How do you write content people can trust?

Writing and publishing content is all about credibility.

Familiarity and quality make you credible.

When you deliver value consistently, people begin to trust you.

Why do you publish content on your website or blog?

You are not just simply giving vent to your innermost feelings, right?

You want to share your knowledge.

You want to tell your prospective customers and clients that you know what you’re talking about.

You want to convey that you have their best interest in your heart.

You achieve this by writing and publishing content people can trust.

It is content that people don’t just trust but also relate to it and base their critical decisions on it.

If you want them to spend money on your website, they should be able to trust you.

They need to have the confidence that they’re not being hoodwinked into purchasing something that they don’t require.

Expertise?

Yes, expertise is important, especially if you are a consultant or a skill provider like yours truly (I provide my writing services and hence, people should be able to trust that I am the expert writer their business needs).

But expertise alone doesn’t help.

Although people use logic when researching for a product or service, when they actually purchase it, they use emotion.

About emotion, I will give you a small example.

Recently I lost a complete day’s work due to some bug in OneDrive.

It so happened that due to an ongoing civil unrest, the government shutdown Internet services.

I decided to use my Internet-less time working on my book.

That day I must have written more than 2000 words.

When there is an Internet connection my documents are being synced by OneDrive in real time – my document is being saved as I type, I think every character, if I’m not wrong.

That day, since there was no Internet connection, no syncing was happening.

When the Internet services resumed at night, OneDrive synced the folder, and it overwrote the new document with an older copy from the cloud.

To rub salt on the wound, there was no help coming forth from Microsoft.

No online chat support.

Stupid AI-driven help was no help.

No response on Twitter even when I said that my recent experience may make me to shift my account to Google Drive.

The solution that I got in my email is easily available everywhere on the Internet and it doesn’t solve my problem.

I totally lost trust in the service.

For all my important documents, I purchased 200 GB from Google Drive.

It was an emotional trauma and I lost trust in OneDrive.

So, both emotion and trust play a very big role when people purchase from you.

Trust builds over time.

Whether through content writing or something else, you cannot make people trust you in a day unless something drastic takes place (you save someone from dying through a totally selfless act).

People who understand the power of content marketing (through content writing or other forms of content) know that content is published to build trust.

Yes, many of them want to use content to get more search engine traffic but once you have gotten their traffic, it is a trust that makes people buy from you.

You can get thousands of people from Google, but unless a trust you, they’re not going to buy.

This is why writing and creating credible content can help you.

Listed below are 5 way creating credible content can make people trust you.

1. Focus more on the benefits and less on the features

Every product or service has features.

Without features nothing exists.

But your customers and clients are not interested in features, they are interested in what those features can do for them.

Suppose you make a tire that does not skid on ice.

As such the feature has no value to the tire buyer.

But the benefit is, a terrible accident can be avoided due to this feature.

Google Maps may have many features.

But people use Google Maps so that they can find the easiest route to their destination and they don’t get lost when they don’t know the route.

I may be a great content writer and a convincing copywriter, but can I improve your SEO?

Can I improve your conversion rate?

Can I help you grow your business with my content writing?

If I cannot help you grow your business, no matter how great a writer I am, no matter how many books I have published, no matter how many articles in no matter how many respected publications I have published, I am of no use to you.

It doesn’t matter much whether I can store 50 songs or 5000 songs in my music streaming account, what matters is, whether I can listen to my favorite songs as easily as possible or not, in case I have saved those 5000 songs.

This is something that you need to communicate to your users.

Hence, display your features prominently, but they shouldn’t be the main focus of your content marketing. People will trust you if they can understand the benefits of working with you, or buying your product or service.

2. Write content from the perspective of your readers

When someone is reading your content, he or she should say, “Aha! This is exactly what I’m thinking. This person knows what I’m going through.”

Are people able to relate to what you’re writing?

This is very important.

If they don’t relate, they think that you don’t really understand what they need and what problems they are going through.

For example, if I want to convince you that I know how to write SEO content, I should also be able to convince you that I understand what difficulties you are facing by not being able to improve your search engine rankings.

If I’m simply harping about what a great SEO content writer I am and how I’m going to catapult you to the first position for your every keyword, you’re not going to believe me.

On the other hand if it tell you that I understand how difficult it is to improve one’s search engine rankings but I also know that rankings can be improved with quality and targeted content and publishing it regularly, you will at least give me a patient hearing.

After that, you will go through my webpages and blog posts and see how I regularly talk about and what I know about SEO content writing and copywriting and how I have been helping my clients improve your search engine rankings.

This way, you will be able to trust me.

3. Write and publish content regularly

There are both practical and logical reasons for publishing content regularly.

People will trust you if they receive valuable content from you on an ongoing basis.

They can receive your content via email or via social media updates.

They can also find your content using search engines.

They can use Amazon Echo or Google Assistant to find your content.

The more content people find from you, the more they trust you.

Trust depends a lot on a sense of familiarity.

Familiarity with positive association.

If you become a part of their regular lives as a nuisance (posting junk content or spamming their inboxes), they will not do business with you and they will also tell other people not to do business with you.

Hence regularity, and positive association, keep these in mind.

This is logical reason.

The practical reason is, your competitors, at least those who know the power of content marketing, and who are serious about maintaining their search engine rankings, are constantly out publishing you.

If you publish one blog post every month, they publish two.

If you publish two, they publish four, if you publish four, they publish eight, and this goes on.

And they’re not just competing with you, they are also competing with themselves.

Hence, if you have 20 worthy competitors (supposing) even if they are not competing with you, they are competing with each other and consequently, constantly injecting new, fresh content into the web in general and search engines in particular.

The search engines like Google aren’t just crawling and indexing content from your niche.

They are also crawling and indexing content from related niches and ranking this content above your content.

When you want to improve your search engine rankings for your targeted keywords, you are competing with thousands of links.

If people cannot find your content through organic SEO improvement, it will be difficult for them to come to your website and begin to trust you.

A lot of my clients want to work with me simply because they can easily find me on Google and they would like me to replicate the same results for their own business.

4. Focus on quality and authority, and not on quantity

The debate between quality and quantity is constantly going on in terms of how much content you should publish.

The more content you can publish, the better it is, but when it comes to choosing, if you have limited resources and time and you have to choose between quality and quantity, you must go with quality.

It is your quality content that makes people trust you, not quantity.

One blog post that is useful is far better than 100 blog posts that don’t serve any purpose but simply improve your search engine rankings.

I regularly come across clients who want to improve their search engine rankings no matter what.

They are obsessed about getting more people to their websites, paying little attention to how many among those actually do business with them.

Traffic doesn’t get you business, quality content does.

Just because someone is on your website doesn’t mean he or she is going to buy from you.

To buy from you, he or she needs to trust you.

For them to trust you, you should be worthy of their trust.

You cannot be worthy of their trust by publishing lousy content.

5. Address the questions in your readers’ minds

We all have this tendency to sidestep inconvenient questions.

When people are evaluating your product or service, they will have many doubts, apprehensions and questions.

They may not have these doubts, apprehensions and questions if you offer your product or service for free because then, aside from the time they will be spending using your product or service, they won’t have much stake.

But the moment you ask them to spend some money, they would like to know everything under the sun, which is natural, because, under similar situation, you would also do the same thing.

You will help people trust you better if you address most of their fears and apprehensions through your content.

Instead of calling you or writing you an email, people try to find the answers to their questions on your website.

They may use your search box.

They may go through your blog posts.

They may go through your FAQs section.

They may also look up your social media and social networking profiles like LinkedIn and Facebook.

If they can find the answers they are looking for right on your website, they will feel reassured.

It will convey to them that you are not afraid of handling difficult questions.

For example, before hiring my SEO content writing services, you may like to know whether I will really be able to improve your rankings?

This is a difficult question to answer because one’s rankings do not depend on a single factor.

There is an array of factors that collectively influence your search engine rankings and high-quality content underpins your entire content marketing and SEO strategy.

On multiple blog posts and webpages, I have described that your content alone – no matter how great its quality is – doesn’t decide your SEO although it does have a big impact.

Your SEO depends on the age of your domain, the density of high-quality content, the content publishing frequency, the topics that you have so far covered, the interlinking of the various sections, the level of optimization of your source code, and the number of authoritative websites linking back to you, aside from many other known and unknown factors.

Hence, by the time a client who has gone through my website and blog contacts me, he or she knows that I will be providing high-quality content that will be fully search engine optimized and on the strength of this content, further SEO is to be built.

Most of the people already know that there are many factors that influence one’s search engine rankings but when I sincerely tell them, it helps them trust me.

The sole purpose of creating content for your website and blog is to increase your credibility in front of your present and prospective customers and clients.

It’s no use writing content to increase your search engine visibility while having inferior content on your website because eventually people make buying decisions when your content succeeds in convincing them, that they should trust you.