Consistency – A 7th Characteristic of Trust Building (Everyone can do this)

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Do your readers trust you? How would you know one way or another? What does trust mean, anyway?

These are excellent questions.

Fortunately, building trust is not difficult, to do or to learn.

Darren Rowse wrote an excellent article explaining 6 factors of trust building. If you haven’t read it, you should jump over there and check it out. We’ll be here when you get back.

You’re back. Excellent.

Let’s recap Darren’s list of six factors:

What I’m on about is helping bloggers to not only be profitable and have traffic but to build blogs that have profile, influence, authority, credibility, respect and a brand that opens up opportunities beyond quick profit.

I’d like to suggest one more characteristic of trust-building, which anyone can practice right away.

An additional trust factor: consistency

A seventh factor for building trust is consistency.

Your readers should have some notion of what to expect. For example, consider Walter Yu and Aaron Pogue, very different in style and substance, yet both consistent:

• Walter Yu posts articles on topics of general civil engineering interest about twice a month. Each article is 300-500 words, nearly always with an informative photograph of the article’s topic. Walter’s article about Three Gorges Dam has a picture of Three Gorges Dam. Walter kicked off in October, and earned a page rank 3 by the start of 2010.
• Aaron Pogue writes about writing; absolutely hammers on it. He posts fresh content about 3 times per week. Each of Aaron’s articles runs between 700 to 1500 words, and covers an essential aspect of writing. You know what you’re in for. His blog, Unstressed Syllables, started in mid-December 2009. Aaron isn’t yet ranked by Google, but I suspect he’ll start with page rank 2 in an intensely competitive market.

However, such consistency risks becoming stale, for both the writer and the reader.

Build interest by broadening scope

Consistency doesn’t – necessarily – mean posting on a single, narrow topic.

It can mean finding your voice and consistently writing in that voice, over a range of topics.

Even if you’re apparently inconsistent, you can be consistently inconsistent. Take Extreme John for example.* Is he going to post on limousines, on football, fighting or tanning and smoothies? Will zebra stripes by involved? Hard to say. At first glance, John is all over the map. After you read a few articles, you see that he’s still Extreme John, no matter what he’s writing about.

Received opinion in Blogistan would have John writing only about limousines, or only about smoothies. Never mind the zebra stripes, the UFC and the football. Or even SEO!

Extreme John demonstrates the power of having a consistently strong and consistently clear voice.

Consistency doesn’t mean boring

When readers always know what to expect, you’ll have to work hard to keep them intrigued.

Think of consistency as a characteristic of your strategy, not your tactics.

Keep the scope of your blog well-defined, but experiment freely within individual blog posts. Strive to surprise and delight your readers in the small. Sure, you’re going to fall flat sometimes, but sometimes you’re going to knock it out of the park.

And you cannot predict which articles are going to fly.

What about you… are consistent in topic, in voice, or in some other way?

Let’s build a list of consistent attributes anyone can develop. Leave your ideas in a comment, I’ll write everything up later, and link back to your comment.

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*I pick on John because he’s so easy to pick on. If you would like me to pick on you, show me something interesting.

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Tagged as: Aaron Pogue, Blogistan, Breaking rules, Building trust, Consistency, Counterexamples, Extreme John, Walter Yu