7 Steps For Building A Trustworthy Blog That Gets Readers To Know, Like & Trust You And Pleases The Search Engine Gods

The key to making more money online in your business is to build trust with prospective clients and customers. When people feel as if they know you, as if you are a trusted friend, they are more likely to invest in you. Here are seven ways to improve your blog’s “trust factor” with potential customers and clients.

1. Teach Your Readers Something

The most important thing when building your blog is to write or feature content that teaches your readers something or solves a problem…and get it right! When you solve a problem for a reader, even if they don’t subscribe to your list right away or share the post on Facebook or Twitter right away, trust me when I say that they will never forget you…and they will come back to your blog.

2. Add Your Address & Phone Number

The latest research shows that search engines like Google like when sites include easy to find contact information for your business. It shows that you are a “real” business who isn’t trying to make it difficult for readers to find you. A great and search engine friendly place to do this is in the footer area of your blog so that the address and phone number appear on every page of your site.

3 . Include Your Email Address

In today’s post Panda and Penguin world, Google is looking more and more for “trust factors” when deciding where to rank websites and a visible, clickable email address is one of them. Marketers (including myself) would teach clients to not include a clickable email address on a blog because of all the spammers who will send you junk — but lately it seems that the benefits of being more transparent and accessible to readers outweighs the cons of email spam. Just be sure to implement a good spam blocker on your email client.

4. Privacy Policy

Readers may not be looking for this on your site but the search engines sure are. Everyone online who collects names or any other information for an email list, contest, or promotion should have a privacy policy clearly accessible on their site.

5. Whois Data

Have you noticed that when you purchase a domain name that the company will give you an option of registering your domain privately for an additional few bucks? This means that if someone goes looking for information on your site using your domain name, that they cannot see that you are the owner of the url or any contact details for you. Can you see how this could reek of dishonesty? You should never hide your contact information from the public. If you are building a real, legitimate business there is no need to hide that you are indeed the owner of your domain and a mailing address for your business. Check your whois information here.

6. Social Media Integration

It is going to be very difficult to increase a blog’s traffic, visibility, and trustability in today’s web environment without integrating some type of social media engagement. Give people the opportunity to engage with you about your content. To share your content with others. To comment on it and add to the value of your posts. Give your blog articles the chance to go viral. That can only really happen these days via social media. At the minium, you need to add social media sharing buttons to your blog. The easiest way to do this is to use a WordPress plugin or toolbar such as the one I use over at Wibiya.

Ninja tip: Don’t worry about engaging everyone on all of the social media platforms out there. If you try to work all of them, you may find that you aren’t making an impact on any of them. Pick one you like and really get visible there.

7. Add A Ratings System

If you own small business that sells a variety of products and services, then adding a ratings system is a great way to dramatically increase your site’s trust factor. This is the type of system that businesses such as Amazon, Zappos, etc. were built on. Not much traditional marketing is necessary when you implement this strategy correctly, because the customers do all the selling for you. Another way to integrate this is to have a presence on a review site such as Yelp.com and then refer to your ratings with a website badge and/or link there when you get a few good ones. In other words, talk about it when you get a good review!

This article serves as a next step in building a highly optimized WordPress blog from scratch in 15 minutes or less.