A few months before Black Enterprise featured my digital marketing strategy “Make Money The E-Marketing Way” in TechWatch, there was the talk of Sales 2.0 in 2006.

This upgraded selling tactic would morph into the term: Social Selling. While I was unaware of this movement to take selling to a new level, it didn’t stop me from putting those tactics into practice.

As outlined in the article, I leveraged online relationships to build my personal brand as an occult novelist with a penchant for giving relationship advice.

By writing blog posts focused on relationships woes and how to overcome the hurt; I grew an audience on several social network websites and message boards.

1. Building an audience, however, is the first phase
2. engaging and growing relationships with your audience are the second
3. offering what you have to sell is third
4. maintaining and strengthening those relationships is the fourth phase

The fourth and most crucial phase is who (not a typo – relationships are between PEOPLE) you’ll need to grow your audience and expand your territory.

By developing and cultivating relationships through social networks, it made selling my novel a breeze. And it was for one simple reason:

“People buy from people they know and like.”

I never pitched my book as a tale of the occult because when it came down to it, the novel I wrote, is about intimate relationships. It’s a story of how the characters cleared the love hurdles. My audience was interested in dating and romance. The occult angle was nothing more than seasoning.

Today, people are busy selling everything from A to Z through social networks. Unfortunately for many, the “social” part is absent. Many are forgetting, in Social Selling, relationship-building comes before the sales pitch.

If one doesn’t know to whom they’re selling, then how can they understand their needs? How is it possible to give them a proper customer service? Learning all about your customer is possible if you first develop a relationship with them.