In just a few short months, I celebrate a decade as a blogger. In that time, I’ve won awards, created successful ecommerce and affiliate sites, generated tons of social followers for businesses, hosted podcasts with some fascinating people and written thousands of blog posts. If that sounds very lofty, it is not my intention. I want you to know that I’ve also run communities that failed, due to harassment. I’ve started blogs to the sound of crickets. I’ve launched podcasts that didn’t go beyond 10 episodes.

In these failures, I think I learned more than from the successes, because I listened to what people said or did, to signal their interest and intent.

The best bloggers and content marketing agencies do alot of listening. They use products like Sprout Social, Hootsuite or Hubspot to mine social media for clues. They create massive surveys and share the findings. They pay attention to theri analytics (prospects to leads, visits, conversion rates, bounce rate, etc) to see what is resonating and what isn’t.

As we look at the most effective content agencies, and how they consistently deliver world-class content, day after day, the most important habit that we see is listening. The most effective content marketing agencies know what to write, what to add to the conversation and what form to package it in. They know who their audience is (marketing personas) and they know what their audience wants (deliver value) and how their audience wants to receive it (the medium).

It is so much more fun to speak than to listen, but the wise man listens more than he talks. If you know that you struggle with listening, take time to improve your skills in this area.

• Join an active speaking class - Choose one that has practice times or homework assignments.

• Set aside time each day to merely read the thoughts of others - Every great blogger does this.

• Join a book club, and attend every meeting - Don’t plan to speak unless you absolutely have to.

Don’t waste your time delivering what you think your audience wants. Learn to mine Twitter and Facebook for answers; learn to glean from what others are sharing; pay attention to the types of headlines and CTAs that consistently work. – Listen.