How to Build a Popular, Trustworthy Blog
If you’ve been browsing around for strategies to increase sales through building trust, you’re in the right place. Building a trustworthy blog is a pillar for gaining a customer’s loyalty and generating revenue. Without trustworthiness, customers will see you as just another competitor who may or may not be worth doing business with.
Are you ready to build a trustworthy blog? Regardless of your niche, the following strategies will help.
1. Focus on security first
Marketing expert Neil Patel points out that building a trustworthy blog is comprised of two components: reputation and security. Both of these components should be a main focus; however, security comes first.
Security is something you do behind the scenes and something you make visible to your customers. For example, behind the scenes you might have a cloud-based server with 24/7 video surveillance and high-tech software security. Security measures made visible to your customers might include seeing your SSL certificate status in their browser.
SSL is required for building trust
Having a valid SSL certificate on your blog – even when you don’t collect visitor information – is crucial. Every blog needs SSL encryption, including read-only blogs that don’t accept comments.
Most browsers display a green lock next to the address bar when a website is secured with SSL. In the absence of SSL, that lock is red, and the site is labeled “unsecure.” Even if your site doesn’t collect data, just seeing that red lock (and the word “unsecure”) can compromise your visitors’ trust.
If your blog is a membership site with paid memberships, SSL encryption is critical. Credit card processing agreements from credible merchants require SSL encryption for payment processing. Not having a valid SSL certificate can cause your account to be suspended and/or terminated.
2. Build a secure infrastructure to support your reputation
If you build your reputation on an insecure foundation and that foundation collapses, you could lose your customers’ trust. For example, say you collect data from your customers and your security protocol encrypts that data from end-to-end. Hackers can steal your encrypted data, but it can’t be read by unauthorized parties.
With encrypted data, if you fall victim to a data breach, the lack of harm to your customers will strengthen their trust in your company.
Components of a trustworthy blog infrastructure
Building a trustworthy blog begins with your website’s infrastructure. A secure infrastructure includes:
- Having a reliable hosting account. Your visitors may never know you’ve got a highly secure web server with 24-hour virus protection, but that’s okay. As long as your blog is protected, your visitors will reap the benefits.
- Performing software updates and patches in a timely manner. No matter what CMS your blog runs on, software updates are required to maintain security. Hackers love to exploit known weaknesses in blogging software. The faster you update your site when updates are available, the more secure it will be.
- Automatic backups. Imagine generating 10,000 loyal, regular visitors to your site. Then, out of nowhere, your entire blog crashes and unfortunately, you never backed up your content. Without content to put back up, you’d probably lose all your visitors.Automatic backups make site crashes appear seamless to visitors. If your backups are set to automatically restore after a crash, visitors won’t know your site crashed to start with. This seamless solution provides visitors with the uninterrupted experience they expect.
3. Develop in-depth content with sources
Publishing in-depth content with cited sources makes your arguments more credible. You may not think you’re making arguments, but every blog has an angle, even if it’s non-profit and purely educational.
When developing in-depth content for your blog, it’s important to cite your sources, especially when you’re making claims about other businesses. For example, say you write an in-depth article to help consumers get the most out of their vacuum based on the height of their rugs. Believe it or not, there have been many studies performed to determine the best vacuum cleaner for every style of rug you can imagine. Citing these studies will generate credibility, which will develop into trust.
Trustworthy blogs gain loyal followers
There are multiple components to establishing trust with your visitors. Between the seen and unseen, the most important components are outlined in this article. If you start with these strategies, you’ll start building the foundation you need to gain, keep, and grow your visitors’ trust.