One of my amazing mentors Mari Smith has just released a book called ‘Relationship Marketing’.  It talks about building relationships with your clients and how people buy from people, not companies. 

 

It got me thinking about all of the relationships I have made online. I am not referring to my wonderful clients I have the honour of working with, but other business owners.

I recently ran a free teleseminar with Peggy McColl on ‘Activating your Online Presence'.  I had reached out to some of the people I have met through social media to help me promote the event. I was constantly seeing myself mentioned on both Facebook and Twitter as all of these wonderful people were supporting me by promoting my event out on social media. With all of their support and my own efforts we led a very successful teleseminar.

Just start reaching out to people. Join groups of people that have similar interest or share a similar message to you. Once you find people you think are compatible to you, start to share their content on social media – you can even mention them in the post or tweet. Example:

 

Here you can see that 'FriendsofSocial' have promoted a blog article of 'KevinKennethLau'.  I know that at some point soon Kevin will send out a tweet thanking 'FriendsofSocial' for sharing his post.  Now Kevin's blog article goes out to all of the people that are following Carolyn at 'FriendsofSocial' – it is great exposure for Kevin, especially if she has a lot of followers.  When you put the @ symbol in front of someone's name it turns it into a link. So, now, any of Carolyn's followers that are interested to find out more about Kevin can click on the ink and be taken to his profile page, where they can choose to follow him.  Thanks to Carolyn, he may get more followers, just because she took the time to share his tweet.

 

Make sure whenever anyone mentions you or retweets your comment or content that you thank them for it. Also, you can start posting or retweeting their content.

 

I now have a great group of business owners that share each other’s content. This benefits everyone as our message reaches more people, great relationships are formed, the readers receive more quality content and everyone is happy.

 

The other great thing about knowing what other people do in their business is that you can recommend them to people you meet.  You might meet someone that says they are looking to lose some weight and you can then say – 'Here is a link to someone I know, her name is Melonie Dodaro and her website is https://www.mindbodyfx.com/'. Who do you think the first person Melonie is going to think of if someone is looking for someone in your field? Exactly – you!

Make sure you are keeping your message consistent, by only sharing content that is consistent with your message.  It is all good and well to be generous, but the last thing you want to do is confuse your readers. If you are in tourism you do not want to start sharing content about weight loss. 

 

A great way to support people that have a different message is to comment on their facebook page, profile posts or by leaving comments on their blogs. There is always something you can do to support other people.

 

We can never have too many friends. I may never meet some of these people that I have formed relationships with but for each and every one of them I am truly grateful. We are all out to make a positive change in the world!

 

(As a side note, if you would like to find out more about Mari Smith's book and how to be part of her free webinar series you can visit the page here.)