Building Trust (Part 2 of 5):
Web sites that inspire trust.
October 17, 2006
This is part two of a five part series on building trust in your visitors in order to convert them to customers.
Step 2. The visitor sees your web site.
In my previous post I talked about the importance of pre-building trust in your visitors by writing articles and distributing them to as many sites as possible. This displays your expertise to the reader and entices them to take the second step in the five-step journey to your making a sale: visiting your web site.
Obviously you can't do business online without an online presence, but you will do very little business online if the site you have is of poor quality.
Look at it from your visitor’s perspective. If they found your site through an article you’ve written, then the article must have impacted them enough to make them want to visit your web site. But if they land on your site only to find a home-grown, unprofessional web presence, the little bit of trust you’ve already built up in them is destroyed.
Think of your web site the same way you think about how to dress for a job interview. When you're interviewing for a job, you're selling yourself. You might be the most qualified person for the job hands down, but if you show up for a corporate job interview in jeans and a T-shirt, with unbrushed hair and smelling a little funny, do you really think anyone is going to hire you?
The same is true of your web site. Your visitor is essentially interviewing you, to see whether or not they want to “hire” you as a consultant for them and their needs.
If you want people to listen to you, to trust you, and to buy from you, you have to give quality information in a format that is attractive and reinforces in the visitor's mind that you are a professional who can be trusted. If that means you need to invest a little money in a nice template, do it! It will pay you back one hundred fold.
If your visitor found your site through an article you wrote, then you want the quality of your web site to reflect the quality of the article that brought the visitor there. It should be professional, polished, no misspelled words or improper grammar. It should have a clean, smooth look with graphics that add punch without being overwhelming. The navigation should be simple and obvious.
A note: if the visitor read something negative about you or your web site, and visited your site out of curiosity (which happens a lot–like people who slow down on the highway to stare at an accident), then having a quality web site with top-notch content can dispel any preconceived negative notions about you.
So make sure to give your web site design a lot of thought and a professional appearance.
Tomorrow's post will examine the third step that leads to converting a visitor into a sale by building trust: your mailing list.
Comments
One Response to “Building Trust (Part 2 of 5):
Web sites that inspire trust.”
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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Hi Jonathan,
This is not really related, it kind of is and isn't.
Anyway, I created a few new websites recently, and added high pr links to them, about 1-2 weeks later these websites with about 50-70 pages each started to create massive traffic for me. These websites are basically using the same templates, all content is original. All these sites are brand new, no page rank yet.
I was getting tons of traffic from these sites, I decided to change a few things with the templates, add a few more articles and all of a sudden the traffic from them stopped. Total there are 6 websites like this of mine. Four of the six were doing great; the other two never took off…
What I don't understand is why did the sites that were doing great, drop the traffic all of a sudden? Was it something I did? I was reading around and found it could be the templates I'm using because they are all basically the same accept the content.
I used website article wizard to create the sites, which by the way is a great product accept for a few bugs, but hopefully mike will fix those..
Thanks for your help,