It happens even before your site really starts to make money. You post articles, market your content, pick up comments and find that other sites are talking about you. All of a sudden, you\’ve moved from being one person with ideas you want to share to being the center of a community, part of a circle of online friends with a keen interest in what you have to say.
Write something clever and you\’ll find that on related sites across the Web, people discuss it and link to it. And whenever you add new content, people will treat it with respect and follow your advice.
The results of that can be tremendous. But they\’re more than that. They\’re also measurable.
Suggest that people read an article on another website and you\’ll be able to look at your stats and see just what percentage of them follow the link to do it. Recommend that they buy a book you\’ve read, and you\’ll be able to look at your Amazon affiliate stats and see how much that recommendation was worth.
Put your knowledge into an information product and you\’ll be able to sell it for large sums to people who value your advice.
We like to talk a lot about users and visitors. But in fact, when your site is successful what you end up with aren\’t anonymous visitors you never see but loyal members of a community. Many of the people who visit your site each week will be the same people who visited the previous week. You\’ll find that the same names turn up time and time again in your comments, the same bloggers mention you whenever you write something particularly interesting, and if you\’re lucky, you\’ll even get to meet them at conferences and workshops.
Building an online business then doesn\’t just mean writing pages of content. It means building a club that\’s open to anyone to join. It\’s a responsibility – the club members will look to you for information they can trust – but it\’s also a huge amount of fun… and of course, the best way to build a stable customer base.