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6 Ways to Help Build Relationships using your Web site

Guest post by: John Alexander

Article Overview: 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. Here are 6 ways

6 Ways to Help Build Relationships using your Web site

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 several years 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.

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?

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.

TIP 3: The XHTML Friends Network is one simple way to represent human relationships in your hyperlinks.

XFN^TM is the acronym for XHTML Friends Network.

Developed by Matthew Mullenweg (who also is the developer of the semantic blogging software WordPress) along with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik, XFN is conceptually like other aggregation technologies, except it uses HTML vocabulary, not other markup languages.

XFN^TM is a very simple way to allow you to add in how another site might be related to you when you create a hyper link.

For more help with XFN^TM visit the XHTML Friends Network.

TIP 4: Join a few Social type sites such as Digg or Del.icio.us

Join a few Social Web sites and start getting involved.

Examples include Linked In, Facebook, Digg, Del.icious.

TIP 5: 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?

o publish an Interview

o talk about your hobbies or talk about your career

o do some affiliate marketing

o highlight an eBay auction

o sell things from Amazon

o Gather customer feedback at no cost with your own

free guest book

o Incorporate visitor voting

o Choose to create content on nearly any topic you wish

o All 100% for free

TIP 6: Join Facebook as a tool to re-establish old time friendships with people.

Facebook 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.

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.

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Article Tags: relationship, relationships



Related Forum Posts
Re: Need A Review Of My Internet Marketing Blog - Hi Jay, I tend to agree with the others. You have obviously put a great deal of effort into your site which you can be proud of and the content is great but there is just too much of it. As soon as I landed on your home page I was immediately distracted by a pop up message followed by another banner at the bottom-not good. I want to see your site and what you have to offer. A lot of visitors will just exit out at this point when what you want them to do is stick around and ‘take action’ by signing up to one of your offers. Try to streamline your site into your banker offers and a few others and if you want to lead people away from your front page to specific niche offers all about perhaps ’surveys’ or ‘data entry’ then just include a side widget for something like ‘Other Ways To Make Money On The Interent’ and take them away to another page with different banners etc but not all on your front page as they will be totally confused by all the offers and leave. My site below is very new with limited content to very specific offers and over the coming months I will be developing it to cover other linked pages to other areas of interest for the visitors, best wishes, Mal.
Re: Great start, but no finish - My advise is FOCUS on your business. Focusing is the main factor to succeed on business. If you have a great idea, then follow it only, don't look anywhere else. It is especially essential in an online business. Because there are a lot of mind blowing sales letters promising millions dolllars or overnight success, people find it difficult to concentrate on one business and they lose their energy. Concept is simple. 1- Have a good idea; 2- Build your business on it; 3- Monetize your business; 4- Promote it; 5- Build list of responsive customers; 6- Maintain You Business. Focusing and not fearing from competition (instead you can learn from competitiors) are main tips of billionaires ,BTW. Orxan
Revenue Streams for Websites - Too funny, I was just reading a book: Multiple Streams of Internet Income: How Ordinary People make extraordinary money on line, by Robert G. Allen. 2001 That's a misnomer, though - they're not ordinary people, they're people with established careers who can take their expertise and exploit it on the web. Ways to generate income? 1) Sell your own material on the site. Ebooks, etc. 2) Join various affiliate programs that match what your website is about. 3) Google adsense - All my money comes from this... it's started out slow but as readership of my sites grown, the income has grown. Nothing to write home about yet... 4) Google adwords - the advertisers whose ads show up on Google Adsense. Unless you're selling big ticket items on your site you don't want to use it, your keywords can cost from 20 cents upwards.
Re: How to do Link Building? - Be diligent. Build blogs.Pay attention to the contents.
Some online business suggstions debunked - 2. Sell photos on stock photography sites --- I tried this, couldn't even get in the front door. But then, I'm apparently a lousy photographer... However, if you do get in, I think you only get something like 25 cents a download... 8. Build services atop Amazon Web Services ---I've been an Amazon associate for a loooong time, selling books, and business has been lousy since the beginning. Nobody reads anymore...I do get a few DVD sales every now and again... but frankly I make much more money though Google Ads on my site. It took several months for that to build up, but now as my website has more readers those ads are starting to pay off, whereas there's been no corresponding jump from Amazon ads on the same pages...


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