How To Build A Re­la­tion­ship With Your Visitors

Re­la­tion­ships are hard. Any­one who has dated some­one for more than a year will know this to be true, and will have ex­pe­ri­enced ar­gu­ments about the wash­ing up and long heart­felt dis­cus­sions about how you want dif­fer­ent things out of life…

But then imag­ine that you’re try­ing to build a re­la­tion­ship with some­one you’ve ever met.

• With­out talk­ing to them.
• And from miles away.

That’s what you should be try­ing to do if you’re a web­mas­ter and ac­tu­ally it’s just as dif­fi­cult, if a lit­tle less teary and dramatic…

Build­ing a re­la­tion­ship with your vis­i­tors is cru­cial if you want to have loyal vis­i­tors rather than just one off hits, and it can be an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful way to see your pro­mo­tion take care of it­self. Here’s how to nav­i­gate the tricky in­tri­ca­cies of the webmaster/visitor dynamic.

Your True Colours

Our first piece of ad­vice comes from Phil Collins, who un­der­stands the im­por­tance of show­ing your true colours.

By show­ing your read­ers who you are and that you have opinions/a per­son­al­ity, you will help them to feel more of a con­nec­tion with you and to read your work with more interest.

Too many web­mas­ters and blog­gers are un­der the im­pres­sion that they must be at all times neu­tral and never con­tro­ver­sial. They will never write in the first per­son, or if they do they’ll say ‘we’ all the time as though they’re some big corporation.

Be your­self and if you of­fend some­one or come across as un­pro­fes­sional you’ll find that sur­pris­ingly it ac­tu­ally makes peo­ple more likely to read what you say. Why do you think celebrity gos­sip mag­a­zines are so suc­cess­ful? Personalities!

Use So­cial Media

So­cial me­dia makes for a fan­tas­tic tool that will help you to con­nect with your vis­i­tors and fans on a more per­sonal level and show even more of your personality.

Tweet about your daily ac­tiv­i­ties on Twit­ter, post pho­tos on In­sta­gram, and add friends on Facebook.

This way you’ll be more of a pres­ence in your vis­i­tors’ lives, and you’ll show your­self to be a fully formed hu­man be­ing rather than just a de­tached voice.

In­volve the Readers

What’s im­por­tant to re­mem­ber though is that a re­la­tion­ship is a two way thing. Be­ing en­ter­tain­ing will not be enough to cre­ate a ‘re­la­tion­ship’ as such - that’s es­sen­tially just a show.

To give your read­ers a real sense of in­vest­ment then, crowd­source ideas so that they can con­tribute, carry out sur­veys and log into a fo­rum from time to time. Giv­ing them mer­chan­dise such as t-shirts and bags can help too as they will that way be able to lit­er­ally ‘brand’ them­selves with your site and feel like they’re a liv­ing part of it.

Be De­cent

But a re­la­tion­ship is no good if it’s a bad one. Re­ally what you should be aim­ing to do is cre­ate a pos­i­tive re­la­tion­ship that will show your read­ers that you care about them.

This means an­swer­ing e-mails rapidly and po­litely, it means oc­ca­sion­ally giv­ing away a free­bee like an ebook, and it means re­mem­ber­ing to al­ways de­liver value through your site rather than fo­cussing al­ways on the bot­tom line.

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment : I love this ar­ti­cle! And added the mu­sic video. :-) Hope you can watch it, and it’s not blocked in your coun­try.

Just 3 days ago I’ve pub­lished my new blog at RalfSkirr.com. There I’m start­ing to do what the ar­ti­cle men­tions above: „Show­ing your read­ers who you are and that you have opinions/a per­son­al­ity.” Hope to see you there, too!