Trust is essential to be successful with your blog and make online sales. If you build trust you can explode your business. This blog post provides the top 29 ways to build trust with your blog and increase online sales.
Most people won't buy anything from you the first time they visit your blog. Many have been scammed online or bought bad products and they want to get to know you before buying from you.
You need to build trust to become a successful blogger.
You need to create a blog that builds trust, and you have to keep building trust with your content and email communications to make your audience loyal to you.
First, you'll need to make a good first impression on your new visitors. You need to show professionalism, integrity, and trustworthiness with your blog. You need to give your visitors value so they'll want to come back.
You have to offer great incentives to get their email. And when you have their email address, you have to stay in touch with them regularly with great content.
Below are 29 tips to keep prospects coming back, win their trust, and increase your online sales.
1 – Know your ideal audience and focus on your ideal customers.
Provide benefits to your customers rather than focusing on sales. Focus on what your customers need and want. Solve their problems. Give them solutions.
Ask your audience what they want. Then, give them what they want.
Solution: Conduct surveys to find out what your audience wants.
SurveyMonkey has free and paid options. The free version will be enough for most bloggers. SurveyMonkey provides free survey templates and also offers online polls, quizzes, and more.
2 – Get a domain name and pay for hosting.
The first step in having credibility with your site is to have your own domain name and buy hosting. Paying for hosting and having your own domain name is a must if you're building a money-making site. Free blogs and free hosting have limitations, they don't offer support and don't inspire trust.
Your domain name is your unique address on the Internet such as https://yourname.com.
You can learn more about choosing and registering a domain name by reading my article, How to Choose an Effective Domain Name to Attract Buyers.
To learn more about hosting and how to choose a host, read my article How to create a money-making blog.
You can get your first-year domain name registration for free from Bluehost if you’re hosting with them.
3 – Use a professional email address that matches your domain name.
A professional email address is one that matches your domain name. An email address that matches your domain helps to instill customer trust.
i.e., you@yourdomain.com vs. randomname@gmail.com
or info@profitablewebstrategies.com vs gypsygirl@gmail.com
An email address with gmail or yahoo looks spammy. You don’t want your customers ignoring your emails and thinking it's spam. Don't use those email addresses for business. Your prospects and customers should recognize your email address and trust it because they are familiar with your website.
An email address that matches your domain name reinforces the connection between your website and email, represents your business, and shows that you mean business.
Match your email address to your domain name to present yourself as a professional and stand out among the competition.
4 – Get an SSL certificate.
When visiting a secure site, you can see a lock icon or a green bar in the browser, indicating that the connection is secured. Visitors will trust your site more when it has SSL and will be more likely to buy from you. You can get an SSL certificate from a hosting company such as Bluehost and others.
This site explains why you need to have an SSL certificate
5 – Make a good first impression with a professional-looking website.
An easy way in getting a professional-looking site is by using a good WordPress theme. ElegantThemes and GeneratePress are popular WordPress themes.
I go into more detail about WordPress themes in my blog post, What are the Best WordPress themes?
Do you want to make money blogging? Check out my blog worksheets and checklist on how to set up a money-making blog.
6 – Provide a clear message.
Mention clearly what you offer. Share who you are. Mention your name, what your expertise is, how you do business, how long you've been in business, and any other pertinent information.
Keep your writing style simple. Use easy-to-understand words and provide clear messages.
7 – Get people to know you and build trust with videos.
Videos are one of the best ways for people to get to know you better and create trust with your audience. They see that you're a real person. Webinars work great too.
Making videos and putting them on your site can greatly boost trust and conversions.
8 – Show your face.
People trust people that they can see. That can be more difficult online but if you post a picture of yourself, it will help them to trust you more. They’ll see you as a real person instead of as a heartless business entity.
9 – Provide valuable content that is targeted to your audience.
Content is the most important element of your blog. Quality content shows your knowledge and builds credibility. You need to have lots of content to make money blogging. You need content for blog posts, email marketing, opt-in freebies, ebooks, videos, podcasts, and more.
Your content has to be unique and interesting. It has to be targeted to your audience and must be valuable and useful to them.
To get more ideas about creating quality content fast, check my article, 10 Easy Ways to Create Quality Content Fast.
If you don’t want to write your own content, you can outsource content writing or use quality Private Label Content. To learn more about private label content, read my Review of four of the most popular autoresponders here.
10 – Showcase your expertise.
Show your knowledge by publishing valuable posts, articles, and reports. Provide a free ebook on your topic to establish authority in your field.
Put your information on your site, provide guest posts to respected, relevant sites, and publish your information in industry publications and on doc sites.
11 – Publish relevant content consistently and update your blog frequently.
Showing that you’re dependable will go far in helping to develop trust with your audience.
You need to add new, quality content to your blog regularly. If you haven’t published anything new in two years or if your blog is outdated, it will hurt your credibility and make the reader wonder if you are still in business.
If you publish blog posts, email newsletters, or other material regularly, it will prove that you’re serious about your business. It helps push you to the “authority” level and will help people to trust you more.
Also, check your older content periodically and update the information as needed.
Solution: Create a writing schedule or outsource writing tasks. Life events can certainly affect how frequently you communicate with your audience but if you’re in business to make a profit, you need a content writing plan.
12 – Build a list and stay in touch with subscribers
If you want clients to follow you, like you, trust you, and eventually buy from you, they need to know you. This means that you have to build an email list!
Building a list is the most important way to build trust with your audience. You need to get your visitors' email addresses, build a list, follow up, and send regular email messages with quality information so people can get to know you.
If you don't get in touch with your subscribers regularly, you'll lose contact and credibility with your subscribers.
Solutions: Automate your email marketing with email automation systems. See my review of the best email marketing tools.
It's also important that you only send targeted messages to your list. Rather than sending the same marketing messages to all your contacts, you can send more relevant content to your subscribers by segmenting your contacts into different email lists.
Segmenting and tagging your contact list by unique interests, preferences, and behaviors gives you the power to send targeted, personalized emails.
You’ll get better open and click-through rates and you’ll gain more trust when sending more targeted messages. You can also create custom-tailored offers for each list.
Some of the more powerful autoresponders today such as ConvertKit and GetResponse offer sophisticated features for automated segmentation. This will save you a lot of time and help you send more targeted messages to your subscribers. Other popular autoresponders today also include Aweber and MailChimp.
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Related blog posts:
- How to build a profitable list on autopilot and turn visitors into customers.
- Review of four of the most popular autoresponders here.
- 30 easy proven ways to build your list fast.
13 – Make it easy to contact you.
Provide a contact link in your main navigation that goes to a contact page. Provide a phone number and email address. Adding your street address helps to build trust.
14 – Respond quickly.
Answer or return phone calls and email messages quickly. Respond to social media messages and comments.
15 – Show professionalism in all your communications.
You need to show professionalism on your website and in all your communications and marketing messages, including social media and email messages.
16 – Make sure that every part of your website is functional.
Make sure that everything is working properly on your site. Avoid broken links and missing images.
Solution: This FREE WordPress plug-in, Broken Link Checker will notify you of broken links and missing images so you can fix them fast. I find it one of the most useful WordPress plug-ins.
17 – Provide clear navigation.
Make it easy for prospective buyers to find what they are looking for. Clear navigation is essential to keeping prospective buyers at your site. Provide plenty of links on your home page, giving visitors an overview of your website's content. Provide links to your home page and main sections on every page. Visitors may not visit your pages in the sequence you would like them to. Provide a site map if your site has more than 20 pages. Also, use internal links to send people to relevant information.
18 – Make your web pages easy to read.
An easy-to-read website can increase your sales. Use color and spacing to make your web pages easy to read. Use dark text on a light background for easy readability. Avoid text on dark and busy backgrounds. Break up your sales copy into short, easy-to-read sections and use subheadings to highlight benefits. Split up long pages into several pages.
19 – Make sure that your site loads fast.
It's important to make your pages fast loading to keep visitors at your site. Your website's speed has a significant impact on user experience, engagement, and loyalty. A slow website will cost you sales as visitors won't wait more than four seconds for your web pages to load.
20 – Make it easy to buy from your site.
Make your order page and order form easy to find. Provide several ordering options, including ordering online, by phone, fax, email, and regular mail.
Provide several payment methods, including credit card payments. And make buyers feel secure by using a secure server for credit card purchases.
21 – Overcome buyer resistance with a money-back guarantee.
A money-back guarantee or satisfaction guarantee promises a refund if a buyer is not satisfied with a product or service. A guarantee communicates your commitment to stand behind the product or service you provide. The longer your return guarantee is, the better. You will increase sales when you offer a money-back guarantee.
Below is an example of a 60-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
22 – Boost credibility with testimonials.
Testimonials can be one of the most powerful tools available to marketers. The most powerful testimonials mention how you solved a problem. For testimonials to be credible, you have to mention the full name, business, and location of the people who gave you testimonials. Ask happy customers for testimonials!
23 – Back up your claims with statistics.
Back up your claims and provide credibility by citing research studies and statistics and providing quotes from experts and trusted websites in your field.
Provide links to websites that people know and trust to support your claims. This shows that you’ve done your research. And you benefit from the trust these sites and experts have.
For example, when promoting a writing course for freelance writers, provide statistics from ZipRecruiter about the average income of remote writers.
24 – Proofread and edit before publishing.
You’ll lose credibility if you have typos and grammar mistakes on your site. Make sure to edit and proofread everything before publishing.
How do you feel when you see typos in your local newspaper or some other authoritative resource? Doesn't it make them look sloppy or less professional? Do you want that image for yourself? Sending emails or publishing blog posts that have typos won’t get you new business.
Solutions:
Let your content sit for a few days before you go back to edit it. When you look at your content too long, your brain becomes blind to glaring mistakes and if you publish it, your audience may think that you’re sloppy. Also, look into hiring a virtual assistant or proofreader who can review all your communications so you don’t get bogged down with this task.
Do you want a quick and easy solution? Use Grammarly to check your spelling and grammar. Grammarly is one of the best online spelling and grammar checkers. It detects grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes as you write Word documents, emails, and content on your website or social media. It's better than Microsoft Word's grammar checker. Just add the Grammarly plugin to Google Chrome and it will check your emails, social media posts or blog posts, and everything else you write.
Grammarly has a free version and a premium version. Check it out here.
25 -Tell Both Sides of the Story
When you are giving examples for anything, whether product or service, telling the pros and cons is always a good way to get people to trust you. If you are able to be truthful about the drawbacks of your own services or products or those that you recommend, your audience will trust you as the real deal.
26 – Disclose Your Biases
If you are providing reviews of ebooks, software, products, or services, it’s important to tell the viewers about any biases you may have. If you received the item free to review, mention this. If you were paid for your review, state it. Not only will this help people trust you better, it’s also the law.
27 – Avoid Over-Pitching Products
When you always revert to sales language in all your content, people get tired of it. They expect a sales tone when looking at a sales page, but not when reading a blog. Be very careful not to confuse the two. It's okay to have a call to action, but you also want to avoid turning people off.
28 – Under-promise and Over-deliver
Don't overstate what the product or service offers or the problems it solves. Instead, ensure that you can deliver more than they expect. This is important because you want them to buy from you again and you want them to tell others about you. Word of mouth is the ultimate way to get the trust of others.
29 – Engage in Real Time
Beware of too much automation when it comes to social media. You want to engage with others in real time. This will increase the trust that your audience is developing with you. They will feel important when you answer questions personally and engage with them in real time.
Developing trust takes time. It's a long-term marketing strategy that will pay off again and again. When you get just one person to trust you, they will tell ten others, and those ten others will each tell ten more people.
Does your website inspire confidence? Check your website with these tips in mind. Correct the problems. It will pay off in sales and profits.
BLOGGING RESOURCES
- Checklists, Worksheets & Planners to Set up a Money-Making Blog.
- Hosting: Bluehost & SiteGround.
- WordPress themes: ElegantThemes/Divi, GeneratePress, Genesis theme from StudioPress & DIYThemes.
- Popular email marketing providers: Aweber, GetResponse, ConvertKit, and MailChimp.
- The best online spelling and grammar checker: Grammarly.