In the 20+ years I’ve been self-employed, I’ve found three strategies that reliably increase trust: speaking, writing, and referral-building. All three of these strategies work to increase your professional credibility, which is a strong trust builder. Let’s look at the writing strategy in more depth.
When you write about topics in your area of expertise, you can increase three trust-building elements at once: awareness, credibility, and repeat contact. If your target audience becomes aware of you, finds you credible, and hears from you consistently over time, they will begin to trust you.
The type of writing that has this powerful impact is writing you do regularly — blogging, publishing a newsletter, writing articles or guest blog posts that you inform your contacts about, or an ongoing column. It also must be quality writing. Publishing a piece with an enticing title, but unfulfilling content, will bring you clicks, but not clients. To build trust, you must become a reliable source.
If you’re ready to use your writing to get more clients, here are five steps you need to follow.
1. Determine your target audience.
Who do you want your writing to speak to? Get specific about the target audience you most want to attract. Let’s say your business serves small business owners. Will any small business owner do, or would you most like to attract start-ups? If so, that’s who you need to be writing for. Don’t try to hedge your bets by making your material more generic. That will reduce its usefulness, and therefore won’t serve as a trust builder.
2. Write material that makes your readers want to work with you.
This advice may sound obvious, but I often see it ignored. Which piece is more likely to attract a potential client for a career coach: “How Is Career Coaching Different from Career Counseling?” or “How to Find a Job When You Don’t Know What You Want.” My vote is for the latter, but I’ve seen an awful lot of coaches write about the former. You should write pieces that make readers see how you could help them, rather than those simply provide information.
3. Publish your writing in accessible, sharable ways.
Make your writing available in ways that allow the maximum number of people to access and share it. If you’re blogging, link to your blog from multiple places on your website, and give people a way to subscribe to your posts. With a newsletter, archive it online so readers can link to your pieces or find them later on. If you’re writing articles, guest blog posts, or a column, don’t publish in venues that will hide your work behind a paywall.
4. Publicize what you’ve written.
To get maximum value out of each piece you write, publicize it after it appears. Don’t rely on others to do this for you. Inform all your social media channels about each piece, and do so more than once. When your writing is evergreen, you can continue to publicize an item for months or even years. Notify your mailing list when a piece appears somewhere other than their inbox. You can also re-issue pieces in compilations such as special reports or ebooks.
5. Write, publish, and publicize consistently.
Remember that building trust requires awareness and repeat contact. When people don’t hear from you for a while, they forget about you and their trust can slip away. It’s a helpful practice to create a writing calendar for yourself, where you lay out in advance a schedule for publishing and publicizing. This will also allow you to plan your topics in advance, so you won’t be stuck for a subject when it comes time to write your next piece.
If you enjoy writing and you have valuable content to share, writing can become a cornerstone of marketing your business. Follow these five steps, and you’ll start to see your published words bring you paying clients.
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