5 Ways to Build Personal Relationships with Your Customers

Once you have identified groups of prospective customers, if you want them to give your links social approval signals, you have to take the time to build relationships with them.

One great way to do this is providing free valuable content related to your niche. So sending them links to websites related to your niche that you find helpful or other information they can use in their everyday lives.

Make It Personal

You also should share personal information about your life. Remember, you want them to think of you as a friend, not just an Internet marketer. So you can do things like posting photos, videos and other links related to your private life so that people can feel as if they know you better

You also want to make positive and supportive comments about their updates and tweets and repost them. Every time you re-Tweet something or share their update, they are going to get a notification.

It’s also a good idea to show an interest in the details of their lives and refer frequently to personal information they have shared in the past, like asking about their kids or how their vacations were.

The 3:1 Rule

Once you have built friendly relationships with your social media contacts, you can go ahead and follow the 3:1 Rule: For every post you make that promotes a product or service, post at least three others that are completely unrelated to any commercial objective.

You want to make sure you always provide valuable content, keep it upbeat and family-friendly, and whenever possible try to engage your prospective customers on an interpersonal level. Don’t forget to use their names, refer to personal information they have shared in the past, and make every effort to engage them as a friend, not somebody trying to sell them something.

Forward links to articles that you found interesting and that are related to your niche, or even those that aren’t. Retweet interesting tweets, not just those that have commercial motivations. Use your postings to encourage conversations and engage other users in discussions.

Happy Birthday!

Birthdays are an excellent excuse to send personalized messages that will enhance your bond with your individual social media contacts. Nearly every social media site has free apps to remind you of your contact’s birthdays.

That way, when you do promote a product, frame it so that you are a friend recommending a particularly good product to another friend.

Video Marketing

Another terrifically powerful free marketing method is video marketing. Because of rapid advances in technology and the falling price of playback-enabled devices have combined to create near-universal access to streaming media, video marketing can now be targeted at everybody.

You can drive a lot of traffic to your pages with an effective video marketing campaign. And the best part about it is that it doesn’t require a lot of expensive equipment or technical expertise.

Stepping out of the internet and into the real world for a moment, nearly every modern smart phone, digital camera, even desktop PCs come with cameras built into them nowadays. Most shoot high definition video as well, making it a simple task to create an engaging, high-quality video you can use to promote your products.

Post Different Types of Videos

There are a number of different kinds of videos. Take a few minutes to research videos about products like the ones you are promoting and see what your competitors are doing. This helps you create something unique and also learn from their mistakes.

One common type of video is just to record someone talking about your product. It could be you, a friend or just about anybody.

The second kind of video is a series of static screen shots, such as a PowerPoint presentation. They can actually be created with PowerPoint, if you already have the program, or you can download a program that will allow you to build one. These kinds of videos are going to be more like commercials than testimonials or sales pitches.

Don’t Forget the Backlink

Finally, the most important thing: The whole point of creating videos and posting them on popular video sharing sites is to create additional backlinks and lead traffic to your website, so don’t forget to post a link to your site underneath your video. You would be surprised how many people forget this step!

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.