What Can You Do To Maintain Lasting Relationships With Your Audience?

Google recently released its so-called “Fred” update – an unannounced change in the way that the company’s ranking algorithms work. For some it was good news: their sites got boosted up the rankings. But for others it was bad. Some who had been on the first page on the Friday woke up on the Monday to find themselves shunted down to page three.

This kind of reshuffling happens all the time on the internet. One moment a blogger or business is riding high, and then the next, they’re traffic plummets.

Individuals can’t control what search giants do. But they can become less dependent on them. The key isn’t always to maximize SEO and boost searching rankings – it’s to build relationships with people so that they will keep coming back to your site time and again regardless of what page you’re on.

So how do you do this? How do you form long-term relationships with internet audiences that are notoriously fickle?

Strategy #1: Ask Your Audience What They Want

Churning out content like there’s no tomorrow is an excellent way to convince Google that you’re providing value by funnelling a large number of people to your site. But if you’re not regularly producing content that people want, the quality of each of those interactions will be limited.

A great example of a bad way to build relationships with users can be seen on YouTube. Have you ever watched a music video with 50 million views and then glanced over the to channel name, only to see that it has less than a thousand subscribers? The channel might get a lot of hits, but nobody is interested in the people behind it. They just want the content before moving on. The key to building relationships is to get people coming back again and again – subscribers if you will.

Strategy #2: Learn What Makes Your Audience Tick

One of the reasons why so many entrepreneurs are investing in masters degree in integrated marketing communications is because they want to understand what makes their audience tick. You might think that you’re providing value to your customers by providing tutorials or news articles, but this might not be what they want. Professional courses give you the tools you need to work out what your audience wants, so that you can give it to them.

Strategy #3: Be A Guru

In today’s information saturated world, people need gurus more than ever. They need people who can look at the body of information out there, understand it, and then distill it into bite size chunks they can understand. Not knowing your topic inside out, however, is an excellent way to put people off your site. So what can you do?

The best approach is to fully backup everything you say with great research. Include a list of references, if necessary, at the bottom of every article, podcast or video. Put all the information you used to create your content out the in the open, and let your users make up their own minds about a particular topic from the source material if they need to.