Transparency is different from personalization, but it’s another element of communication that will help you connect with your audience online. It’s a way of not hiding behind false measures to try to make money off of your audience.
Be Truthful with Your Reviews
Whenever you’re working as an affiliate marketer, or even a Joint Venture partner, and you’re conducting a review on your blog of a certain product or a particular membership program, be honest.
Many new Internet marketers worry more about hurting the feelings of the product creator, or engaging them in a war of words, than they worry about the needs of their own customers.
You’re not coming online to spare feelings – you’re here to help move the marketplace to a higher level. That means being a guiding light in your niche. You have to help your customers decipher between products that can help them and those that will be a complete waste of their money.
If you go into online marketing with the intent to make a quick buck, then you could be willing to set aside your ethics and fudge the truth a little – “just until enough money comes in to take the pressure off.”
Not only are there now laws in place to help protect consumers that you need to adhere to, but you’ll never build a loyal, repeat-buyer list of customers if you’re constantly stretching the truth and ultimately scamming your customers.
Foster Your Ability to Discuss Successes and Failures
Many newcomers to online marketing feel timid about trying to become a leader in a niche because they’re so worried about not having yet achieved the pinnacle of success in their topic.
It’s okay to be a work in progress.
People love to learn from someone who is just ahead of them because it makes their journey seem more doable. This is true regardless of what niche you’re in. You can share your progress, your setbacks and your successes and help others reach their goals, too.
Look at some of these examples where you could share success and failures in a transparent manner:
You can share the struggles you’ve had both emotionally and physically. Then you can talk about small wins that you have along the way – like listening to your hunger cues or losing your first 5 pounds.
You can imagine that someone with 300 pounds to lose might find those first steps difficult, and if they had the choice between learning from you and someone who lost 50 pounds 15 years ago in 3 weeks – they’d choose you because they want something doable and real.
Reading about how you “fell off the wagon” and gained a few pounds back, but then overcame that setback is inspiring, not shameful.
You may not yet have a totally clear face. But maybe you have some before and after shots where your face was riddled with acne and now it’s cleared up quite a bit.
The physical and emotional toil it takes on you is worth being transparent about. If your face breaks out again, don’t hide from the situation – blog about it! Let the audience know that sometimes this happens, and here’s how you deal with it. This makes your audience feel comfortable with you.
People are attracted to success – there’s no denying that. But they’re also attracted to watching the entire process unfold where someone grows from no income online to a six figure salary.
You want to be open about the profit and loss you go through in your journey. When something turned out to be a waste of money, say so. You’ll be helping others avoid the same mistakes.
And when you start seeing results and things are working out with bigger profits, your audience will cheer along with you – because they’ve been watching to see what you do to keep climbing the ladder of success.
In every niche, making sure that you show the ups and downs in important to providing comfort to your audience. They need to know they’re not alone when they fail. They shouldn’t be taught that there are no potholes along the way.
That’s when they start feeling like failures, when they can’t be perfect right off the bat and they see everyone else claiming that it’s effortless. As a leader, you don’t want to put them through that.
Be Open About All Things in the Niche
This is hard because in every niche there are things people don’t want to talk about. Maybe it’s some seedy tactics that other make money online marketers are engaging in.
Part of you doesn’t want to discuss it because you fear the backlash against those powerful marketers who are using the strategy. Part of you just wants to focus on all that’s good in the niche and not bring any negativity into your blog.
But you have to be willing to shine a light on things that aren’t right. To be a voice for the audience where there is none.
If you’re always “rainbows and unicorns,” then your readers aren’t going to build much trust in you anyway – because deep down, they’ll know it’s a lie.
Being transparent means you share:
What strategies you’re using as solutions
How they’re working well
How they’re not living up to what they claimed or what you’d hoped
What setbacks you’ve had that thwarted your progress
Your emotions – how did all of this make you feel?
The last bullet point – emotions – is a big one in terms of transparency. You don’t just share things like, “I couldn’t get the plugin to work.”
You want to share how you felt about that. Like this: “I couldn’t get the plugin to work, so I came very close to deleting it and finding another one. I was so frustrated that I didn’t hear back from the creator of the plugin, and then I finally found out what I was doing wrong!”
This scene that you set lets them realize that you’re the type of person who sits down, even in mid-frustration, and works through your problems until they’re solved.
