Using Past Credibility to Sell New Products

As you may know, cred­i­bil­ity can make a big dif­fer­ence in the response you get from what you offer. The more cred­i­bil­ity you have the more peo­ple trust you and are more will­ing to down­load or buy your con­tent or product.

For exam­ple, every­one knows who Stephanie Myers is right? No? How about “Twi­light”? Of course!

Opin­ions aside, she has sold tons of books and earned tons of money from the movies. The Twi­light series is extremely pop­u­lar right now. You can’t go any­where with­out see­ing or hear­ing about it. It’s the “thing” right now.

She recently came out with a new book called “The Host” and on the cover it says “by the author of the Twi­light Series”. See what hap­pened there? She used a past accom­plish­ment and used it as credibility.

So if some­one sees this book in stores and they see that, it’s going to cre­ate cred­i­bil­ity and value in their mind. Even if they don’t know the author’s name, they know about Twi­light. And they know that Twi­light is sup­posed to be really good. They may even like it themselves.

Stephanie Myer used a past accom­plish­ment (the Twi­light series) as a launch­ing board for her new book (The Host). She used “Twi­light” as past cred­i­bil­ity. And I’m sure it helped with sales of her new book.

This is why cred­i­bil­ity helps. It cre­ates believ­abil­ity and trust. If you have already accom­plished some­thing and it was suc­cess­ful, then your new prod­uct can use that as a sort of “proof” that your stuff is good and peo­ple may be more will­ing to buy.

So what do you do if you don’t have any past accomplishments?

There are other ways to cre­ate cred­i­bil­ity but you can also use small accom­plish­ments and tes­ti­mo­ni­als to cre­ate it. Ask your­selves a few questions:

What are you known for?
What do peo­ple like about you?
What have you done that some­one has noticed?
Have you helped oth­ers in some form?
Is your work on some­one other site (i.e. a guest post)?

It can be the sim­plest things. For exam­ple, if you are known to be overly nice, I’m sure some­one would be happy to men­tion that in a tes­ti­mo­nial or a shout out of some sort. Or if you have done some work for some­one to help them out, they would prob­a­bly have some­thing to say too.

In other words you do have past cred­i­bil­ity, you might just have to do a lit­tle brain­storm­ing and check out your past accom­plish­ments. You should be able to find some­thing that will give you more cred­i­bil­ity and help you with your next accomplishment.

~Chris

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• Why Tes­ti­mo­ni­als and Social Proof Work
• The Power of Cre­at­ing Credibility
• Is Your Being Nice Scar­ing Peo­ple Off?

I’m glad to see you back at The OMV. I hope your enjoy­ing your time. Feel free to con­tact me for any­thing and if you haven’t already, don’t for­get to sub­scribe to The OMV Newslet­ter. Leave a com­ment too! I’d love to hear from you.