5
Easy 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 8 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.
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
TIP 1: Help build
relationships with your writing style.
Consider places in your Web site where you might mildly
re-write your text so that it flows in a much more natural
sounding dialog. Most of us do not tend to communicate in
the same way we write. Natural flowing dialog means that
your reader will feel like the Web copy is "speaking
to them" in a natural way. This is especially
important when you are trying improve your response
rate. Tiny little changes in the way your content
reads can have a huge impact. The placement of important
information or even the size of the font being used can
make an impact. How many people could improve their
business just by using their log analysis statistics to
make decisions on the placement of important
information.
-How long are readers staying your pages?
-Could you benefit by bringing more of your deep content
to the home page
so people can see what you have to offer?
-Are your Toll Free numbers big enough to be easily read?
-Could you shift a compelling offer to page that already
has high visibility and get immediate benefit from it?
These are all easy little things to do, that can make a huge
difference. Communicating things in a different flow or in a different
tone (especially with your specific audience in mind) can make a difference in your visitor responses and initiate
more relationship potential. Have you ever tried giving
your readers a non-threatening reason to respond to your
page by leaving a bit of information out? The beginning of
business only occurs when you are easily found and ALSO
once someone chooses to respond or is compelled to
respond.
TIP 2 : Automating
communications while keeping "relationships" in mind.
Many people are familiar with using a sequential auto
responder, but don't think of it as just a tool to push
sales.
Use your auto-responder to deliver communications
that ad value and serve your readers or fulfill some
purpose and don't forget that if you write naturally
and ask for a response, you'll often get it. Even if the
visitor knows it is an auto-responder if you take time to
prepare quality communications and write plenty of
opportunity to respond into the messages, you'll find that
it works. Check out Aweber
as a good tool.
Listen to a few of these people talk about the
power of e-mail marketing:
TIP 3: Join a few
Social type sites such as Digg
or Del.icio.us
Join a few Social Web sites and start getting
involved.
Try using OnlyWire.com
which will allow you to bookmark a page with 20 different
services with just one click.
TIP 4: Build some value
related lenses using Squidoo. It's 100% free!
By creating articles and content on Squidoo you can link
back to your main site but also participate in the Squidoo
community. Read my last article
on using Squidoo.
What kind of creative strategies can you employ using
Squidoo to help build your profile?
publish an Interview
talk about your hobbies
or talk about your career
do some affiliate
marketing
highlight an eBay
auction
sell things from Amazon
Gather customer feedback
at no cost with your
own free guest book
Incorporate visitor
voting
Choose to create content
on nearly any topic you wish
All 100% for free
TIP 5: Join
Facebook as a tool to re-establish old time friendships
with people.
Facebook.com
is pretty cool as a tool for connecting with old friends
as well as new ones. Loads of wild and crazy time wasting
applications which you may not want to activate, but I've
been very interested in how people connect in Facebook and
your list of contacts and networks can potentially grow
very quickly.
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.
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.
About John Alexander John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his
associate educators, John
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,
Australia and
Internationally in Asia.
