Engaging Online Communities to Drive Customers & Get Links

21Mar/110

Engaging Online Communities

One of the hot terms in Internet marketing over the past few years has been to "engage your community" to attract people to your site. With the rise of social media there are lots of conversations going on about your niche and by building relationships with these members you can get more links to your site, build your brand recognition, and get more customers. How exactly can you successfully engage your community and get more traffic and sales? It's not all that hard.

Find the Community

The first step to engaging an online community is to actually find them. The obvious places to look are Facebook pages and groups, and Twitter. All you have to do is search for your keyword terms in their built in search boxes and look through the results. It's also beneficial to search for forums (Google "(keyword) forums"). Forums might not be as popular right now, but a lot of times they are places that a large group of people interested in your niche have gathered together for an extended period of time, making them a dedicated group.

How to Engage Your Audience

Nobody likes the person who comes into their community and tries to endlessly promote themselves without adding anything back. If you do that you could get banned, but even if you don't you aren't going to make many friends.

You know what the members will like? An expert who helps them out. Forums are a perfect place to find an archive of questions that people in your market have had. If you want to engage your market, answering their questions and becoming known as a helpful expert in the field is the easiest way to do that. Plus, it's a great way to find content ideas for your site.

Getting Links & Referrals

So someone in an online community asks a question and you know the answer. If you post a quick reply, you might make a few friends with your knowledge, but you won't generate many links to your site nor refer many prospective customers that way. The best way I have found to answer the question is to write a detailed article covering the solution or answer, then give a short summary in response to the person who asks the question with a link back to your site. If you have a decent following on Twitter and Facebook, I'd even repost the question with a link to the answer. This should generate additional tweets, Facebook likes, and referrals from others.

This is the best way to engage online communities. Find out what the people are talking about in your market and then contribute something of value to their conversations.

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