A professional writer shares his relationship building secrets.

Or ... how to build a relationship with your mailing list.

Relationship building is a magical ability that is the sum of many factors. To be truly effective, you have to combine honesty and reliability with trustworthiness. Throw in a degree of outspokenness, a good measure of charm and the ability to demonstrate empathy with your reader. Some of these attributes are hard to learn if you don't naturally have them, but until you do, your career as a writer of ezines and newsletters may be a struggle.

However, there are important factors that you can learn to put you ahead of the crowd as far as building great relationships with your readers is concerned. This is my own take on some of them that you can start doing right away.

The first and foremost secret is to never think about your readers as a list. 'List' is way too anonymous. You can't ever build a relationship with a list - relationships are for people.

When I sit down to write Kickstart Today, I never write to a list. I write to Richard, who I met for the first time at a seminar and who sent me a Christmas card. I write to Pearson, who started out as a subscriber and soon became a close mate. I write to Margaret, who sends me lovely emails. I write to my daughter, who reads Kickstart at work.

Keeping the image of one person in your mind is easy. Your writing becomes more of a conversation. And the more you write the easier it gets because readers will naturally write to you with comments and you can then keep them in mind as you answer them.

The strange thing is that the better you succeed at addressing one person in your writing the more you'll get emails from other people asking how you knew exactly what they wanted to hear. Your writing will resonate because there are only so many concerns to go round and by addressing one person's thoughts, you'll appear to be reading the minds of many.

The more you can make your writing appear to be one-to-one, the more of your readers will imagine themselves as the one you are talking to. It is like a whispered aside in a real conversation - it makes the listener feel special.

Well-meaning experts, who often pontificate about online writing techniques, love to trot out a couple of 'truths':

1. Use the words I and Me as infrequently as possible and concentrate on 'you' and 'your'. Readers don't want to hear about you.

2. Your readers have to be trained to buy things from your recommendations. You must sell to them every time you write - so they know what is expected of them.

Both are nonsense if building relationships that are what you want to do.

People read your newsletter for the information you can give them to make their lives better/easier/more successful. If that was the only reason they read you, then the I/You ratio of 1:5 that is often quoted would make sense. But the reality is that people do business with people they like and they get to like you by knowing about what is going on in your life.

In my opinion - and experience - you simply can't talk about yourself too much! Whenever I talk about my family and friends, the number of emails I get from subscribers eager to know more rockets! Of course, you can't run a newsletter that is entirely about you! That stuff should only be the icing on a rich, content-filled cake.

The best ezines and newsletters balance both, providing a cocktail of solid factual information punctuated by the real-life soap opera content that keeps the reader coming back for more.

Talking about the everyday personal things that happen in your life is how to build a relationship with your list - one person at a time, because the same things are happening in your reader's lives. Each time your life compares with one of your reader's experiences, resonance happens and you've found another soul mate.

The other advice - that you should attempt to sell something with every communication - needs a very special kind of writer to manage successfully.

You will sometimes find a newsletter writer who has mastered the art of the constant hard sell, but most who try it just end up looking over-eager to grab your money.

My own policy is to only recommend things that I've used and love, and to only recommend anything when I'm moved to. That means I often go weeks without recommending a single product, but when I do tell my readers about something, they appreciate the recommendation.

How often you publish is another thing that can affect relationship building and should be thought about carefully.

A monthly ezine will have a harder job building a positive personal relationship than a weekly. And in my view, even a weekly is hard to build a close relationship with.

As you develop as a writer you'll find it easier to write more often. You don't need to write huge newsletters every time - it is the frequency of contact that matters, not the length of your prose! So long as you are interesting and amusing you can publish every day if you like. Just don't become boring!

When your readers complain that they haven't received an issue, you know that you've made a connection.

It goes without saying that over-use of other people's writing in your newsletter can damage your relationship building if you aren't careful.

On that subject, a lot of publishers still use guest articles. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, the best writing by far that you can publish is your own. As you build your relationship with your readers they will want to hear about you, your life and what you think. If you are going to effectively give them that, you just have to get on and learn to write. Or more accurately, learn to communicate.

Which brings us to another old chestnut: grammar. The grammar you use in your newsletter should have more in common with the conversations you have with your friends than with anything you ever learned at school.

Effective, relationship-building writing flows. It isn't stilted and it doesn't fuss over starting sentences with 'and' or 'but'. It isn't a bad thing to contract words (so long as you put the apostrophe in the right place!) and informality is key.

All of which brings us right back to the start: write as if you are talking to one person, keep it honest and personal and remember that you are not writing to a list, you are communicating with a friend. Relationship building is best done one person at a time.

Article Source: http://www.rightarticle.com

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