How To Improve Your Blog’s Credibility? Build Trust Among Readers

A great revolution is going around the web with blogs and blogging. We have been discussing the secrets of successful blogging. We are continuing the discussion on how to improve your blog’s credibility in this post.

What are the secrets of successful blogging? What’s the key to success? It is establishing trust with your blog’s readers, thereby improve your blog’s credibility which in turn increases traffic from repeated visitors, the loyal readers. So, how do you build trust with your readers?

You must give people a reason to trust your writing. The easiest way to achieve that is to provide value. How do you provide value? Help your readers by providing information that they can put to use and use immediately. When every post you write provides your readers with value, the trust grows into rapport, a symbiosis where you elucidate you understand the reader and they, in turn, know you understand and care about them. It develops over time if you keep on writing posts without giving up at any time. For the first few months or even more than a year, you have barely 2-3 digit visitors and pageviews but never give up. Blogging is not getting rich quick business. It requires tons of patience and perseverance.

Apart from writing value content, concentrating on these aspects can grow the number of loyal readers:

• The first impression is the best impression. Build a blog that portrays a professional appearance. Choose a mind-boggling theme.
• Offer FeedBurner subscription. Put an RSS feed button or a subscription option that is well visible on every single page.
• Offer at least three, latest, posts in your RSS. No partial feeds if you want to increase your RSS count. Full-text RSS gets more loyal readers and thereby more traffic, experts say. (I had to make it excerpts, as the contents were scraped through RSS feeds by some enthusiasts!)
• The point of a FeedBurner Chiclet is to show your readers the blog’s growth and development over time. Furthermore, new readers can see the amount of already subscribed readers to get an idea of the age or popularity of the blog which often dictates how long they stay around. However, showing a FeedBurner chiclet with no subscribers or a few subscribers can be detrimental. The mob mentality or flock psychology comes into action here. It turns people away in many cases. Hence do not put a chiclet with your RSS reader count unless the count is in a few thousand.
• Put an email subscription option in a very much visible place. Assure that there is not going to be any spam mail except the post contents and that the email address will not be shared with anybody. As well, assure the potential subscribers that they can opt out of the subscription at any point in time if they are not satisfied with the contents by just clicking on the unsubscribe option that resides at the bottom of each mail. Be transparent.
• The load time of your pages is extremely important. It is estimated that if a page doesn’t load within five to eight seconds, you lose one-third of your visitors. If your blog’s loading speed is slower than that, you need a redesign or move to a faster server. Hence check your blog’s loading time at GTmetrix and compare the loading time of your blog with that of several other famous blogs to know where you stand. Too much of plugins and widgets can hinder loading time. Hence restrict plugins and widgets to the minimum required. Slow loading pages are one of my pet peeves while on a blog. Try avoiding all the pet peeves that you find on other sites.

• Good grammar and spelling matter. Proofread at least twice before posting. Errors give the impression of sloppiness and carelessness. Use language that is appropriate to the audience. It will build empathy.
• Prefer quality over quantity. No matter how good your material is, too much of it can cause feed-overwhelm and unsubscribes. If you write too often, pushing down the previous post and its visibility, you decrease the reach of each post, run the risk of increasing unsubscribes, and create more work for yourself. If I am overwhelmed, my preference is at the most two per week. Don’t feel compelled to keep up with the frequency.
• Don’t make outrageous and unbelievable claims, like “Read this blog and you’ll be a millionaire by the end of the week.” People are used to scams, get-rich-quick schemes, and rip-offs and it will do no good for a new blogger. Whereas John Chow runs a similar blog where he claims teaching “making money online” but brags where he dined, rambled, flirted, etc. I couldn’t find his traffic trending down even when Google put him in the doghouse, just because his loyal RSS readers are helping reach those numbers. Since people read all his humbugs and snobberies, he earns more than $30,000 pm and they’re following him like rats that followed Pied Piper.
• Paid to post is corrupting the web and will experience a user backlash. Be explicit when you are being paid to endorse a product or service. An advertorial is fine as long as it is transparent but I don’t read posts done for payment. I would rather vouch “Don’t offer paid blog reviews. It makes you look like a prostituting beggar who is unable to monetize his blog with something legitimate.”
• Make your “About” page personal and comprehensive. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Nothing creates more suspicion than a blog that tries to hide the identity of its publisher. Put a photo of yours on the “About” page. It plays an important part in making visitors feel comfortable that a real blogger is behind the site.
• Make it easy for the visitors to contact you with a “Contact page.”
• Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.
• If people provide constructive criticism or comments, don’t delete them, but respond with your point of view.
• Register meaningful comments on other blogs that do provide “signature line” for comments. The signature line provides a link to the commentator’s blog so that you attract a reader of that blog to your blog by your comments.
• Comment like an outsider on your blog itself. Comment using great bloggers’ names. To achieve a goal, some little evil deeds like this can be handy without hurting anybody.
• Split extra-long posts to avoid monotony for readers.

Going by that theory, we are ending this post on successful blogging here to continue in the next post about taming search engine spiders to obey our directives.