Building Relationships Online Part 2

Dear Readers,

Last week I wrote about the importance of building relationships online. They key to your marketing is by learning to build relationships. (first post, second post.)

One of the things I spoke about was in writing “questions” in order to get your audience to participate.

Darren wrote that he feels responding to other people’s questions, their Facebook status updates, etc. is important. I agree with Darren but just liking someone isn’t enough.

You want to participate in people’s Facebook conversations and get your name out there, but that isn’t enough. You need to have something interesting to say so that people will want to follow you. If someone clicks through on your name you want them to see something interesting. That is where starting interesting conversations comes in. You want to ask though provoking questions. You want to post on a controversial topic to get the conversation going. Then when someone clicks through and sees your comment they’ll be engaged. They’ll want to subscribe to you to see what someone says next.

Keeping in mind the idea of starting conversations and asking questions you might want to try some free surveys. There are a couple of services you can use to run your own free surveys. Typically they allow you to run a survey of up to 100 people. A couple of these services are Survey Monkey and Free Online Surveys. You can use these sites to create your own free surveys and engage your readers and fans. You can even collect email addresses and begin to build a mailing list.

Another cool free service is Formspring. This a free service you can use to ask any question. It basically allows your users to ask you a question about any topic. It can be a great way to learn more about your readers/prospects/fans. You can populate it with questions of your own or let your fans make up their own questions.

Engaging your fans is the first step towards building strong relationships. These free tools can help you begin to engage your fans.

Later this week I’ll give you some ideas on how to continue those relationships once you’ve started them.

- Ben Fitts

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