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 7 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.
* 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 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™ 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™ 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.
Here are some simple definitions:
acquaintance - is someone who you have exchanged greetings and not much (if any) more — maybe a short conversation or two.
friend - Someone you are a friend to. A buddy, home (boy|girl) that you know.
co-worker - Someone a person works with, or works at the same organization as. Symmetric. Usually transitive.
colleague - Someone in the same field of study/activity. Symmetric. Often transitive.
For more help with XFN™ visit the XHTML Friends Network.
Here is a handy XFN™ tutorial on how to get started.
Here is a XFN™ creator tool to help you create your XFN™ friendly links.
* 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. Try using OnlyWire.com which will allow you to bookmark a page with 20 different services with just one click.
* TIP 5: Build some value related lenses using Squidoo. It's 100%
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.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.
* TIP 7: Watch this video describing the Social Graph API with Google code.
code.google.com
Basically the Social Graph API makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful. Watch this video.
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.
7 Tips to Help You Build Relationships using your Web site - To learn more about this author, visit John Alexander's Website.
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Idea Motivator - Robin Nobles has a background in business, but she’s always had a passion for writing. When staying home to take care of her young children, she started her fiction writing career. She’s had several short stories published and has won several contests with her writing. She’s written three fiction books and had a good chance at getting one of them published.
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