How to Create Your On-line Community - Easily!

You've probably heard a lot of marketing folks talk about "growing your list." I like to think of this more along the lines of "building a community." It's a reminder that for each email that is on your on-line list, there's a person behind it.

Whatever you call it, the larger your community the greater opportunity you have to connect with more people, reach more people, and serve more people through your business. Now here's the thing: there's no single way to build your community. There are actually several ways. The key is combining them to build a community of subscribers who then have the opportunity to get to know you, like you, trust you and become your customers and clients.

So for today's tip I wanted to share with you 3 ways of creating an on-line community that have easily worked for me:

Share Your Information Via The Internet

For years I've been a huge fan of writing articles and posting articles on the internet. The more articles you are able to share with various web sites, the more folks get to see you and know about your business. Your articles on complimentary web sites will drive qualified visitors back to your website.

But finding all these sites and then posting your articles on them could literally be a full time job (and I'm guessing you have some other things to do in your business, too, yes?). So a way to make this easy-breezy for you is to get your articles posted and distributed by syndication sites. These sites are great - you give them your article and they'll get it distributed to other online networks and sites that are looking for articles to post.

Now if you aren't an article writer, another way to get information out there is by using online press releases. This has emerged as one of the most powerful ways to drive traffic to your site! And it's fun! You can even do this for free at certain sites.

Share Your Information Via In-Person and Virtual Presentations

I first built my on-line community through giving talks and presentations to different groups and organizations. During the talk I'd offer a free e-course along with a subscription to my ezine. Lot's of folks jumped in and joined the community from this invitation alone.

Then I started to become more virtual and I started to give more teleclasses and was invited to give teleclasses to other groups ... another great way to share high-quality information with a lot of people and invite them to join the community ... it starts to become just one big, joyful entrepreneurial party really.

Share Easy Access to Your Community

It doesn't really do anyone any good if once they get to your website they don't feel called (or can't figure out how) to join your community, right? I mean, actually, let me tell you an important secret... the ONLY real purpose of your website is to have people join your community. That's right. So you want your home page, navigation, sign-up page - everything - set up for REALLY easy access to your community. You want multiple places that visitors can just CLICK, enter name and email and then, of course, receive something from you of extremely high-value and right away (it's a lot to ask of folks for them to give you their name and email these days so you want to honor that.)

So take a look at your web site: Is it easy or difficult for someone to find out where to subscribe to your community? And if you do have a subscription form, what do you offer that is free, high-value and can be received right away? Again, very few people will sign up for just an eZine by itself anymore. But they will happily join you in exchange for some valuable information.

Success in this vast online world comes down not to things like hype and flash and snazzy joint venture partnerships. It comes down to things like quality connection, communication, authenticity and consistency, good products, programs and genuine-we-care-about-you customer service.

Your Call To Action

Want to build your on-line community? Make communicating with as many people as possible a priority; share your information out there far and wide on the internet; and then maintain quality and consistency with the intention to build a positive, growing community.

Trust me - the energy will be returned to you 100 times over.

Seed Newsvine

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Comments

Thu, 5 Mar 2009 at 12:33 AM, by Webmarketing
Nice post. creating an online community is a good strategy to use in
Internet Marketing
. It will increases your visibility thus making your site more accessible to your target customers.

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