Building trust critical to law blog success
Darren Rowse at ProBlogger had an excellent post this morning on the importance of building trust for blogging success.
..[I]f you’re looking to build influence, to build a brand that is respected and you want a site that is authoritative – you’re going to have a lot better chance if people actually trust you.
Yes with some clever copywriting and good positioning in search engines you can probably convince people to buy certain products – but in order to build lasting influence – trust is going to need to play a part.
On the flip side – many businesses today have seen the way that a lack of trust or even worse, broken trust can hurt a business, destroy reputations and ruin years of hard work.
The lawyers on the LexBlog Network who have achieved extraordinary success through blogging have done it by establishing trust with their readership. I’ve done the same.
How do you build trust? Here’s Darren’s four principals of building trust online, with a little added commentary from me.
- Trust usually takes time to build. Unless you’ve established trust with a large audience offline before blogging, you’re not going to turn your blog on and have trusting followers. Like all things worth having, you need to work at it.
- Trust is earned. You need to help folks week after week by offering worthwhile and authoritative information and commentary. Look for ways to improve the personal and professional lives of your readers.
- The recommendations of others are important. Positive words of others carry more weight than you promoting yourself. By building relationships with your readers and the writers of content online (bloggers and reporters), you’ll get people talking about you and your blog content in a positive way.
- Be yourself. Be something you’re not and you’ll get no where online. Blogging is all about transparency. If you’re not the leading authority on a subject, that’s okay. Blog things from your perspective. If you make a mistake, admit it. We’re all human. Seeing a lawyer willing to be themselves (a real person) is a breath of fresh to the public. It’ll serve you well.
Too many lawyers think successful blogging is all about getting content on the net so the lawyer can be seen on search engines. That’s so short sighted and fleeting.
Blog success is all about establishing yourself as a respected and reliable authority in your area of practice. Just like getting clients, that requires getting folks to trust you.