SELLING IS HARD WITHOUT FIRST BUILDING TRUST

Having something for sale online is the easy part. The hard part is making the sale.

I talked about this a bit on a recent Substack Live with an author who had their work on Gumroad and Amazon but had no sales.

I got talking about this in my conversation with Deanna Seymour, about sales pages. Well, long sales pages. You’ve seen them; two miles longs, 9000 words, and they don’t say anything.

Like Deanna says during this conversation, by the time she’s on a sales page, she already knows she wants the thing, to which I replied:

“I think it’s a trust thing. The trust that (is) built. Like, there are people that we both know, they could send a Google Doc with a PayPal button on it. Yes, I’m signing up because we built that trust. We trust them now. I don’t know that an 18-page sales page builds trust. I think the trust comes way before someone clicks on your sales page.”

We buy from people we trust, or we buy things that we trust will get us what we want. We trust that buying a coffee at our favorite shop will bring us a bit of calm, peace, productivity, whatever.

But buying something from a complete stranger on the internet? There is risk in that, a roll of the dice. A foundation of trust has to come first, before growth and reach and views. As Sari Azout of Sublime said:

“Attention is cheap and volatile. Trust is slow, expensive and durable, and I think if something reaches a lot of people but creates no relationship, that’s not distribution. That’s just noise.”

When I started hosting Zoom calls with my readers in 2023 I made sure to invite friends personally, one at a time, just in case no one else showed up. By doing so, I got to learn how to host a Zoom call, and make my mistakes in safety, with people who appreciated and loved me!

Seek out ways to build trust first. Build that foundation, become oh-so-very sure and confident in who you are and what you’re offering that people are drawn to what you’re doing. Seek out the one or two or five people who appreciate what you do and figure it out together.