Building Relationships Online – Part 3
Dear Readers,
Continuing the theme this week we’re talking about building relationships online and how this is the key to marketing. If you missed the first 3 installments you can read them here ( intro, part 1, part 2).
Today I want to talk about the process of building that realtionship. One of the first steps you should take is to open yourself up for people to easily get in touch with you.
- You want to put your photo online.
- You want to put your phone number online. (Mine is my name: 877-BEN-FITTS) (GASP! I work online but YES I want people to call me!)
- You want to put a contact form where people can send you an email.
These are just a few simple techniques. But they’re a good start.
Putting your picture online is to make yourself more friendly and allow people to connect with you. One technique you want to use is to brand yourself and begin using the same photos over and over. I even fail at this myself sometimes. For example I need to change the picture on the top of this blog.
The idea being that if someone sees the same photo on your blog, on your facebook, on your twitter, etc. they immediately know it is you. Sometimes those photos appear in a newsfeed and seeing a recognizable photo helps them know it’s you. That is brand building.
One strategy I use for my picture is to try to make it interesting. You’ll notice on my most commonly used photo I have a picture of me and my hairless cat Tallulah. That is a recognizable image. If you see that picture again you’re going to remember it. You want to be memorable. My buddy Chris has one of him and two of his sons in a sombrero. Again it’s memorable. You don’t want to blend in. I know one guy, and I think is photo is idiotic, but it looks like a mug shot. Guess what? I ALWAYS remember that photo. Another guy I know is a blue collar dude and he has pictures of him in a red white and blue hard hat.
It all boils down to putting your photo on your site along with your phone number or email address makes you more accessible. Your audience sees the photo and relates to you. Without the photo your just a faceless person. With a photo you’re suddenly more interesting and hopefully they can relate to you better.
Putting your phone number on your site instantly makes you more approachable. A few years back I was selling a product through pay per click ads. I added a phone number to the sales page. The next month I sold 30% more of the product just by putting a phone number on the page. I still made as many sales directly online but I made an additional 30% from telephone sales that could be tracked back to that PPC ad. Even if all you do is put up a voicemail number you want to have a phone number on your web site. It makes you look more legitimate and approachable.
Finally lets talk about email. You do NOT want to put your email address out on the web. This is one of the ways you start to get spam. The spammers write robots that are programs designed to go surf the web and steal email addresses to add to spam lists. That is how a lot of people end up getting so much spam. They don’t know any better and they start putting their email address out there. Then they get on the spam lists and they can’t get off the list. Instead you want to use a contact form so you can hide your email address.
If you’re a blogger like me… There is a WordPress plugin you may want to check out. The plugin I use for my contact form is called Fast Secure Contact Form. I tried a couple others but they were a pain in the arse. Fast Secure Contact Form is both complex and simple. LOL. That means that you can set it up and take the default settings and have a pretty good contact form. You can also do all the extra customizations and stuff if you so choose. The one thing I really like about it is that it ties into your WordPress Akismet spam filter to help filter out the junk emails you get from your blog.
To review:
Use your photo, your phone number, and an email contact form on your web sites to make it easy for people to follow up with you.
Next time we’ll go beyond simple email contact forms and talk about other ways to get your readers to engage with you.
See you later this week 
- Ben Fitts
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Operating a successful business is largely about building and maintaining relationships. Sure, your customers are concerned about price, quality, service, etc., but the most successful businesses are those that work to develop a relationship with their customers