I hope you all have had an amazing week!

Last week I shared details about Linktree and its benefits and uses when wanting to promote blogs, websites, social media platforms all from one page. You are welcome to go back a read that if you haven’t had a chance. For those of you that have, I wonder if anyone has had the opportunity to try creating their own Linktree? Let me know in the comments!

This past week I’ve had a lot of learning opportunities, one of which I’m sharing with you in this post today and I hope it helps you!

Building Authority and Credibility

If I look back on my life through many of my jobs or work, I can recognize the times I was able to build authority and credibility with those around me. Whether it is with customers, clients, or colleagues, this tends to be an important step in gaining peoples’ trust.

Think about every company or service you interact with throughout your life. Do you not try to make sure they are as reputable and trustworthy as possible? I hope I can say I do. I don’t want to get a sub-standard product or service, especially with the cost of things today, and how many rip offs happening.

If you’re as interested in blogging as a tool to run your business as I am, do you think this relates to our blogs? Of course it does!

How Do We Build Authority and Credibility Through Blogging?

There was a day some time back on which the principal way to do this was to be an expert or present yourself as one. When I did this in the past it was more about teaching and instructing, kind of like a teacher/instructor would, but online. Writing about topics, services, and products. You only presented a more professional aspect of yourself and never showed any flaws or anything personal.

I encountered a blog post/podcast this week that was refreshing to hear. It was from ProBlogger and the author was Darren Rowse. The topic was How to Build Authority and Influence with Your Audience. Darren shared 13 things that good influencers do to build authority and credibility with their audience, and I want to share that with you!

What are These 13 Things!

Here are the 13 things I learned from the teaching that we should to build authority and credibility with our audience.

1. Share what you know – Its’s not uncommon in the past that people would share some of what they know, but it seems the more credible people these days are open and sharing freely what they know and experience.
2. Share what you don’t know – We are not all knowing in anything and some of us are quite new to this business of blogging. It’s okay to not know everything and even share what you don’t know. Ask questions and maybe your readers will know and share with you, which leads to the next one.
3. Learn in public (openly) – Doing experiments in public. Ex: If you’re going to work on (adding something to your blog) you can do it in a video, and they could see you troubleshoot and work though the issues. Asking lots of questions to your readers whose opinions and feedback you could learn and benefit from.
4. Doing case studies – Doing a post about how you would improve another’s blog. Not being critical but in the mindset of “Based on my preferences this is what I would change. Demonstrating what you know.
5. Show vulnerability and personality – Don’t be afraid of letting readers know the things you go through, not just good but also bad or hard. Show your personality and try to be yourself instead of trying to show yourself as perfect without error or flaw.
6. Share transformations and conversions – Allow your readers to know where you’ve come from and how you got there. Moving forward share your current breakthroughs and setbacks. The more readers know about you the more they trust you.
7. Tend to be positive, optimistic, and constructive in their outlook – Busting myths and critiquing is not bad if done selectively but shouldn’t be a consistent tone.
8. Build a platform of giving and generosity – Don’t cram promotions down people’s throat, before you promote give as much as you can. There’s a time for asking and selling, but more important is giving. Serve others first, don’t be self-serving.
9. Then show up – Be reliable and dependable. Do what you say you are going to do. If you mention you’re going to post 2 blogs per week or record 3 videos per week, then do it and you’ll earn your readers trust, become credible and be seen as an authority in time.
10. Keep your messaging clear and simple – make your audience feel smart and help build their knowledge. It’s not about making yourself look smart. The best communicators are known to write at a lower level (grade 8). A quote from Adam Grant. “Good communicators make themselves look smart. Great communicators make their audience feel smart.”
11. Use your influence for the benefit of others – What can you do that’s going to improve your readers and make the world a better place? What can you do to help make your readers’ dreams come true? This will show you truly care about your readers.
12. Don’t seek to be known, liked and trusted – Show that you know, like and trust your readers. (Bob Berg – People do business with those they know, like and trust.) Display that you know, like and trust them and they will return that.
13. It takes time – Like building a business takes time, building authority, credibility and trust in your readers and audience takes time. It’s not a quick fix. Once again, this is where having a get it fast mentality will get us in trouble. Take the necessary time to connect with your readers.

(You can find the post I listened to here.)

There we have it! Now what are we going to do with it?

Where do we go from here? We keep doing any of these things we are already doing and implement the ones we are not yet doing. We take the time needed, we learn more about our readers so we can help and connect with them.

What excites me is that my mentor has been teaching us these very principals and helping us to implement them over the last several months. It’s refreshing to know I’ve been taught the best ways and I hope this will help you as well!

Please share your thoughts and opinions with me about this post, ask any questions. Being rather new to blogging I may not have the answer, but I promise to search for an answer 😊

Please also choose a way to connect with me below 👇

Talk Soon,

Denny

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