Blogging 101: Gaining Blog Credibility

Today we’re talking about blog credibility! Blog credibility is important as it’s how people percieve your blog, and if it’s not good then you may get less people returning to your site.

What is Blog Credibility?

Blog credibility is how much your audience trusts and believes in the content that is being shared. High blog credibility has the full trust of the audience for both subjective and objective topics and post, but low blog credibility means the audience doesn’t really trust anything you have to say.

What Affects Blog Credibility?

So what affects blog credibility (and the most important question… how to improve your blog credibility?)? Well there’s so many diffeent factors and some are things you can work on, and others are going to be out of your control unfortunately. But it’s important to estimate your own credibility and put the work into it to improve your brand reputation as a whole.

Identity of A Blogger

First up, there’s been a lot of research into the identity of a blogger and the emphasis on source credibility. Especially before blogging was more mainstream a few years back, there was a study that showed audiences put more trust in journalist bloggers than non-journalist bloggers and this was due to a few different reasons.

Firstly, actively working within an industry makes people believe and assume increased credibility of the person, so a beauty blogger who writes beauty articles for magazines is automatically assumed to be a more credible source. This will be due to more experience, plus the company acts as a reference that their work is so good they were hired to do it. This also expands to industries outside of journalism, where a book blogger who works in publishing no matter what job is assumed to have higher credibility.

Journalism bloggers are also more likely to have been trained to write in a more objective way. Subjective topics and posts are great, and I love reading them but subjectivity often reduces credibility of information. This can be balanced out if the blogger has high credibility in general as people will trust in subjective opinions however – for example, book reviews are subjective personal thoughts on a book, and many people use reviews to inform which books they will read. Finding a book reviewer who’s credible, can make you trust their opinion if they say a book is good or bad.

And finally, another factor is that journalism focus on a filter then publish model. This model is because the author must submit, there’s edits and fact checks, and then it’s published once completed. Most bloggers don’t have additional people for editing and fact checks, and there’s often an assumption that they run on a publish then filter model – which is changing the post after it’s live if there’s something wrong in it. Whilst journalism bloggers may not have this either for their blogs, they’re more attuned to writing content which will have minimal edits and fact checking themselves because of training. You can kind of fight against this one in particular by editing your own blog posts and ensuring they’re as accurate as can be when first published.

Whilst you might not want to become a journalist or work in the industry your blog niche is connected to, this doesn’t mean you can’t have credibility. Blogger credibility (also called source credibility or author credibility) can also depend on your trustworthiness as a person, your expertise on a subject, fairness and balance in your views, your community contributions, and increased accuracy of past content with limited bias or incompleteness. This is why building a community is important, as it lets you show off yourself as a person and build trust directly with the audience.

How you choose to blog may also affect your individual credibility. There’s differences in percieved credibility for full time bloggers, part time bloggers and hobby bloggers. Whilst this isn’t always the case, there is an assumption that full-time bloggers will be spending more time on their content, more similarly to journalists with the filter then publish model. Then on the other side of the spectrum, hobby bloggers may not have the time or feel the need to prove credibility because they’re just having fun writing and creating. It’s fine to not worry about it, but if you are ensure that you’re putting time into creating quality content over quantity.

There’s also the amount of anonymity in the blogging community. To clarify what I mean by anonymity, I mean bloggers who hide every aspect about themselves except the one niche they blog in. I’m not talking someone who just has a pen name, or not sharing your location (as these are often for safety reasons) – but when you reduce your personality to nothing it can de-humanise your blog and brand as a whole. Bloggers who are completely anonymous, and don’t share any details at all can make it hard for the audience to trust them. People trust other people and if you’re not being yourself online, it’s not impossible, but it can be difficult to build community, trust and credibility.

To improve your presence in your blog to avoid this pitfall, you should ensure you’ve aced your brand creation to represent you, create a personal tone of voice, and build relationships with others in the community.

Information Credibility

On top of how you present yourself, you also need to take notice of the content you are producing. If you regularly create content which is false or inaccurate then it may make you lose credibility and possibly traffic. Whilst little mistakes do happen, ensuring you fact check anything you’ve wrote about before going live and making sure you’re not spreading false information especially if it’s harmful is important. If you repeatedly post things that are wrong, it can lower your credibility and damage your brand reputation and depending on the level of falsehood, it may damage it permanently.

Reach of Blog

Not surprisingly, credibility and the reach of your blog also correlate slightly. Research has stated that the larger your reach (AKA the more unique users you have) the more credibility you have. This is because as a reader, you’d assume that a site that lots of people read an enjoy is one that is more trustworthy because those other people find it credible (even if they don’t). This is kind of how virality works on social, if everyone is watching and agreeing with a false piece of information – others will trust that it’s right.

On the other hand, and this is based on my own assumptions from being in this space, being an influencer manager and following mainstream news around bloggers, once you have too mcuh reach I would say credibility can be negatively affected. Based on lots of different factors, some of the larger reach bloggers have been accused of selling out, lying, causing drama and so many other things which reduce their overall credibility. So as you build your reach, you should take measures to ensure you’re still being faithful to your values and that your audience knows they can trust you.

Referring Traffic

In addition to reach, you need to keep an eye out on who is referring people to your site and whether they are credible and have a good reputation. Unfortunately, if you’re associated with another blog in any way that has some negative attached to them, it may harm you as well. To help if this happens, I’d recommend always being open with your audience if you don’t agree with certain opinions and to be honest about things.

Then there is the statistic of DA which looks in more detail at backlinks specificallly and mainly your SEO. This is more of a credibility in the eyes of companies, as readers probably don’t check this, however it’s a good way to see if good blogs are referring you or not. If you’re mostly being hit by spam sites, why is that? Are you engaging enough with others in the community? etc.

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Hopefully this post was helpful to you (and you find me credible!), and you can see yourself how you can help improve your own credibility and avoid ruining credibility.