Friendship Marketing: Putting Friends First
A little quote on friends: “You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can’t forget. Those are your ‘friends.’”
Friendship is the best way to market your business or website.
Recently I had a chat with a favorite friend and blogger, Nicholas Cardot of Site Sketch 101. Nick is a pro at building conversations naturally, creating sincere relationships, and always getting a laugh. He’s smart and witty with a big heart. If you need his help he’s only a tweet or email away. Nick is a great friend.
So Nick and I were chatting about different strategies we were using and the term came up (from Nick) for Friendship Marketing. Although I am sure what Nick is writing on it will be similar, I want to express my different perspective on the power of working with friends to market your work.
You Don’t Use Your Friends
Friendship marketing is not about going out and creating lots of “followers” or “friends” in the social networking terminology. It’s about creating lasting bonds with people you sincerely care about. The line between friends and tools gets pretty gray online so let me give you an example.
A friend of mine online recently posted a great article on a subject you could tell they were passionate about. After reading the post I made sure to digg, stumble, and tweet all about it. I was excited to see my friends passion for what they were writing and wanted to share it with others. Not thinking about what I would get out of it, in a matter of hours I was getting THOUSANDS of new visitors to my own website from my friend doing the same thing. I had no intention of receiving these kind of benefits from being a friend, but they did come.
I never tried to purposely use or manipulate my friend into promoting my own work. I just shared what I loved.
Stumbleupon Friends
Recently I was going through my Stumbleupon account, Seth1492, and looking at the profiles of my friends who were following me on Stumbleupon. I felt so grateful to see them be my friend on Stumbleupon because I knew that whatever social media outlet I had a profile on, they were my friend. I decided to leave a review on their Stumbleupon profile about the great stumbles they discovered and then I made sure to go to their recent “discoveries” from their own blogs and make sure to give them a thumbs up. I was glad to have helped a friend.
The act of gratitude for one friend quickly led me to review and “like” many of my friends on Stumbleupon. Pretty soon I was recognizing that I was sending THOUSANDS of visitors to my friends sites. The best part was that it was fairly anonymous. I got the satisfaction of helping a friend and watching them succeed.
Now you might be wondering what this has to do with marketing, especially for your own sites but it does make sense. About a week later I noticed that everything I was discovering was doing much better than previously. Soon I found out that the reason why was because my friends had more authority on Stumbleupon. My “thumbs up” on my friends profiles got them lots of new followers and more authority on Stumbleupon. So everything they liked of mine got more traffic. It was a clear example that when you help your friends succeed you always win.
Build Others First
Having started an online website design and search engine optimization company I was curious to put Friendship Marketing to the test. I started helping others with projects and tasks they had. I volunteered criticism and critique on their work as well as shared and commented on their websites. In some cases I went out of my way to buy their products. As each of my friends succeeded, their influence brought me great authority in my own niche.
Building others first is perhaps the best way of building your own website. Here are a few ways this works:
- Help promote your friends in social media. For every good thing your friend does for others you recommended them to you will notice people will be more likely to come to you for advice and expertise. The bigger your friends followings are then the more likely they are to send you excellent traffic when they get excited about something you are doing.
- Go Out of Your Way to Help Others Improve. Recently I sent an email to a friend who I thought could use some help with their social media techniques. The email was not too long but pointed out some easy ways my friend could improve and offered them more help anytime. My friend has put these tips into place and now sends other friends to me for similar advice. My network is expanding and referrals are happening naturally.
- Provide Content For Friends. One of the best things friends have done for me is notice when I am busy or stressed and have provided guest posts or content contributions for me. In the end they get something great out of it (exposure and links) while I am so grateful to them for their attentiveness to my needs. Being observant goes a long ways. Try and help someone by providing quality content and see what happens. You’ll be glad you did.
These are just a few thoughts on a very fun topic. I love the way that social media has expanded my friendships with people I would not be able to meet otherwise. I know that by making sincere friendships and then caring about your friends and helping them where you can you will find your own success. Always be true to your friends and you will find that marketing just got a whole lot easier.
“Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.”
For more Friendship Marketing awesomeness check out Nick’s take on SiteSketch101: Friendship Marketing.
photo credit: Jeff Bauche._.·´¯)
4 Responses to “Friendship Marketing: Putting Friends First”
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- - January 21, 2011
Good stuff Seth! Above all the stats our relationships are the most important. I hope I never forget that. Thanks for the reminder.
I agree with Amy! Great stuff Seth! Nurturing relationships whether on line or in real life is always the best way to go as far as I’m concerned! Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes…
“The heart that GIVES, gathers.” ~ Hannah Moore.
Thanks for writing this!
Thank you for this post! I regularly read SiteSketch because I appreciate the “human touch” that seems missing form a number of web development blogs. It’s nice to see this kind of thinking on another site! Getting caught up in the rush of the possibilities provided by the internet seems to have distracted us from the core of its glory: helping us connect with other people!