151: How to Build Trust With Your Blog

Build Trust With Your Blog Today, I’m talking about how to build trust with your blog, podcast, YouTube channel, and social media. This question came in from Stacie. “I’ve heard that blogs are great for building trust with potential customers - how would you suggest speeding that up?” - Asked by Stacie I’m going to tackle this question today and talk about how trust is built using content online and give you some tips on how to maybe speed it up a little bit. Although, it does need to take some time, but I will give you some thoughts on how build trust with your blog. Further Resources on How to Build Trust With Your Blog Strategies to Help Convert First Time Visitors Into Interested Readers of Your Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to Episode 151 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I want to talk about how to build trust with your blog, podcast, YouTube channel, and social media. This question came in over the last couple of weeks from Stacey. She wrote, “I’ve heard that blogs are great for building trust with potential customers. How would you suggest speeding that up?” I want to tackle this question today and talk about how trust is built using content online and give you some tips on how to maybe speed it up a little bit. I think it does need to take some time, there’s a bit of a spoiler. I'm going to give you some thoughts on how to do that. Today’s question came in from Stacey and she’s touched on a really big reason that many businesses start blogs. They hear that blogs help to build trust with customers and potential customers and as a result can drive sales. It reminds me of Bob Burg famous quote who once wrote, “All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people that they know, like, and trust.” It’s become a bit of a mantra in marketing circles. Ultimately, Bob here is talking about relationship, about connection as being the basis of how people make their decision on where to spend money in many instances. If you’re anything like me, you know this is true for you. We look at our own spending habits and we know that there’s some truth in this, we don’t just make purchasing decisions based upon features or prices, we often make our purchasing decisions based upon other factors including whether we feel a connection with the brand, whether we feel we trust the brand, whether we like the people selling us the product or creating the product. What’s this got to do with blogging, you might be asking. I found that this exact principle applies to blogging. My experience with blogging over the last almost 13 years now has been that it is one of the best ways by far of building a connection with potential customers and people. When you create content on a daily or even just a regular basis that brings about the change in the life of those who read it, then over time they really do begin to feel like they know you. They really do feel like they like you and that they trust you. Some kind of relationship opens up, as virtual as that might be. As strange as that might seem, people do feel this connection to you when you enhance their lives with regular content. I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve been at a conference and I've literally just got home from the ProBlogger Conference, it happened again. People come up to you at a conference when you’ve been blogging for years and they speak to you in such a personal way that sometimes it can be really confusing as to whether you’ve met that person before, whether you’ve had some memory lapse which is quite common for me because memories are not my strong suit. Many times, there’s people who talk to you and you realize you never met them before. This is the first time they’ve met you but they feel like they...