How to Build Relationships to Increase Your Web Presence
I just had a great conversation with Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré. Nichole started out designing websites in the 90s, and now she does… well, a little bit of everything, but her superpower is SaaS marketing (she even wrote a book about it).
I was originally planning to talk to Nichole about lead generation, but as I prepared for the interview I started to have more and more questions that were unrelated to generating leads.
Why? Because…
She’s Everywhere!
Nichole is a moderator at Product Hunt and GrowthHackers.
She’s written for HubSpot, Copy Hackers, Moz, and just about every other popular publication related to marketing and growth hacking.
She runs two successful groups on Facebook and Slack.
Her testimonials page is filled with glowing recommendations from some of the most respected names in marketing (Dharmesh Shah and Rand Fishkin, for example).
Most recently, she was the first hire at Zest.is.
This woman is everywhere! I wanted to know how she did it.
It’s All About Building Relationships
When I asked her how she was able to get published on all those highly trafficked blogs, she said it’s all about building relationships.
“I spent a lot of time just trying to be active in forums,” she said. “I focused on building genuine relationships in niche spaces.”
Eventually, her name started to come up in the forums and people would refer work to her. She continued to build relationships by having conversations in forums related to her niche (e.g., Inbound.org, GrowthHackers), and would curate the content of influencers and @mention them.
Soon she started to land guest blogging opportunities on industry leading websites. She took every opportunity she could get to increase her digital footprint.
“I try to be everywhere that people in my industry go online at least once,” she told me.
Building a Community
As her reputation grew, she began to start her own groups on Facebook and Slack. By leveraging her relationships with influencers, she was able to grow her groups quickly.
If you plan on starting a group, Nichole recommends that you “spend a while building relationships first. To be successful, you need to have an unfair advantage. Having influencers in your group to answer questions can do that for you.” (For more information on community building, check out her SaaS marketing workshop on Forget the Funnel.)
Tips on Building Relationships
Nichole has four tips for anyone out there looking to build trusted relationships that lead to mutual opportunities:
- Join niche forums in your industry. For Nichole, this meant communities like GrowthHackers.
- Be empathetic and transparent. Nichole says being open about what you’re trying to do goes along way. Most importantly, she says to look for ways you can help other people.
- Blog. Nichole recommends buying Content Inc. and finding your “sweet spot,” the place “where your particular fields of knowledge and your skill sets intersect with a passion point.”
- Be active on a social network that serves people in your industry. “Get active in a social network where your people are. For instance, I wouldn’t look for growth hackers on Pinterest.”
Keep in mind that building real relationships takes time. Don’t just lurk around looking for an opportunity to pounce on someone and ask for a favor. We’ve all gotten enough salesy, self-serving messages to know better than that!
Connect with Nichole
I’m sure I could interview Nichole for days and come away with enough valuable information to fill a couple of libraries, but she’s got too much going on to sit around for a two-week long interview :)
But if you want to learn more from her, she’s got tons of great advice all over the internet. You can find a list of some of her work here and you can sign up to get early access to her book, the SaaS Growth Playbook here.
Other ways to connect:
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