Build Communities, Not Websites

One of the pitfalls of online marketing is that a lot of people don’t really understand how to gauge the performance of their websites. There are several schools of thought at play here. For some, they put a lot of value in the page hits or the number of unique visitors that their website gets. Others, on the other hand, would rather focus on their RSS or E-mail subscribers. If you’re an e-commerce based site, then you’re probably monitoring your sales. However, one critical issue that a lot of bloggers and marketers often forget about is the reader churn. Ask yourself this question – how many people have checked out your site and haven’t come back anymore? I personally believe that reader loyalty is one of the best ways to measure the success of your site. It’s always been my belief that marketers shouldn’t be building just websites, they should be building communities.

Build A Relationship
The key to building communities is to make sure that you have tools in place for your reader to easily connect with you. This is where social media optimization comes in. Building a relationship is a long-term process and is not something done overnight. Here are some practical tips that you might find useful:

- Icons of your social networks linked to your accounts prominently displayed on the site (this has proven to be very effective for my political blog, www.juancountry.com)
- A text link at the end of every post inviting your readers to connect with you on selected social media channels. My personal favorites are Twitter and Facebook.

After you’ve added them up, make sure you regularly update your social networks with the latest articles from your site. This is a form of direct marketing. An added bonus here is that if they find your article interesting, they might forward it or share it with their network on Facebook. This has proven to be an effective way to drive traffic especially if you write about relevant issues.

E-mail and RSS Subscriptions
Speaking of direct marketing, nothing is as direct as an e-mail or RSS feed. The problem with social networks is that there’s a chance that your connections might not get to read your post because of the deluge of activity going on in their profile. If you have someone subscribed via e-mail or RSS, it means that they are actively waiting and reading for your contents.

This is also a good way to build your personal database for future direct marketing efforts. This comes in very handy if you’re going to build and launch a new site and you want to populate it with readers quickly.

The Revolving Door Effect
To sum it all up, let me quote one of my officemates about customer retention. It’s like going through a revolving door in the mall. You spend so much time and effort in getting new readers and yet you’re not making it easy for them to keep on coming back.

Content is King. Marketing is Queen. Retention is the Prince.

Each time a reader clicks the “x” on your site and doesn’t remember your site url, that’s a lost opportunity for you to get a loyal reader.

Build communities, not websites.