Wordzopolis – Marketing, Campaign Planning, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing , Content Creation, Social Media and Public Relations

When your blog is the main marketing activity for your business, building credibility and trust is important. The great thing about using a blog to build your business is that prospects get to know and like you on a daily basis. You can show your personality and draw people to you that are in harmony with your personality. The people who do not get you will keep clicking and those that do will return. Blogs allow you to target your market but it also allows your market to target you. I enjoy knowing that those who return to my blog find my posting informative and sync with my style of writing. I admit that I do hold some of my personality back in my blog. In real life, I do curse and I am very direct, somewhat blunt and have a very offbeat sense of humor. My goal is to inform you of what I know about marketing and hopefully you can teach me what I don’t know.

In the past, I posted 11 tips for using your blogs to gain credibility and trust.

Here are more:

1. Be honest:

Telling the truth can be scary. I believe in being as honest as you can. I believe if you have the balls to do something, stand up and have the balls to say that you did it. I don’t know everything about marketing, I am still learning a lot of the new fangled things that are going on today to market businesses (twitter, facebook, linked and others). Some of these things seem very helpful some seem a waste of time. Every business is different. What is good for one business may not be good for yours. This is why marketing planning for your business is important. Just because another business similar to yours does certain things to market, their business does not mean it will work for yours.

2. Don’t be afraid to tell where you have failed:

No one in their right mind thinks that businesses always make the right decisions. They are businesses run by humans and we all make mistakes. No one wants to see post after post where you failed, but we don’t mind seeing that some ideas just did not work. We can understand that, it makes us remember that you are human and you are not perfect. I also know up front that if I hire you not to expect perfection, but to expect your best. If I screw up, I will tell you and do everything I can to make things right. I am human, I do not know everything and I never will. I can give you my best advice from experience and all the hard work that I have to offer but the plan we decide upon and implement just may not go as well as we would like. Well, let’s look at what worked, go back to the drawing board and start again. The clients I work with are my partners and I want to see you successful. I take joy in knowing that we have increase your sales, added clients, gained referrals, but you see I said WE. I am not in this alone. Marketing your business is collaboration. We are in it together. If I get something wrong, I am sorry. What can I do to make things right?

3. Tell what you offer and what you don’t:

While I am very capable of writing journalistic style pieces, I don’t care to. I enjoy writing more informally than straight journalism allows. I also enjoy marketing planning and implementation, but not all of the work that marketing encompasses. For instance: while I might know that a white paper will great for your business, doesn’t mean I want to write it. I will probably farm that work out to a freelancer that enjoys writing white papers. I am great at planning, monitoring and managing a marketing program. I am not great at all the grunt work that marketing takes and prefer to work with those who enjoy the grunt work of marketing. That is not to say that I don’t do any of the grunt work, there is some that I really do enjoy. I am a numbers person and I like make sure that targets are reached and creating planning to reach those targets. So, instead of offering to do jobs that I don’t enjoy, I work with a group of freelancers that enjoy doing the work that I am not my most productive doing.

Robert Middleton offers a great post on Building Trust through Marketing Strategies. This is a great read and I won’t rehash the same information here since he has already done a great job of presenting the information.

How do you use your blog to build credibility and trust?