Are You Building Relationships Online?

How's your relationship?

I'm not prying into your personal life, so no need to worry. it'sjust that lately I've noticed something about most network marketerswhich got me thinking.

Let me start with some background on these thoughts I had. One of the reasons an internet business seems so attractive is because of the ease with which you can communicate. This lends itself well to marketing, and in particular network marketing.

With me so far?

So we all jump into network marketing and mlm style business opportunitiesonline to seek our fortunes, but this is where it all seems to go wrong.

The thing I've noticed myself and a lot of others doing online is justpromoting our businesses.

We don't build relationships.

Network marketing is about networking with others, and I have heard itreferred to as relationship marketing. But are we doing enough to build those relationships?

A recent example was a new style messaging system I was introduced toat http://www.profitmessaging.com/invite.php?f006bcd3bb . There you caninvite "buddies" to message you, and add other buddies from the system to your buddies list. Then you can send them all a message safely fromwithin the system. An Ideal opportunity to build a relationship or two.

Instead of getting to know each other, almost everybody jumped in and sent each other an advert for their business.

The result?

No one reads any messages.

No new relationships are formed.

It becomes another wasted opportunity to form relationships.There were one or two more savvy marketers who attempted to build relationships, but their efforts got lost in among the hundreds of "make more money than you can spend" ads.

In our personal lives we create many relationships, but for some reasononce we start an online business, we forget to speak to people and instead send ads through the machine. We stop building relationships with people.

This has got me thinking, and I am going to try to break some habits, and startmarketing myself, instead of the opportunities I am involved in.

I'm going to start building relationships.

It won't be easy, almost every other article, or ebook seems to be abouthow to promote your website, or your business, but rarely how to promoterelationships. But it is possible, and we have all the tools to startbuilding relationships.

For starters, we all have email addresses whhich could be used to start aconversation with someone. We have instant messengers, Yahoo, MSN and AOLto name a few, you can even use the software from Imvite http://www.imvite.com/dougyt which has a payment plan built in and canaccess most of the other networks anyway. And then there's Skypehttp://www.skype.com for voice chat which is as clear as a telephone, andfree to download.

So we have the tools to form relationships, lets start doing it.

It can only be good for business to get to know each other and formfriendships, partnerships, and trust. In the offline world you wouldn'tdream of greeting a new potential customer by saying "Earn Millions Today"so lets stop doing it online.

Doug Titchmarsh
Online marketer, and real life person.

Doug Titchmarsh runs several sites including http://www.cashinonline.info andhttp://www.titchmarsh.com He also publishes an e-zine for marketers online and off which you can get by sending an email todouglastitchmarsh@getresponse.com