Blogging to demonstrate expertise

People do business with those they know, like, trust, and value. A huge part of that is trust. People trust you in part when you establish yourself as an expert before they even meet you. So how can a blog help you establish that expertise?

Blog In Your Own Voice

To trust you, your readers need to feel that you’re a real person. If your blog is cold and impersonal, they won’t have that feeling.

That’s not to say that your blog has to be extremely informal. It needs to match your company culture. If your company culture is formal, your blog will need to be more formal. But if your company culture is informal, your blog should be informal as well.

Many bloggers inject tidbits about their personal life into their blog. This can help make you seem more “real” to your readers, if done in a way that’s consistent with your voice and your company culture.

Avoid Industry Jargon

When blogging, people frequently use terms that are specific to their industry that their readers may or may not be familiar with. If you use industry terms and assume your reader knows what you’re talking about, you run the risk of alienating them.

To really be viewed as an expert, you have to explain things to people in such a way that they can understand you. If one of your goals is to establish trust when blogging, you need to avoid industry jargon. If you just can’t avoid it, make sure you include a simple explanation of the term or phrase you’re using.

Of course, your audience may have already run into industry terms elsewhere. If that’s likely, it can be beneficial to write an article just to explain common industry terms they might have heard.

Blog on a Regular Basis

In life, one of the quickest ways to alienate people is to act inconsistently. So it should be no surprise that the same is true when blogging. A consistent blogging schedule is really the bare minimum.

If you’re like most people, you have trouble writing on a regular schedule. Fortunate, blogging consistently really just means publishing consistently.

Most modern blogging software will let you write the blog entries whenever you want, then schedule them to be published later. You still have to write on a regular basis, but not with the same regularity that your blog is published.