photo credit: Brett L.
Why will I see higher conversion rates if I associate my blog posts with Google Plus?
Will you believe a review written by a big company’s marketing department or will you believe a review written by a trusted expert. In this episode of Future of Publishing, VigLink CEO Oliver Roup and I interview HubPages CEO Paul Edmonson on why the emergence of authorship, and thus credibility, is changing content creation:
The importance of gaining the trust of potential customers has been known by salesmen since time immemorial, but bloggers who run affiliate marketing campaigns have only recently been able to gain credibility among new readers:
Consumers trust friends and experts
When you’re buying a car, do you trust the salesman in the powder-blue suit, or do you trust your friend who’s also a car dealer? Now what if you don’t have a friend who’s also a car salesman. None of your friends have bought cars recently, so you can’t ask them either. Plus, they might not be automotive experts so their opinion, though honest, might not be accurate.
Experts, on the other hand, almost always know what they’re talking about with regards to their area of expertise. They’re even paid to give “expert testimonies” in trials, and their testimonies carry weight because of their perceived expertise. They frequently don’t have to cite sources to be believed by their audience; what they say is authoritative because they know what they’re talking about.
Since it’s so advantageous to be seen as an expert, lots of people claim to be experts, and are perceived as such even if they aren’t. It works out because they get a small audience, and then grow that audience. You become an expert because lots of other people listen to you.
How can associating your Google Plus account with your blog posts make you an expert?
Your existing readers already trust you, but people who’ve just found your blog from a search engine search might not know who you are. However, Google has started to promote Google Plus by letting people associate their blog posts with their Google Plus account. This helps build credibility among new readers in two ways:
In search results, posts by associated bloggers show that blogger’s Google Plus profile picture. This quite literally ads a “human face” to their posts, and we as humans trust people we can humanize more than we trust an anonymous person behind a user-name or nom de plume.
The number of people who have put the author in their Google Plus circles appears next to the search results as well. This makes it appear to potential readers that a lot of people read the author’s works, which makes the author authoritative.
How can I monetize my credibility?
If your readers trust you, affiliate campaigns can be a lot more lucrative than exclusively PPC campaigns and have really high conversion rates. If you review, say, tech products, and are in lots of people’s Google Plus circles, then you’ll be able to convert people who don’t otherwise know you or reader your blog more easily because they’ll see that lots of other people value your opinion.
Find out more by watching my interview with HubPages CEO Paul Edmonson, NetShelter CEO Pirouz Nilforoush, and Yulia Smirnova, the SEO manager of a major company.
This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company, Influence People, do blog relations and video marketing work for a variety of clients in the SoMa district of San Francisco. Be sure to check out the Future of Publishing Facebook page!
