Yesterday we compared SEO to a multiplayer game. Some of the other players can actually be your friends, if you play your cards right.
One of the best ways to build a large group of online contacts is to become a social butterfly. Find some highly respected forums that concentrate on your niche or field, and start chiming in – not too much too soon, but wait until you can add a relevant, pithy comment and wait for the nod of recognition. If you can be among the first commenter’s on a particularly good blog, you can start to get noticed.
Forums are a great place to spread your expertise. Make yourself known by offering sage advice, and helping other with things like finding links or troubleshooting problems. Once you become known for being a helping hand, people will start to pass your name around (pick a decent online handle, please, no-one will take ‘Blue Elf Warrior 7204’ seriously!!)
Start frequenting sites like Yahoo Answers, and providing solid helpful advice on topics related to your site. You can rack up quite a following, and eventually lure people to your site as you build up a reputation for expertise. There are several sites like this that will allow you to become an expert.
Write articles for publication in places like Knol, and various article directories. This is one of the fastest ways to build up an ’expert’ standing, and yields bonuses like Google Rankings and links back to your site of you search engine optimize properly.
Consider investing in an auto responder program, and preparing a newsletter for your clients with tips and helpful advice. You can get a lot of people willing to sign up for free stuff, and then you will be keeping yourself and your site at the front of people’s minds. Anything that gets them to come back for another visit is a good thing. Around the holidays, you can offer them a special discount and encourage them to indulge themselves by purchasing that special something you know they have been eying.
Don’t forget to look into affiliate programs, or better yet, start your own affiliate. This can be as simple as writing an eBook that spells out some of your tips. You can send out teasers through the auto responder to get people interested, and pre-sell it a week or so in advance.
It’s not hard to make friends that can refer others to you and even become customers themselves. You just have to figure out where the right place and when the right time is, and show up!
Tags: affiliates, blogs, directories, forums