"Give them the gift of words"
As if real life relationships weren’t hard enough to decipher, we now need to maintain and nurture digital relationships too.
The good news is that digital relationships with your customers and potential clients are quite straightforward – there’s no reading between the lines, no giving the silent treatment.
In fact, you can maintain and advance your blogger relationships fairly easily.
Acknowledge Them
Saying “thank you” is a long-lasting way to express your gratitude to someone who follows and engages with your blog often. You can do even more than a simple thank you through the phone or email, quickly and easily:
– Thank them through a Tweet or Facebook post with a link to what you regard to be their top post.
– Ask them to guest blog. This is an opportunity to directly expose them to your audience. The more similar your niches the easier it will be to find a topic you’re both comfortable with.
– Interview them and then turn that into a Blogger Insight. Don’t go for formal; it should be a mix and match of personal and business-oriented questions to give your readers a complete idea of who they really are.
Helping those bloggers that help you is the first step towards building sustainable, long-term online relationships.
Show Digital Love
As with every human interaction, relationships between bloggers and businesses is based on one rule: they should both work towards a mutually beneficial interaction.
The practice you’re looking for here is reciprocation.
Check your fellow blogger’s site, blog, and social media accounts. Engage with them there, and then let your own network know what your opinion of them is. By helping them grow their community they will do the same for you. The good thing about reciprocation is that it’s ongoing.
Apart from sharing others’ content you can also directly engage with them through commenting, liking, and reposting their posts and tweets online.
Think Quality Over Quantity
To maintain a beneficial relationship with a fellow blogger it’s important that you both share one opinion. You both need to believe that blog post quality supersedes blog posting frequency.
Publishing blog posts every other day may be too much, and it definitely will be too much if the things you say are simply derivative posts without true value to your readers. Instead, opt for weekly or biweekly blog posts that are high quality and offer great value to readers.
Grammar, Spelling and Syntax
It’s our duty to also remind you that your grammar should be flawless.
It’s only human to make a couple of grammatical mistakes or have a misspelling slip away. But as a professional blogger, you need to be superhuman in this area. Double-check your work before you publish it to ensure your followers and readers are not put off by your seeming lack of language competence.
Your readers might not care about typos, but your fellow bloggers will see them as a reason to not engage in a professional online relationship with you. So go the extra mile to diligently proofread your work.
Working on your digital relationships is a priority you should never overlook.
Online relationships are an important aspect of digital marketing for beginners and expert bloggers alike.
Dedicate time and effort to developing and maintaining these relationships, and make use of the right tools and resources to create mutually beneficial relationships with others.
It will ultimately pay off in many ways, because you will increase your online community and improve how they engage with you. What’s more, you will be able to expand your reach to new markets and demographics that your new connections make possible.
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