Content Crooner

photo credit: Manel

One of the cornerstones to successful sales is credibility. You can’t build a successful business on top of a foundation that fails to establish your credentials. People not only use the Internet to research the specifics of your product or service, they use it to perform background checks. Without the opportunity to meet you face to face, your prospects require more credibility points online. But don’t worry, consistent online marketing methods make it easy to provide your prospects with all the information and material they need to gain enough confidence to become a lifetime client.

Provide Unique Information

The power of the Web not only makes it much easier to conduct research and find useful information, it also enables countless businesses and individuals to essentially regurgitate all that information. While content is surely king on the Web, passing on content and information that has been discussed more than Michael Jackson’s death is ultimately a waste of your and your prospects’ time.

For one thing, if you don’t differentiate your content enough you will likely be facing some immense competition for similar topics and keywords, which means that few, if any, will even see your offer. In addition, people want to learn new things that will help them in their daily lives, with their businesses and more. It can get very frustrating when looking for unique information and simply finding countless resources that all mimic each other’s content—your prospects will appreciate your effort to keep the knowledge pool fresh.

Besides being completely illegal and an act of plagiarism, copying the same exact (or slightly modified) content from other sources will register as duplicate content in the search engines and eventually significantly harm your search engine ranking and even get your business flagged or blacklisted for black hat SEO (the wicked-witch sister of white hat SEO).

However, it should be noted that there is a careful balance that can be struck when relaying certain points of interest or news in the media. While you don’t want to hop on the bandwagon and simply rewrite what others are saying about hot topics in the news, you do want to harness some of that excitement and popularity by adopting a unique twist on the same topic.

Provide Hard-to-find Information

Remember when you used to have to go the library to look up information? Neither do we. The Web’s lightning quick, seemingly endless information retrieval capabilities has spoiled us rotten, and we now expect to find anything and everything in just a few seconds. In fact, that’s why entire industries are now popping up that boast faster and more accurate search results derived from the leading search engines.

So much information available and so little of it addresses our specific needs and desires. Conduct a think tank with your business associates or do some brainstorming on your own to generate completely unique, useful topics that you can provide on the Internet. (Verify the degree of uniqueness of your ideas and topics by doing a simple search on the Web). You will establish immense credibility by preventing people from having to jump through so many hoops to find what they’re looking for. Plus, generating unique content and offers also means you’ll have much less competition online.

Display Sample Work

You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? Don’t just tell your prospects what you can do for them—show them. Provide links to current work, snapshots of projects and portfolio pages for a wide variety of past and current projects. Simply listing the names of businesses and individuals you’ve helped isn’t enough. While listing well-known brands and companies does lend some credibility to your business, it doesn’t show the prospect what you’re capable of. Make it as clear as possible exactly how you can help them achieve success.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!