somewhere, it was just going to take some effort as well as time for us to get there, wherever that somewhere happened to be. It was then that it occurred to me that, by as much as I "followed" anyone, I was hurting my own ratings by raising their follower count ahead of my own. See how "logical" artist's can be?

Now lets just think logically about this for a moment. I follow someone, they get an email notifying them of it, and just maybe they will recipricate by following me. So in this case, the more I follow them, the more they follow me, right? Sounds good to me.Let's get to following, I say to myself. So I jump back on the site and boy do I start following. I follow everybody I see. Surely this is going to get me ahead in the race.

But, come to find out, they didn't follow me just because I followed them. I go to check my email, and, you guessed it, no followers. Do you think they knew something I didn't?

It's just too bad they did not have a special reward for "top follower." Then I would have came through with flying colors.

Instant Success (with a whole lot of time and effort)