Building Credibility - Your Key To Online Business Success

No matter what great product you may have to offer or how good a sales letter you may have to pimp it, people want to know something about you, and what others think of you and have experienced from dealing with you. It's your reputation, your credibility that bring people to trust you.

Let me put it this way - if you want to hire someone for a job you have to fill what else would you expect to find in their application for the job beyond their resume? Recommendations? Accomplishments acknowledged by others? Something to demonstrate actual interaction and relationships with others that give evidence to your work and your reputation? These are the same things people look for in deciding who they will deal with on the internet.

If you're just starting out, how can you build credibility that is measurable and an asset to your business? Let me ask you a few questions.

Do you have a website?

Have you had any articles published online?

Have you participated in online forums?

Do you have a blog? Are you active in blog commenting?

If you have none of these, or perhaps one but not the others, or even a dabble of all, you need to kick it into high gear and step up your writing and online interaction with others. Without a good measure of online presence in these simple forms, people have little or nothing to go by to get to know who you are and what you're like. If you had two job applicants for that position you need to fill, wouldn't you choose the person with experience, references, and accomplishments over someone with little more than a job application to present? Of course you would.

Establish Your Website/Blog
Get your website or blog up and running. Fill it with useful content that will express your desire to help others learn what you know and in what you are presenting yourself to be an expert. Offer free reports and products that are suitable for your niche. Don't expect to make money doing this. You are aiming for credibility here.

Write Articles
Get busy writing articles - brief articles the tackle specific problems or questions people have about your niche. Use the resource box to present a very brief biography statement about you and a link to your site and invite publishers to reprint the full article on their site for free content as long as nothing is changed including links and your resource box information. Submit your articles to as many articles directories as possible. Post them on your blog or website too.

Submit a Press Release
If you are establishing a business write up a press release about it and submit it for publication on the internet and in email.

Post to Forums
Seek out large, highly active forums that are related to your niche. Post informatively and helpfully. Ask good questions that will initiate discussion. Respond to the replies. Use the forum's signature feature to promote your business and link to your site. For more on forum posting read Traffic Generation - Forum Marketing on my website.

Write up a brief report (5 pages or so is fine) giving information on some topic in your niche. Give the report away free, linking to it in your forum signatures, in emails you send, wherever you can.

Do an Audio Interview
Volunteer yourself as someone to be interviewed or interview someone else. It's best to do it as an audio. People like to hear your voice. It gives them a way to connect with you beyond print. Whether you are interviewing someone or being interviewed be sure to identify yourself, mention your website address and your email address. Upload it to your site and allow others to place it on their sites. Let it spread around the net as much as possible.

These simple steps should get you started in establishing your credibility but a nice side benefit is that all of these will also drive traffic to your website. Be sure to have an opt-in box for visitors to subscribe to your email list and you can capture some of that traffic for good!

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