Build relationships

and make money from your website

It is essential to build relationships to get the best from your website. Bear in mind your visitors may well have never heard of you or your products, so you need to gain the trust of them before you can expect them to buy from you. By building a relationship, you can turn visitors into hot leads. And you have a far better chance of turning hot leads into revenue than cold ones.

Creating great content is the best place to start.

In the online world, this is the equivalent of smiling at a potential client in a clothes shop. Or helping them find the right size. Or still smiling as they hand back the clothes after trying them on and leaving the shop having bought nothing. But leaving the potential client feeling like they have had a positive experience and would want to come back.

With websites you can also build relationships and maintain contact with visitors even while they are not on your site. By collecting email addresses of visitors you can communicate regularly with them - thank people for their interest, make them a special offer, give them a free article or report, send a newsletter, recommend a product or service they may be interested in, ask for referrals, share some news they may be interested in, ask why they’ve not done business with you... The list goes on and on!

You can collect email addresses by offering some free stuff in return. A report, newsletter or any form of valuable content.

Don’t forget though - more and more companies are doing this. And some exploit it and send absolute rubbish to people, thus making web visitors increasingly wary of giving email addresses away.

The key is to give something of real value. Something that helps to solve a problem. Something that will make the recipient trust you and want to deal with you in the future. And crucially want to part with their hard earned cash in order to get more of what you can give!

Once you have email addresses, use them to build relationships. But do so sensibly. And always give people the option to unsubscribe.

We'll be covering how to make your website work for you in much more detail on our free bulletin. Subscribe here. (Yes - we will be asking for your email address. But we will definitely be sending you extremely valuable content to help you grow your business. A fair deal?)