The Internet is turning out to be a commercial engine based
not on technology, but on trust. Ebay figured that out early,
when it started rating vendors using its services according to
how well they'd fulfilled the letter of their contracts. Most
people today prefer online vendors to have an offline store;
it makes them seem more permanent if they have invested
in creating a bricks-and-mortar business, even though it's
just as easy for a business like this to fail as one online.
But this shows you something important: it's all about
appearances online, and unlike appearances in the real
world, an Internet vendor must work hard to create the
proper one. More than with any other business form, you are
really creating your online brand identity. Because it's so
easy for people to praise or castigate you online, your
business practices online are more transparent than they
could possibly be offline.
And yet your customers probably don't even know who you
are – only your virtual identity.
The key is convincing your customers that they can trust
that virtual person you show them online. You do this by
demonstrating that you are an expert.
Creating A Guru
It takes time to build up a stock of trust in your customers,
and is just as much an investment as anything you put into
your company. The first thing you must do is show your
expertise. You do this by talking about your product online.
And the medium people talk in online is text.
Ideally, you need to create articles under your name – your
byline – that demonstrate your expertise in your field of
knowledge.
If you can't write, this might pose a problem. And that's not
uncommon. You may know your field inside and out, and
you may be able to talk about it for days, even sell it in
person as if you were Andrew Carnegie. But online, it
doesn't matter if you can't express yourself well in writing,
or at least seem as if you can.
The ideal solution: purchasing articles. PRA (Private-label
rights articles) are a good possibility; you purchase them in
bulk, ten or twenty or fifty articles on your area of expertise
or on a related one, and you own them completely. This
means you can modify them to support your business, you
can put your own name on them, and you can add or delete
any text you like. Another somewhat more expensive
possibility is to hire a writer to create articles to your
specifications, purchasing all rights in a similar manner and
publishing them online under your name.
How Long Does It Take?
Once you've started putting articles up online under your
name, if your customers like them and appreciate the
information they're getting they will start building up trust
right away. The key is to focus on a narrow niche market
and figure out what they really want to read about. You can
do this in part by soliciting feedback on your site – perhaps
putting a response form at the bottom of each article. This
helps you target your articles closer to what your customers
really want to read.
Just like anything else in business, it will take some time. If
you publish a fresh article every week (leaving the old ones
up as well), it could take six months before you start seeing
a real change in your bottom line. But that also depends on
where and how you publish your articles.
Where Do You Publish Your Articles?
This is where you can maximize your guru-building. Most
people will publish articles under their own names on their
own website. But there are dozens of other places you can
publish them. For instance, you can start an ezine and mail
it out to your customers on a regular basis – this can be an
amazingly powerful sales tool. You can compile groups of
articles and put them together into an ebook for some
serious added credibility.
Or you can go off your site entirely. Many experts and gurus
publish articles to article directories, sites where thousands
of articles on every imaginable topic are stored for free
download to any webmaster who needs good content. You
contribute your article; in return, the webmaster retains
your resource box with your name and your keywordoptimized
link back to your own website. This gets your
name out to prospective customers you would not otherwise
reach, and it also gives your website a boost in the search
engine ratings with that link.
You can also look at websites such as about.com,
howto.com, or specialty informational websites covering
your niche industry. Many of these websites are hungry for
information, and will be overjoyed to get your good content.
They will also include your resource box, just as in an article
directory, and you get both a very valuable link back to your
site and byline exposure to a ready audience in your field
through a site with which you are already familiar.
One Last Note
If you have a name that is somewhat common (you can
figure out whether yours is by Googling your own name in
quotes and seeing how many different people come up with
your name), it might be wise to establish your byline identity
with a middle name or even a nickname. The easier it is for
people to Google you and come up with you, the more brand
identity your name will have, even when divorced from your
business name.
