7
Tips to Help You Build Relationships using your Web site
By John Alexander
Why talk about "relationships" and the Web?
The answer is simple.
One of the most powerful objectives you can keep in mind as
you build and enhance your Web
site is with relationship building in mind.
First let me set the tone
for some of these suggestions with some important points from
my own experience. As I look back
over
the last 6 years since January 2002, I have done more
traveling than I have ever done in my entire life.
What a wonderful privilege it has been for me to have these travel opportunities and
to be able to meet some of the wonderful folks we have gotten to know and
have gotten to work together with and formed relationships
with.
Here's the funny thing. While probably most of the folks in my
own home town do not even
know me, the Web has made it possible for me to make many good
friends throughout Canada, the United States as well as
many friends from other countries on the other side of the
globe. So in what other age would it have even been possible for
some guy in a small town in Ontario to meet and partner with a
person who lives in a small town in Mississippi and then have
had the opportunity to meet and teach students and help folks
from all over the world. Thanks to SEO and
the Web and thanks to relationships made through our Web site,
I've had this opportunity to
travel to many of the United States as well as across Canada
and to places like Australia and to the United Kingdom. (I hope to
come back to the UK again in 2008.) But these opportunities
were all available because of the Web. What great friends we've made with so many
folks from all over the globe and what a privilege it has been.
Without stable visibility in top search results for the right
keyword phrases probably most of our customers would have
never found us in the first place. We know that top visibility to the
right audience in search is of exceptional value. But
right next to that, comes the importance of good old fashioned
relationship building. Although relationship building
potential can be
supported with today's Web 2.0 technology and programming enhancements, it also needs to be supported by each of us understanding
the tremendous value in forming good, genuine, long term
relationships with good people.
The
capability of a well crafted Web site, properly optimized
presents much more than an opportunity to make a quick
one-time sale. These days, you want to take the time to craft
your Web site as an authoritative resource for your customers
and the multiple marketplaces that could benefit from finding
your resources. Build it correctly the first time and put the
required work into it so that it will stand the test of
time.
I often like to
say that, "Business
is about making money and making a profit - but life is about
helping people. You don't want to get too focused on doing one
without the doing the other."
A business
online today is not so much about the who has the latest
technical marvels (as cool as they are,) but a Web business
exists for the purpose of effectively reaching and
communicating with others in the local surrounding communities
(or global communities.) For you to benefit from your Web
site to the maximum, a relationship with others
needs to come into being somewhere along the way, just as in
real world business.
Listen to how the man who created the World Wide Web, Sir Tim
Berners-Lee put it..
"The web is more a
social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a
social effect — to help people work together — and not
as a technical toy.
The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our
weblike existence in the world. We clump into families,
associations, and companies.
We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the
corner."
—Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web
Isn't that quite an amazing
statement?
Okay, with these things in mind, it's let's discus a few
tips now.
7 Tips to
Help you improve Relationship building using your Web site
By John Alexander
In Summary About Using the Web for Relationship building
I have had
the tremendous privilege to work with and become friends with
students, webmasters and professionals from well over 87
different countries. Many of these folks have made the trip to over to attend our little
hands-on SEO workshops from places as far away as Asia,
Australia, Israel, London, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, Africa,
Spain, Norway, Japan and of course across the US and from
Canada.
We
have had the pleasure for many of these students of watching
them grow their businesses
and many of our students have made a habit of coming back for
a refresher class each year just to keep up with the newest
skills.
Robin Nobles
and I are very privileged that many of our original students
have also joined us as professional SEO associate educators
and are now opening localized Search
Engine Academy Workshops within local communities.
High performance SEO skills are now being taught on a steady
basis right from local communities so that students can
gain the freshest research, updates, re-certification of skills
without needing to travel or make any lengthy trip out of
town.
But none of
these things would have been possible in such a young industry
as the Web (when you think of how short a time the Web as even
been around.) The
ultimate direction that the Web is taking us, is back to the
very roots of relationship building and communicating
effectively with individuals and communities around us.
Every time
you establish a new relationship on the Web, you never know
where it will lead to or what new opportunities it will
position you for. Explore all the ways of making your Web
site or Blog more relationship effective and continually
strive to build better long term relationships with your
customers and you will take your business to new levels of
exposure in so doing.
Wordtracker
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About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his
partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first
comprehensive online search engine marketing courses. John is author of an
e-book called Wordtracker
Magic and has
taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world
wide. John is also Director of Search
Engine Academy with localized Search Engine Academy
training centers where the Complete SEO Mastery Workshop and 6
Month Mentoring program is taught locally to business
owners and individuals in
communities across North America and
Internationally in Asia.
