Tuesday, July 12, 2016 Nigel Ekins

Has Your Business Earned Their Trust?

Trust is a very powerful thing. We need it for society to function. We trust that people will stop at the light when theirs turns red and ours turns green. We trust that the surgeon about to perform a medical procedure knows what he's doing and cares about our well-being. We trust that the sun will rise in the east and go down in the west.

Without trust we would be paralyzed with fear.

Some people are a bit more suspicious than others, but everybody trusts somebody. I'll even go further and say that everybody trusts almost everybody else, at least to a degree.

But that doesn't mean that we don't need to build trust with our customers (and potential customers). Just because they trust you a little doesn't mean that they trust you enough to buy from you or take your recommendation to buy from somebody else.

I trust the guy I don't know driving on the same road will stop at the red light, but if he told me I should buy this or that service from him without offering any reason for me to trust him—forget it. I need proof, evidence of his trustworthiness.

So it goes with our contacts and customers, especially those on our email list. We need to provide them with continual reassurance that they can trust us and that we know what we're talking about.

How do we accomplish that? There are a couple of ways:
1. Free Information
Look, we're all in this business to make money. Everybody knows that. Nobody expects to continually get something with no expectation of something in return. But sending free, valuable information in advance of asking for somebody's money improves the odds that they will buy from you.

That's because that information helps establish you as an authority. You know your stuff, and they should trust you. Hopefully you're providing evidence inside that information that what you're saying is true. A steady stream of quality, actionable information in advance of a sales promotion does wonders.

2. Personal Experience
When it does come time to ask your contacts and customers to open up their wallets, nothing works better than demonstrating your own personal success with a product.

A lot of affiliates make the mistake of only citing other people's success. I see a lot of affiliates email their lists talking about how the product owner had this or that success. Yeah, right. And we all know that all product owners are open and honest about that kind of thing, right? Umm... no.

Besides, even if the product owner is 100% trustworthy and telling the truth (and many of them do share real proven results), your contacts don't trust them, they trust you. So if you can demonstrate your own success with a product you're much more likely to land a sale.