Building Trust

You hear all the time about how it’s important that you build trust with your prospects.

It’s 100% true; nobody will spend money or send contact information to someone they do not trust. But actually building that trust is a delicate business.

Take a website I ran across today. Here’s the link.

In that website (which is not an affiliate link, by the way, since I wouldn’t recommend you opt-in), there’s a statement to the effect that the only thing stopping you from making money is your lack of trust in him.

That’s a pretty powerful statement, and some great sales copy. It might even be true. But consider the conflicting messages being presented in this page. The “From The Desk Of” line at the beginning has his last name fogged out. In the video, his face is fogged out.

How is this building trust? In fact, since he brought up the lack of trust idea, that caused the ways in which he doesn’t trust his visitors to stand out to me.

Frankly, I wouldn’t sign up with this guy no matter what his pitch.

As I said before, building trust is a delicate business, and something you really want to consider as you’re writing content online. Every time you copy and paste an affiliate sales letter instead of using your own words and opinions, you’re losing some trust from your readers (half of whom probably have access to that same sales letter, and the other half have seen it from a dozen people already).

Be a real person, and provide your prospects with real value, and you’ll build the sort of trust that will carry on for years.

7 Replies to “Building Trust”

  1. Hi Jay,

    When we start online, we want to hide everything about ourself – emails, pictures, whole indentities. This is fine if you don’t want your visitor to interact with you, buy something, sign up or you just want to libel celebrities.

    I think that online business is the same as offline. If you had a real shop, you wouldn’t get very far serving your customers from behind a screen. So, I am a big believer in trust building through genuine openess because don’t have many other Trust tools available online.

    The one piece of advice I would have, particularly for the younger generation, is to remember your online profile. Once you have “opened up” you need to be aware of ALL of your activities online (past and future) and make sure they are business like. Facebook could come back to haunt you.

  2. *laugh* That’s so true, Facebook is a place where many people do things they’d rather not have business acquaintances know about. An online reputation is a rather permanent thing.

  3. Trust is basic to all relationships. You can’t build it by hiding your identity.

    Many people don’t trust Internet marketers. To change that we have to develop a relationship. That requires revealing ourselves through photographs and our content.

    Warmly,

    Linda P. Morton

  4. Excellent post.No matter how visually appealing your site is or how great your content is, it is the people that will decide whether your online business is worthy of visiting and sticking around at.Take the time to open up and show people who you really are.In doing so, people will see that they matter to you. They will not be just another prospect you are trying to convert to a customer.Instead, they will see that you care about them and are trying to better them rather than just take their money.

  5. [quote comment=””]If I get you right; what you are saying is to be open and make your website more personal.

    Like putting photos of your self in your “about me” and contact page.[/quote]

    Everyone has their own level of comfort with photos, real names, etc. But even if you don’t do those, just being a real person as opposed to an Internet Marketer will build trust.

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