Looking for something in particular?

• Home
• About
• Subscribe
• Contact
• Other

Building Trust (Part 1 of 5):
Pre-building trust in your visitors.

October 16, 2006

This is part one of a five part series on building trust in your visitors in order to convert them to customers.

If you're a little overwhelmed by the myriad of business opportunities, products and "secret formulas" being touted online these days, then this five-part series should help you regain your focus on what's really important in any business venture, on- or off-line: building trust in your visitors.

You see, few people will buy anything from someone they don't trust. Those few who will buy from someone they don't particularly trust will be quick to demand refunds or scream "fraud" over the smallest problems.

So how do you build trust in an online environment that lends itself to being so anonymous? The best way is to examine trust from the visitor's perspective.

Trust : A Five-Pointed Star

You need to work at building trust in your visitor along each step of his or her journey toward your product offer. Doing this will maximize the number of people who are willing to buy from you at the end of that journey.

There are five basic steps taken by any visitor along that path. They are:

1. They learn about your web site.
2. They visit your web site.

3. They join your mailing list.
4. They receive your product offer.
5. They receive follow-ups.

Along each step of that path you need to be building trust with your visitor. Today we're going to examine how to do that in the visitor's first step, and each day that follows we'll look at another step.

Step 1. The visitor learns about your site.

You won't sell a thing if nobody ever visits your site, so it's important that you work to get traffic. But it's also important that the traffic coming to your web site already has a measure of trust in you.

You can pre-build this trust by writing articles and distributing them via free article sites and submissions to online publications.

A quality article demonstrates your expertise in your subject area, and that "best foot forward" builds a measure of trust in whoever is reading the article. Also, if the visitor trusts the site where your article is found, some of that trust is passed on to you, since your article is appearing on a source that the visitor considers trustworthy.

A warning note: don't recommend any products in the articles you distribute, that makes you look like a salesperson instead of an expert. Use your articles to build trust.

Try and get your articles spread out to as wide an audience as possible. Having your articles in as many places as possible gives you the best chance of getting visitors who have already seen your expertise, so when they click the link in the article to visit your site they have a good feeling about what they are going to find there.

I personally submit almost all of my articles to the free article sites after they've been indexed by the search engines. Once an article is indexed, then the search engines know that your site holds the original, and you won't get penalized for duplicate content.

An added benefit of distributing your articles is that it gets you in-bound links so that you can rank better in the search engines for your keywords.

After reading your article, if you’ve built up even a small amount of trust in the reader, it is likely he or she will click the link in your About the Author section and go to your web site. That brings us to the second step on the journey toward a sale.

A note: another way trust is pre-built in visitors is if they read positive comments about you or your site in online forums and bulletin boards. Having top-notch content and good customer service will get people speaking well of you and can generate substantial amounts of quality traffic that already has a measure of trust in you.

Tomorrow's post will examine the second step that leads to converting a visitor into a sale by building trust: your web site.

Comments

Rodney's 404 Handler Plugin plugged in.