If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, no one knows if it makes a sound.
The same can be said of the blogger, writer or small businessman who puts his thoughts, ramblings and products online. Without other people to hear our message, our voices become mute. This is especially hard during the first few months for a blogger when it can really feel like you’re just writing post cards to yourself on your blog. Luckily, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but to help you cross over to the other side a little faster I’ve marked down 5 techniques that you can use today to start building stronger relationships online.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, no one knows if it makes a sound.
Feature a Blogger You Admire
Go find a blogger that has a message you connect with and write up a little review of their work. Include some links to posts that have helped you. Bonus points if it’s all relevant to your main message i.e., they talk about personal finance and you talk about small business widget sales. Then, before you publish your article, email a copy of it to the blogger and ask them if there’s anything they’d like to include. Free exposure is great, and they will usually use this as an opportunity to promote their own ventures. This will lead to them tweeting your article etc. Follow up with regular comments and you evolve from a face in the crowd to a person with a name.
Tweet Value
I like to use the iPhone app Twitteriffic to see what people near me are tweeting. Here are some of my favs:
“My biceps swing both ways.”
“Cleaning and laundry today…What fun!”
“is sitting in the exam room at the vet. Dog needs up to date vacs so he can go to the groomed. Lookin shaggy.”
I blame this on the tagline “What are you doing?” because it leads people to literally tell us exactly what they’re doing. It turns out that we are not doing anything. If you are tweeting your daily schedule or replying to @therealshaq you are losing out on a valuable opportunity to enrich people by tweeting instead about articles that meant something to you. I try to keep my tweet ratio at 1:5 junk tweets to useful tweets. Anything beyond that risks becoming noise. Also, when you write great content, people will retweet it. Make sure to thank them (unless they are following 15000 people, then they are spammy and you can block them).
Solve Problems
I try to solve every problem that I come across online. It build credibility and trust, which are social currency even when money is not an issue. Forums are great for this. It is easy to tell who is genuinely trying to help and be supportive on a forum and who is just promoting their stuff. The more value you are able to give the more tends to come back your way. Also, check twitter hash tags (they look like this # followed by a subject i.e. #thesiswp) for interesting topics or problems people are having in niches that interest you. Then, just appear out of the air and hand them a solution. Maybe it’s a messiah complex but people seem to really appreciate that. I think it is an apex of social media.
Talk About Yourself
People who have studied business have been taught largely to reveal as little as possible about themselves while at the same time getting other people to open up and share tons about themself. They think it will make them powerful but they are wrong. A man with shields erected around him is a weak man and online this is amplified. When a reader comes to your site I think they are looking for two things:
1. Great Content and
2. A connection with the author.
In order to develop that connection it is necessary that the author be relatable. That means that your reader feels like “hey, this guy is just like me.” It has been said that people like two things: a) themselves and b) people like them. Being relatable will draw people like you to your message. But be careful! If you start seeing flamers and trolls it should give you an idea of what people are relating to in you.
Lets do a quick review, and while we’re at it, you can start right now to do these four things to build an online relationship.
1. Write a feature article about a blogger you admire, email him the draft and explicitly ask that they include any points about their message that you’ve missed.
2. Tweet something that does one of the following: solve a problem, make a person think deeply, answers a question or makes me laugh 
3. Solve a problem in a public forum. Give and give and give until you’ve got nothing left. Then give some more. It is hard to build trust offline, and harder online where you can’t see the other person’s face. It takes a lot of time to build credibility and just a few bad decisions to lose it. Treat your credibility like money.
4. Be Relatable. People want to hear your story so go ahead and tell it. More on how to do this well coming in another post.
I’ve enjoyed writing this post. I like stepping back from Thesis tutorials and talking about some of the other things I know. If you liked it (or hated it) I would love to know! Also, if you’d like to start using some of these techniques I will be a willing lab rat
One more thing. I have pages written with notes about personal communication since I used to teach it. If you’d like more mixed in with the rest of the online/tech content please let me know.
Till next time!
If you want to find me on Twitter, I'm 
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