Lesson 11: The Key to Credibility
Lesson of the Week:
Establish Credibility
Trust is everything. It is everything in any relationship, not just in online ones.
And credibility is the key to the kingdom of trust. If people don't trust you, you might as well not say anything because they won't pay attention. We don't buy from brands we don't trust, we stop working for bosses we don't trust, and the list goes on.
How can you gain credibility in the Online Game? How can you get credibility on social platforms with algorithms, so people decide to subscribe to your newsletter and listen to you?
There are a few ways. But one powerful way is to show proof that you accomplished something. If you want to talk about writing, or give writing advice, show what you've written. If you want to talk about getting in shape, show your exercise routine and maybe a body picture or two to prove it. Show videos of you working out. That's hard proof. Louie talks about engineering career progression, and he shared his promotions and once even shared his pay stubs. Proof cuts through the noise.
Going back to last week's lesson on "Giving vs. Asking," if you are not credible, you're asking, not giving to people. Even if you follow the three ways of giving that we touched on, but you have no credibility; you're asking, not giving.
Why would this be the case? Because when no one knows you know something, you are asking them to go verify that you aren't full of crap. There is so much noise and so many people giving advice that have no business giving certain advice that readers have become allergic to it.
Think about it, if I'm not a software engineer, but I give you ten reasons to choose Ruby over Python, you're still going to need to do more research before making that decision.
But you can trust my advice without verifying if I've written a few books on programming languages or have a software engineer-focused newsletter. And I can prove that to you.
Next time we will go over other ways to gain credibility, such as by saying other credible nodes in the network say we are credible. Sort of like the way you would recommend a friend for a job.
While the newsletter launchpad is much more focused on starting a newsletter and sticking with it, the internet game becomes important because it is where we will go to get our readers. Most of the people that land on your newsletter you will already have established credibility with, or they wouldn't let you into their private space, their inbox.
And if you want to learn more about these concepts and growing on Social Media and want to go much deeper, Daniel Vassallo's course on how to build a Twitter audience is the gold standard, and at $25, we highly recommend it as a baseline.
Newsletter of the Week:
Josh Spector has a ton of credibility on newsletters.
He has 23.5k followers on Twitter
19k subscribers to his newsletter.
He has articles on entrepreneurship, newsletter growth, productivity, social media, and writing tips.
He has 324 issues of his newsletter, all available at a click.
He constantly tweets and engages about newsletters
Because of this massive amount of credibility that Josh has built up, he doesn’t need to announce his credentials every time he says something. His audience has already bought in.
Tip of the Week:
Don’t be afraid to skip a module! If it’s a difference between missing a module and missing a whole edition of your newsletter, you can always skip a module every so often and come back to it the next week.