Third Lesson From Psychology That Will Help You Grow Your Blog

                                     

\Writer’s Life

As an experienced Blogger, you have to make sure your climax in your blog post is positive and your ending is happy with the peak-end rule, the next thing you should do is what I am going to discuss now.

The Third Lesson from psychology will show you how to build a relationship with your Readers. Do you know that your Readers want a relationship? When you build a relationship with your readers it will build trust.

You’ve heard it said everywhere that content marketing exists to get people to know, like, and trust you. And maybe they cobbled together some meaning from that, but here’s how it actually works:

1. People get to know you from your first impression. You just learned how to rock at that by understanding how to influence your readers’ perception with the halo effect.
2. Your readers will grow to like you by leaving happy. You’ll rock at that by knowing how to apply the peak-end rule to your content.
3. Now it’s time to build trust with your readers. And trust comes from building on that happiness by providing reliable, cooperative, and helpful content.

According to The Psychological Foundations of Trust by Jeffry A. Simpson:

Trust “may be the single most important ingredient for the development and maintenance of happy, well-functioning relationships.”

And that’s exactly what you’re doing through content marketing: Content is your salesperson that builds a happy relationship with your clients (your readers). That relationship is what will keep your readers coming back for more.

Put simply:Your readers look to you to provide reliable, cooperative, and helpful content, and when you provide that to them, they’ll trust you.

How To Grow Your Blog By Understanding The Psychological Foundations Of Trust

You probably saw the recurring theme: Trust stems from reliable, cooperative, and helpful relationships.

Your content needs to build that type of relationship with your readers and the 3 ways are as follows:

1. Reliable content is consistent. If someone reads one post that’s really awesome, so should every single post you publish. And part of that consistency is that it’s published consistently—your readers will look forward to seeing new content from you based on a regular schedule and cadence.
2. Cooperation in a relationship is really about “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours—we’re in this together.” You need to give—and you need to give what your readers want and how they want it. That includes figuring out what topics they love, the types of content they want (blog posts, e-books, infographics, etc.), how they want to receive it (email, Web push, search engines, etc.).
3. Helpful content provides Youtility, as Jay Baer coined it. We call it actionable content. Your content should help your readers solve a problem right after they finish reading it. That includes giving them the ability to ask you for help through comments and social media—and getting a useful response.

There are so many useful nuggets of information from the psychological foundations of trust, but to me, these three really stand out for content marketers:

1: Give helpful content away selflessly.

You build trust by going against your own personal self-interest to rather support the best interests of someone else. So trust forms from a selfless act to help someone in need.

To use a psychology term, content marketing must past a strain test. That is, it’s probably not a good idea to ask your readers to convert into paying subscribers right off the bat.

Well, at least don’t be pushy about it—your readers know you’re marketing something, so it’s not an entirely selfless move to publish helpful content. But, if you want to keep readers coming back, you need to give selflessly—secrets, transparency, and helpful advice.

If you want to keep readers coming back, you need to give away content selflessly.

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Give away content for free, without asking for anything in return. To make sure their experience is great; help them jump to another piece of content within your first 100 words.

Give them additional content whenever you can—and do it selflessly.

Recommended Reading: Why You Should Give Free Content To Your Readers

2: Publish awesome content consistently—and give it time.

Trust forms naturally and unintentionally. It takes time to form, which is where reliability comes into play—consistency in building your relationships.

People need time to build trust. They need to know you’re worth building a relationship with. You can influence that by publishing awesome content consistently.

Again, people need time—continue publishing even if it seems like no one is reading. The reason for the boogeyman statistic that most blogs fail within the first 3 months is that you haven’t given your readers enough time to trust you.

Without a backlog of credible content and no audience to begin with, you need to have patience to build a reader base. It will come if you focus on the last point here:

3: Meet your readers half-way.

Trust depends on the action of both partners in a relationship. You can definitely influence it, but it takes both parties (you and your reader) to form a relationship built on trust.Just because you have a blog with great content doesn’t mean that you will grow your readership.

You need to figure out what topics your readers want you to cover, the types of content they prefer, and the delivery channels they enjoy using already. That’s how you form a cooperative relationship with your readers.

Just because you have a blog with great content doesn’t mean that you will grow your readership.Click To Tweet

Your content builds the relationship between you and your reader.

There’s a model that Jeffry A. Simpson uses in his Psychological Foundations of Trust that shows the stages of building trust in a relationship with two participants.

It’s pretty interesting to apply this model of trust in relationships to content marketing. There are 5 stages leading up to ultimate trust:

1. Commonalities start a relationship between you and your readers in the first place. So your content covers a topic your readers care about. This first impression is made through your content.
2. Now “relationship-enhancing transformations of motivation” play a role. This is where your content selflessly provides something extremely useful to your reader.
3. That selfless act of providing something your reader needs helps both of you come to make “mutually beneficial decisions“. At this point, your readers start to feel positive emotions about your content, and they develop future expectancies. So this is when they realize you provide great content and believe they can continue to get that on a regular basis as part of your relationship.
4. Those positive emotions and expectations enhance their perception of trust. Notice that this is the first time the t word is mentioned in the relationship building model!
5. When your readers know when the trust is well placed in your content, they feel security. That is the point at which you could ask for something more from the relationship—an email address, product conversion, or whatever else floats your boat.

The hard part is that no one experiences your content the same as another person. They’ll enter your site seeing different content which they all found uniquely.

It’s OK to have elements like asking for email addresses in all of your posts even though you can only expect readers to sign up much later than their first visit. And that’s OK.

To build trust, however, don’t be pushy about selling. Great content that essentially tells your readers how to do their job without your services or products should come back to help you make the sale in the end.

Great content teaches readers to work without you. But it will help them buy in the end.

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Why?

Because great content builds trust through the 5 stages of building relationships—and at some point, your audience will feel secure enough to buy from you.

Think about it. When was the last time you had a first-time visitor on your site convert into a paying customer?

As a Blogger, track the stats to know how many times a reader visits, then signs up for your emails. You need to know how many emails they receive before they sign up on your blog. And you need to know how many days hooked up before becoming a paying customer.

If you can do all the things you have read in this Third Lesson of this series of the blog post, you will suddenly witness a tremendous grow in your blog. I will talk to you next week.

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SOURCE: Nathan Ellering