‘Trust’

No one buys from anyone offline and online to whom they do not trust, and that also means not knowing you. Remember as children we are taught not to trust strangers? Is your website a stranger to the person visiting?

Then you have no trust and with no trust comes; no sales.

“Well I can hardly jump through the screen Alan, and take them out for a beer can I?” I hear you scream, well no but you can certainly develop a trust online!

I always read with interest about convicted murderers who find love online or by writing letters and eventually end up getting married in prison even though they are on death row! If a death row inmate can develop enough trust to find a spouse, then you can develop enough trust online to find a client!

Challenge comes when you look at your corporate website; it’s just a massive stranger’s shop that screams ‘Give me your money!’ you have to try get over that by building trust with a content marketing strategy.

When I am training companies to develop a content marketing and social media marketing strategy in Thailand, I train them to buy a new keyword rich domain and start a blog site. Your blog site becomes the good cop to your bad cop corporate site, the main point is to get more people to buy from your corporate website, and this is the most effective process:

If you can start writing blogs about your business and the peripheral subjects, and if you can write freely, personally and without expecting a return on investment in your first month, you can engage your audience, and this will mean you will start to see a huge difference in your online sales and lead generation.  Trust me I have done this! Google: ‘social media marketing company Bangkok’ This is my business I am one guy no staff, I have my keywords for a few sites on page one and receive 3-5 leads a week asking about online marketing training in Bangkok, or Google: ‘free business directory Thailand’ see biz-find at the top? Yep that’s me as well!

Biz-find Blogs

Major important thing to remember is: Do not sell direct on your blog, that’s commandment No 2! Can you remember social media marketing commandment No 1?

 Best way to blog for business is to share information trick and tips in order to brand you as the expert, and branding is another word for trust! You can however (and must on every blog) add a subtle ‘call to action’ that links to your main site, this is a non-pushy way of saying:

 “Hey I have been pouring my heart out here for you for months, now that you trust me, let me show what products I have, yes I do make a living off this, and there’s nothing sordid about coin, the wife will tell you that!”

<Ahem> not really, you know where I am going on this, a simple contact the company permalink will suffice. Science says; that a person who trusts you after reading lots of your personable and passionate blogs, will click to your corporate site and stay more than 30 seconds which means they will be very ready and expect to be sold to, they want to buy, those kind of clients don’t come cheap, because they are the elite of potential clients that any business could expect!

The vast majority will fail at content marketing because their mind will now come up with hundreds of excuses:

 ‘Well I am not a writer’

(Most successful bloggers aren’t, they just have passion that’s plenty enough)

 ‘Never was much good at school’

(Huh! Look at all the top industry leaders who are running their own business, there’s less MBA’s than you think)

 “Can’t find the time to write blogs”

(It takes approximately 40-60 minutes to write a blog and 20 minutes to post around social media!)

‘What can I find to write about?’

This last excuse I find fascinating! In UK recently a client that makes the metal for drains (manhole covers) was listening intently to my talk at a business club, afterwards he asked me how on Earth he could make drain covers interesting enough to get trust and new clients. I advised writing about corporate social responsibility and as unimportant people think drains are; they hold a very important place in society, and he should write imaginative stories about what would happen if we had no sewers or drains, and  to look back at the history of the invention of sewerage systems which is actually very interesting indeed, with Cholera and water based diseases in London killing thousands before civilised drainage systems, we had a good chat and I just goes to show, there’s no industry I can think of where you could not find something interesting enough for people to read and develop trust and branding!

Google and other search engines love of blogs and consistently changing updated content on websites is a bloggers unexpected bonus, write without expecting clients, and Google will kiss your website and rank you really highly. It is really rewarding and a karmic feeling when you receive a substantial business lead and you ask where they came from, and they tell you it’s from reading your  blogs.

I am going to be in your face and tell you if you do not have a blog you are going to seriously struggle to get people to stay on your website and develop branding and trust, and without trust you can kiss your sales goodbye.

Fortune favours the brave!

To learn how to set up your blog and develop a content marketing strategy to destroy your competition, cos they have all the excuses!

Contact Netmedia

Alan Johnston on LinkedIn