The beating heart of any business is customer relationship management (CRM). When it is throbbing at a strong steady pace the business thrives.  When it falters, when a company's relationship with its customers turns ugly, the business dies.  Except in cases of pure monopolies - think old-time telephone companies and current power utilities - this has been true since the dawn of time, or at least since the first cave dwellers began trading bone knives for rock hammers and skins for woven baskets.  It was true for hundreds of years before the current buzzword - CRM - was ever uttered.  Even the habit of describing the interaction between businessperson and customer with buzzwords is nothing new. Such hallowed phrases as "customer satisfaction" and "the customer is always right" mean essentially the same thing as CRM.

Like many of us, you may never have looked at your website's link environment from the customer relationship management (CRM) point of view.

Like many of us, you may never have looked at your website's link environment from the CRM point of view.  To most internet entrepreneurs, customer relationship management involves filling orders promptly, responding to inquiries in a timely and informative manner, constructing a shopping cart that is intuitive rather than confusing, uploading images and product blurbs that clearly and completely describe each item available, and having a return policy that is fair to both merchant and consumer.  But a first-class CRM program in the e-commerce space must go far beyond that.

As Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says "customer service is the most important thing in any business, (but) it's more important online than in the physical world because customers have more power online."  Think about that for a moment.  In what way do customers have more power online than in a brick-and-mortar store?  Online they can leave your site and surf off to a competitor's place of business.  Is that giving them more power?  More convenience, certainly, but not more power.  Because in a brick-and-mortar environment they can walk out of your store and go across the street or across town to a competitor's store just as they can online.  No, the extra power that online shoppers have derives from their ability to access infinitely more applicable knowledge than a conventional shopper.  Going from one conventional vendor to another may provide a little more enlightenment about a specific product, service or company - the salesperson may be better informed at one place than another - but not much.  The basic features of the thing - whatever it is - will have been laid out in the manufacturer's promotional literature and distributed to all dealers.  Compare that to the internet, where the concepts of interaction and hyper-linking combine to offer vast amounts of pre-purchase data, everything from users' raves and rants, to the prices and availability of spare parts.  Nobody understands - and exploits - the information dissemination advantage of the web better than Jeff Bezos.  Spend five minutes browsing Amazon.com and you'll discover a wealth of information about each book offered for sale - far more than you could find in even the largest, most advanced brick-and-mortar bookstore.

On the Internet... the concepts of interaction and hyper-linking combine to offer vast amounts of pre-purchase data, everything from users' raves and rants, to the prices and availability of spare parts.

On Amazon you can click on a title and discover any or all of the following:  A professional review, reader reviews, an interview with the author, excerpts from the text, a list of other books on related subjects, a list of other books by the same author, and information about alternative editions such as digital downloads or audio CDs.  Compare that with what you get in the bookstore: Out-of-context cover blurbs carefully selected by the publisher to make even the dumbest, most insipid work sound like "Gone With The Wind" and the opportunity to thumb the book and read some extracts.  About the only area in which the bookstore provides better information is in allowing you to see if the book's typeface and type size are compatible with your eyes.  In all other ways, Amazon delivers more.

So that's all there is to great online CRM.  It's simplicity itself.  Raise a billion-plus dollars like Jeff Bezos did and craft a site bursting with things your customers and potential customers want to know.  Or sit down at your LinksManager console and massage your links pages into a billion-dollar repository of information that your customers will find difficult to obtain from any other vendor.

Let's continue with Amazon.com as our example.  In this scenario, you're an online bookseller in the unfortunate position of directly competing with Amazon despite the lack of a billion-buck bankroll.  First, visit LinkPartners and search for book review sites.  Next, go to your favorite search engine, say Google, and look up additional book review sites.  You'll find thousands of them, some featuring professional reviews and others reader reviews.  Many of these sites, of course, offer books for sale, but a surprisingly large number don't - they are non-commercial manifestations of humanity's love of reading.  Select the best of these non-commercial, non-competitive sites and offer to exchange reciprocal links with them.  At this point, you might ask why a non-commercial book review site would want to exchange a link with a commercial book vendor.  What's in it for them?

One of the keys to a successful customer relationship management program is anticipating customers' questions and providing the answers.

By asking that question you've exposed the true beauty of reciprocal linking, there's "something in it" for everyone.  In this particular case, the book review sites enhance the image they present to search-engine ranking programs by linking to your site.  Why?  Because your site epitomizes the two qualities most search engine programs rate most highly in reciprocal links:  Relevancy - what could be more relevant to someone reading book reviews than a site enabling them to buy those books; and "freshness" - every time you add new book releases to your site, you are refreshing its contents and keeping it up to date.  You can, if you like, even go one up on Amazon by using LinksManager's setup wizard to divide your book review links into subject-based categories such as sites that specialize in reviewing fiction, non-fiction, romance, science fiction, thrillers, etc.  Now repeat the same process with sites that feature interviews with and biographies of authors.  From there, where you go is only limited by your imagination.  Maybe your customers would find it useful to be pointed to a site where they could check if their favorite book was ever made into a movie?  Maybe they would like to visit a site offering reading lamps or tables?  The possibilities may not be endless, but there are a lot of them.

Whether you are selling books or plumbing parts, the same rule applies.  One of the keys to a successful CRM program is anticipating customers' questions and providing the answers.  And on the Web, the best way to provide answers to questions like "did the book get good reviews" or "how do I install this lawn sprinkler head" is via robust link pages organized into a virtual knowledge bank.  By creating and consistently adding to this knowledge bank -- or to use another popular label, data mine -- you will enrich your customers' online experience, make your link pages more attractive to search engines, and enhance your bottomline.

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