How To Build Relationships Online – How to Find Clients Online

Before potential customers have the confidence to buy your product or online service they need to be convinced that you understand their problems and issues and that you have the capability to help them, and that you will be a good fit for them to work with. That confidence isn’t going to be built in one interaction on your website or blog. This needs multiple interactions and the deeper those interactions are, the more the potential customer’s confidence will be built.

Website and blog visitors usually consume your content passively and most times there is little or nothing to engage them to start a relationship with you. To start up a relationship interactions are needed. From what I see on different websites and blogs most sites might have a contact or subscriber form asking visitors to get in contact with you if they want more information about your product or services. But this is not sufficient.

For buying a book on Amazon or a fridge or TV from an online store, one contact might be sufficient, since the clients are pre-informed and know pretty well what they are looking for. Buying complex, costly or intangible products or services after just one visit on your site isn’t very likely.

Generally the market for online shopping is growing at a remarkable rate. Approximately 87% of U.K. consumers have bought at least one product online in the past 12 months, and the United Kingdom is second only to Norway for making e-commerce purchases in Europe. Across the world, nations such as China and the United States are the biggest online buyers, but other countries are catching up.

There are many ways to build relationships with website and blog visitors. You can encourage comments and feedback on your blog articles, run surveys, send monthly Newsletters via email or you can encourage them to link up with you on your social media channels. Important is to take them beyond being passive consumers of the information on your site to being active participants.

Active participation and interaction is the key to taking your relationship to the next level. The more they feel they’re communicating directly with you the stronger your relationship will get.

Bloggers love it when people comment on their articles and find them helpful. The little effort it takes to comment on someone’s blog post can result in a deeper conversation and stronger relationship. Comments have longevity – they last forever in your comment section.

For a lot of people social media is another way to build their network and ultimately meet new people. I personally believe that Social Media – in particular Facebook and Instagram – is the most important opportunity to find your ideal target audience and to build online relationships.

While it’s not very difficult to get a lot of “friends” – using your personal Facebook profile which isn’t adequate for a business since you are violating Facebooks Terms and Conditions – it’s challenging to take your online relationships to the next level. If you think that you can just go online and find a lot of friends in a few hours you are going wrong. To build real relationships takes time and to develop trust even more.

If you want to know if you should use your Facebook Profile or Page for Business and Network Marketing click on the link to find out more.

To get business online you need to get visitors to your site and convert them into customers.

Your main focus should not be on how and when to pitch them – you might not even ever do this – instead you should rather focus on the two essential online strategies:

• Generating leads and
• building relationships

This is true for most online businesses in any profession or niche as well as for network marketing businesses.

As a first step you have to locate the people that are searching for your product or services and then build an audience. The easiest way to build an audience is to teach and to provide education. From my experience it’s a much more successful approach to come across as an educator rather than a salesperson.

To be able to locate the people that are searching for your product or services its crucial to know your Ideal Target Audience very well, since you need to create content for them. If you don’t know their problems and needs – how do you want to create content for them that answers their questions?

When putting educational materials out there it’s important to have a lead capture page or an “Optin form” behind your Call to Action, where people leave their contact details before downloading your guide or cheat sheet. As an example you will notice that there is this blue banner across this blog post where you can download my free giveaway called Peter´s Target Audience Worksheet.

My target market, network marketers and business owners of small businesses, struggle with knowing, defining and finding their Ideal Target Customers so we get them to exchange their email information for that cool giveaway.

Because you are in network marketing this does not mean you also have to target network marketers. There are two ways you can go:

• the business route and
• the product way

If you decide to go the product way you could create educational materials for health & wellness, fitness, nutrition, skin care advice or weight loss suggestions. My advice here is to pick the niche which fits your interest and knowledge best and fires you up the most to talk about online.

After you generated your leads by offering one of your branded giveaways you start working on part two which is building the relationship. In your beginning, when only a few leads drop in, you may personally reach out to each lead that comes through and welcome them. You may ask them: Hi, I saw you visited my site and downloaded my giveaway XYZ, hope you enjoyed reading it and found it helpful. Is there anything in particular I can help you with?

You are looking specifically for their problems and pain points or needs to see if there is an opening where your product, service or opportunity can solve their issues. You definitely wouldn’t send an email to your new lead saying “Check out my thingy!” as you can’t have any idea yet if they are either open already or not to let you help them … this would appear to your new lead just pushy and spammy.

Later on, when you are getting busier, you definitely want to automate your email follow ups using an email marketing service provider like AWeber, MailChimp or similar which allows you to set up email campaigns. During your email campaign you are guiding your leads step-by-step on the way to solve their problems.

To recap… focus on lead generation and building relationships and you will most likely do it all different than most of your competitors who only pitch and spam their audience!

Stay tuned and don’t miss out the last part of the post series … coming next:
Make it Easy to Become a Client.

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