One perk for contributing to the SMPS Marketer is the association’s annual gift. This year, I received a copy of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
The book’s topic, needless to say, touches close to my heart — and this blog’s mission — as the key idea behind marketing success is to build trust with current and potential clients, and convert that trust into profitable business. If you order a copy through this link, Amazon will pay a small commission to me.
The authors list eight “Signals of Trust”. You might wish to compare these signals to our own situation and decide how close/successful you are at implementing them. I’ve added my own commentary.
Design: If a site looks like a basic template, without any styling or editing, we’re less certain that it’s trustworthy, as opposed to a well-dressed design.
I have two thoughts on this. Switching from Blogger.com to WordPress, I discovered an incredible selection of design templates (and there are some pretty good templates on the Blogger site). The inexpensive way to follow Brogan and Smith’s advice is to not use the default template within these options, and to look for alternative templates with some design flexibility. The more expensive approach is to commission your own design from scratch. If you are really serious — and have the budget — this is not an unwise investment.
Longevity: Has a web site been around for a while? Have you just started reading it, or are we longtime subscribers? (The definition of a longtime subscriber might vary.)
Here, I’m scoring pretty high within this niche, although am paying a price for the long delay before setting things up at constructionmarketingideas.com. The point here is your benefits from working within the online community grow with time, and you will undoubtedly fail in the trust exercise if you behave like a flash in the pan, coming on strong, then disappearing. (I see this frequently on some of my favorite forums and groups, when “experts” arrive with great ideas, then disappear, presumably when they don’t gain instant or immediate business gratification.)
Volume of productivity. Is there a lot of content, or does it feel like someone slapped something up a day or two ago?
This is where I like the quality of sites such as Mel Lester’s E-Quip Blog, Ford Harding’s site, Matt Handal’s Help Everybody Everyday and Tim Klaubunde’s CofeBuz. They’ve been around a while, with lots of great content that is timeless in its utility and value. You may also wish to review and vote for the Best Construction Blog — the finalists are all receiving recognition here, and the most popular will achieve special publicity in the next issue of the Design and Construction Report.
Number and quality of comments. If no one’s around and no one’s talking, are you really a trusted part of the conversation?
I can do much better here, or maybe can do much better at encouraging you to comment. Please do. This site is set up so comments have a “nofollow” attribute built in, so if you are just spamming or trying to earn search engine links, you will fail — ahem, unless I edit out the “nofollow” attribute, which I will, for meaningful, useful, and truly relevant comments. (In other words, if you are commenting or have an agency doing this for you for SEO, forget it. If you are commenting sincerely with relevant insights, you will gain the true SEO benefits from effective commenting.)
Number and quality of links. How did we first start reading this web site? Was it recommended by a friend, or by a site like Reddit or Digg, where users vote on a story’s importance? Do we trust the recommending site?
This is straightforward. Link quality and quantity, of course, are the keys to search engine status and ranking. The search engines are getting as good as humans in discovering whether the links are meaningful, genuine, and relevant.
Domain name. We trust things from professional names versus “starter domains” (e.g. Blogspot or WordPress.com domains are more suspect than ‘official” domains). We also tend to trust URLs ending in .com more than those with such endings as .info.
It doesn’t cost much to host your own domain registered inexpensively with a third-party service on your own site. It is best to separate your domain registration from your site in case anything goes wrong. I wish I had moved to my own domain much sooner than I did, though, in fairness the original blogspot.com site still achieved its reputation and success over time. (Note to Mel Lester: You might want to see about a new suffix for your blog.)
Does the web site have an About page? Does it have a picture of the author?
Easy to do.
Does this blogger have a Twitter or Facebook profile? In other words, is the blogger interacting on the Web in several different places? Checking out what that person does everywhere tells us a lot about the blogger’s real intent.
Done, and for you, also, easy to do. See the Linkedin.com, Facebook, and Twitter pages here.
Brogan and Smith reiterate the basic point of trust-building on the Web: If you are out for a short-term, quick fix and fast sales, you are likely to be disappointed, and this makes sense. Are you really going to contract with an architect, engineer or contractor because of some marketing hype, or because you really believe there is substance beneath the surface? But you can build this trust, and marketing success, with patience, some simple effort, and learning from the mistakes of others (myself included) who have been in the space for a while.
