In our day to day lives, small business owners come across a wealth of people. If we work from home, we end up building relationships with everyone around us, from the postman/woman who drops off parcels of business cards, right through to the various tradespeople who pop in during the day to check meters or try and sell us things.
When we first leave the corporate world to work at home, we can be shocked at just how much activity takes place around our homes.
Do You Miss The Corporate World?
However, despite all of these new relationships, it’s easy to start to miss the camaraderie and social side of working for a large corporation.
Instead of being waved off each morning to go and join a team, the likelihood is most of us get up, shower, have breakfast…and then go off to work in our home office.
This could be a corner of the sofa in the living room, a desk under the stairs, or a small study on the top floor.
Instead of going out for lunch with a group of colleagues, we remain inside with a dog, wondering how we got to the point where we may not meet anyone in the flesh from morning until the end of the working day.
The good news is, everyone who works from home goes through the same acclimatization to get used to shifting from office to home working.
The Good News…
The even better news is, there’s a fantastic network of people available online to relieve the loneliness and make home working as busy, sociable and talkative as any office job could ever be.
With the growth of online communications mechanisms such as Skype, Facebook chat and MSN messenger, it seems that working from home can be as busy as a full day in the office.
Is building on-line relationships a waste of time?
Building relationships online isn’t even a waste of time – in fact, it’s just the opposite.
Having a great set of people whom you can draw upon for various things is a real prerequisite of successful home business, for a number of reasons:
- It alleviates the loneliness which can affect all home workers when they make the transition to leaving a large office
- It enables you to network online and share your blog articles through Facebook, Twitter and other vehicles like Google+, knowing that your network will support you through sharing
- It allows you to contact a group of people when you launch new initiatives, and ask them to help you with pilot phases, getting great feedback from people who care about you
- It opens up channels for developing new business, as you work with people from across the globe who share the same interests and passions as yourself
- It gives you access to a strong knowledge base, with people you can ask for advice on specific industry-related subjects, knowing you will be communicating with people who understand you and what you offer
- It opens up new challenges to potential customers as you forge new relationships and people get to know who you are, and what you can do for them
- It supports potential ‘job swaps’ where you help each other, through providing specific services, in a mutual agreement.
With all these benefits, it soon becomes clear that your online relationships will become the cornerstone of your home business.
Network with people, nurture your contacts, and you’ll soon get to the stage where you can’t sit down to work in the morning without getting bombarded with people who want to get in touch.
You’ll wonder how you ever thought working from home could be an isolating experience!
What’s your experience of building on-line relationships? How have you benefitted from them?
Please share your views in the comments below.
Image © NLshop – Fotolia.com
Samuel July 24, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Works exactly well for any endeavor on the online world.
For your blog or site, it can be the difference between succeeding and getting somewhere with your site.
Great article Andrew!
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Mary July 7, 2012 at 2:07 pm
I can’t wait to get started! It sounds like so much fun. I am still working a job but I look forward to transitioning to working from home!
Mary
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Andrew from Blogging Guide July 8, 2012 at 2:11 am
Mary
So…what’s your plan to transition to working from home?
Andrew
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TJ McDowell May 7, 2012 at 11:45 am
I think there has to be a good balance of online / offline relationship building going on. I think it’s a lot easier to get noticed in person, but you can definitely do some building online too. Has anyone made any BIG connections exclusively online?
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Andrew from Blogging Guide May 8, 2012 at 2:33 am
TJ,
I found my business partner on-line. Since then we have created an on-line business course, several other on-line related products and a WordPress plugin.
Andrew
Andrew recently posted..Does Your On-Line Business Get In The Way Of Your Relationship?
Clark May 3, 2012 at 3:08 am
Building relationships is what I think blogging is all about. If you don’t have relationships with any of your readers then simply you are wasting your time, We have several opportunities to build online relationship and I prefer to use social media and blog commenting for this purpose as it is cost effective and effective LOL.
Andrew from Blogging Guide May 4, 2012 at 3:46 am
Clark,
How much time each day do you spend commenting and using social medai to build realtionships?
Andrew
Andrew recently posted..How To Make A Blog Part Fourteen: The Most Effective Ways To Promote Your Product
sadiq from webdesign May 1, 2012 at 1:48 am
Thank You for sharing this valuable post. it is very useful for peoples who have started their business.
Building online relationships is very important for business peoples.
Elena Anne April 30, 2012 at 12:38 pm
Building relationships is what I think bloggin is all about. If you don’t have relationships with any of your readers you are probably not doing very well.
Pete Goumas April 30, 2012 at 8:10 am
Hi Andrew,
Online relationship is a paramount and without it we can’t succeed in online marketing world. We have several opportunities to build online relationship and I prefer to use social media and blog commenting for this purpose. Thankyou for the tips to build relationship online.
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Andrew from Blogging Guide May 4, 2012 at 3:47 am
Pete
And do you find making relationships on-line easier or harder than off-line?
Andrew
Andrew recently posted..How To Make A Blog Part Fourteen: The Most Effective Ways To Promote Your Product
Rashmi Sinha April 28, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Social networks are the future for a lot of works. Building online relationships is the same as having a lot of business cards, people to advertise, volunteers to help. It is not easy to express how crucial having online relationships is.
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Andrew from Blogging Guide April 29, 2012 at 2:13 am
Rashmi
I do like your connection with on-line relationships with giving out business cards – not thought of it that way.
Andrew
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abhinav April 28, 2012 at 3:07 am
Really great post you share with us.Its very valuable and useful info for me. thank you so much for sharing this wonderful post in your blog.
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Saket Jajodia April 28, 2012 at 2:03 am
Building relationship is one of the best way to make yourself known in the market.. whether its online or offline.. Thanks Andrew for this post..!!
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Mary MacDonald April 23, 2012 at 6:24 am
Everyone thinks it must be great to work at home, but someitmes I do miss the ‘water cooler’ moments. That’s why it’s important to interact on line if you are working on your own. It wil help keep you sane.
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Andrew from Blogging Guide April 24, 2012 at 3:31 am
Mary
So you miss the gossip?
Andrew
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Wasim Ismail April 22, 2012 at 9:52 am
Building relationship does a long way, whether its online or offline. Building a good network, will help your business, and also you will learn a lot more by being around others.
Overall you know the says “It’s not what you know, Its whom you know”.
Thanks for the post, Andrew.
Andrew from Blogging Guide April 23, 2012 at 2:55 am
Wasim
Having a good network certainly helps. It’s getting the balance though – you can spent all your time networking but still not progressing!
Andrew
Andrew recently posted..The New Threat To Your Business
Joe Boyle April 21, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Building online relationships is never a bad idea. If it weren’t for those relationships we all have, some of us wouldn’t have even gotten started in the website world. I remember when I met Rob Rammuny on Youtube. He’s one of my closest friends online, and he really did get me started on the web. He showed me the tools and taught me the style that I advanced into a style that I am proud of.
If it weren’t for online relationships, people wouldn’t even have communities – blogs would be hindered useless.
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Andrew from Blogging Guide April 22, 2012 at 3:33 am
Great points, Joe. You sum up the benefits of on-line relationships well. And gettting help from others is crucial.
Andrew
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Trung Nguyen April 21, 2012 at 12:01 am
In my ways to build online relationships, I usually use social network such as Facebook and Twitter to talk with other people, I ask, answer their question, sometime share my own story or other, it’s helping get many new friends, wow.
BTW, thanks for your great points on building relationships online, it’s very cool
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Andrew from Blogging Guide April 21, 2012 at 6:24 am
Trung
And your efforts – has they been worth it?
Andrew
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Riten Jain April 20, 2012 at 12:36 am
It is very much important to build a online relationship, as today world is all about smart work and networking is smart work for Ur future success.
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Ryan Biddulph April 19, 2012 at 3:53 am
Hi Andrew,
Excellent. This is the topic of my current newsletter.
The quickest way to grow your online business is to have a ton of friends promote your biz. You might have an online network of 20,000 people. Imagine how quickly your biz grows when 20 of your friends with similar – or even smaller – networks, promote you? Yikes!
Of course, promote others first, to become friends. Help. Assist. Promote. What you want, give it away first, and your presence expands FAST.
Thanks Andrew!
RB
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Andrew from Blogging Guide April 19, 2012 at 6:38 am
RB,
Nice to see you here!
You are right, of course.
“Give, give, give” is the motto. Too many people on-line business owners do not understand that. They believe it should be all ‘receive, receive, receive”!
Andrew
Andrew recently posted..The New Threat To Your Business