How blogging positively engenders credibility and trust

BlogKing March 7th, 2007

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Alister Cameron has a great summary of why internet marketers should be taking to blogging.

Let’s explore how blogging positively engenders credibility and trust, and in turn influences each of the above “numbers”:

Blogging generates leads.
Internet marketers whom we at Alliance Software have introduced to blogging are telling us that they’ve entered a whole new world of
lead/traffic generation strategies. PPC is not under any immediate threat, nor is SEO, but social media marketing is booming! Lead generation here is closely aligned to bookmarking, linkbait, viral strategies and a great way to effectively access the “long tail” of search engine and directory traffic. I don’t have room here to unpack all this, but Darren might, on the day

Blogging can increase your conversion rate.
The jury is in: the long-form salesletter sells, but the conversion rates are very very rarely extraordinary. However, this morning I was on the phone to a top-gun internet marketer discussing my ideas for this post, and he excitedly explained to me how he has seen extraordinarily high conversion rates from blogs, compared to long-form salesletters. He attributes this order-of-magnitude increase in conversion rate to the much greater credibility and trust levels he and his business partner have established with their target market, thanks to the highly relational and transparent conversational style of their blogs.

Blogging can help you sell more stuff to your customers.
I asked this same marketer about sales volume, and he explained that his customers were happy to pay a premium price, if only they could gain greater “access” to him and his business partner. (My client sells educational products to the personal investor market.) What a perfect justification for blogging, as a means of delivering greater value to your customers, who are asking for ever more value (in this case, access to/dialogue with the “gurus” themselves).

Blogging helps you sell more expensive stuff.
There are few more effective ways to engage your customers, survey them, and determine what premium product/services they’re willing to pay for, than blogging. There can be challenges to keep your eavesdropping competitors out of the most valuable and juicy conversations, but that’s usually a price worth paying, I think. Blogging can also function as a very effective “suggestive/up sell strategy” in the form of case studies, customer interviews/ testimonials, etc.

Blogging is dirt cheap and highly effective marketing.
Finally, blogging costs remarkably little. Frankly, the biggest cost is time, not money. As blogging proves its worth to internet marketers, we will see them diverting internet marketing expenses away from SEO, PPC and banners to social media marketing (SMM), which includes blogging, as well as bookmarking, participation in effective marketing spend may well deliver sizeable savings, even in the short term.

Again, it’s all about the unique value that blogging and online social engagement has in building credibility and trust with our marketplace.