Credibility Counts – How To Boost Credibility In Your Niche
Think about your last significant purchase. What was your criteria for making that purchase? Price? Quality? Reliability? When a customer or client decides to make a purchase, factors such as these are all driven by the level of TRUST they have for the business.
If you are a credible business owner or solo-professional – people are more likely to buy from you versus your competitors. So have you considered your credibility factor later? These are some of the things that you can do to bump up your credibility factor and start to present yourself as the expert you are…
1. Get Published
It is very easy to become “published” these days with the variety of self-publishing options out there — but the way that you can maximize your credibility factor as a published author is to make sure that you always write high quality content and to get as much exposure for your writing as you can.
2. Get Support
Outsourcing a lot of tasks in your business is a very smart decision because you can spend more of your time doing income generating activities, but there is also the other added credibility booster benefit of giving you a more professional appearance. The reality is that if you have an assistant or a team you are more credible than someone who is doing all the work themselves.
3. Use Professional Resources
Consider the experience of the processes in your business. What types of resources do you use? What is the experience of signing up for your newsletter? Is there a smooth flow from opting in and confirmation? Do subscribers get your email delivered regularly? A top notch autoresponder and/or newsletter service (like Aweber) will ensure that the majority if not all of your emails end up in your subscribers email boxes and not the spam folder.
What about purchasing products and services from you? Are you using a professional shopping cart and/or payment processing system or is your checkout process a little amateurish?
4. Increase Visibility
To increase credibility in your market, sometimes people just need to know that you exist. Start bumping up your visibility by getting as much exposure as you can. Free ways you can get started doing this is by local public speaking, guest spots on teleseminars, guest blogging, and local press (your local newspaper would love to do a story on your business!)
5. Recommendations
Amazon is a great example of how user recommendations, referrals, testimonials, etc. can totally drive a businesses sales. I base most of my buying decisions online based on recommendations, user reviews, and testimonials. Sometimes it is word of mouth and other times it’s right there for me to see on the site — but it is absolutely a factor in my buying decisions. So make sure that you are very proactive about collecting words of encouragement, testimonials, and praise from your clients and customers. It can literally be the difference between a sale vs. someone clicking away.
Conclusion
While I am sure you will be able to use one of these suggestions to ramp up your credibility factor, I always recommend for business owners to take a look at what credibility factors matter to you when you buy something or invest in someone — then model that in your own business. What drives you probably drives a lot of other people as well.
Feel free to add you credibility suggestions to the discussion here. We can all learn from each other…
Lisa Angelettie
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