7 creative SOCIAL PROOF ideas to build trust on your blog.

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What’s up bloggers! No interview today, just coming at you with some solid social proof ideas to add trust and legitimacy to your blog. Enjoy.

So, I searched a WHILE to find the perfect definition for “social proof,” and pretty much hated the ones I found. Here’s the best I could come up with:

The Social Proof Theory, popularized by Robert Cialdini, maintains that a person who does not know what the proper behavior for a certain situation is, will look to other people to imitate what they are doing and to provide guidance for his actions.

Basically, that means this: When website visitors land on your blog, social proof serves to add legitimacy and trust to your brand, and to you.

In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you a few really cool stories and ideas that will help you implement social proof on your own website.

Let’s dive in!

Also, be sure to leave a comment on this post below. I’ll choose one commenter and send them a free DYEB t-shirt! They are super comfy 🙂

Sweet social proof ideas for bloggers!
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Listen to my episode on social proof for bloggers

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Show notes and referenced links

  • Robert Cialdini’s book Influence
  • Yeah that’s really about it for today.

Wait, why do bloggers care about social proof?

If you want to sell anything on your blog (could be products, or selling an idea), you’re going to need a ton of trust and respect from readers.

If you ever want to have a huge following, you’re going to need to quickly convince new website visitors to buy-in to your brand, and your message.

In general, social proof builds trust so you can…

  1. Increase retention,
  2. engagement…
  3. generally have an impact on people!

So you want a massage?

Who would you rather have a massage from?

  • A grad student in massage therapy, and you’re their 1st client
  • A 10-year masseuse w/ a full-time massage business w/ 500 5-star Google Reviews

Given that information beforehand, you’d likely choose the candidate with the most experience, and those 5-star reviews will carry a lot of weight in determining who the better masseuse is.

2 quick examples:

1 – The intro to this podcast above.

When I can feature several of my podcast guests, this helps adds an aura of “oh wow this podcast has had a LOT of awesome bloggers on the podcast,” or “oh wow this podcast has had JLD, Neil Patel, Michelle Schroeder, Nick Loper, etc, etc…it must be pretty good.”

At least that’s what I’m aiming for.

2 – Amazon reviews/ratings

What are some of the first things we look at when we view products on Amazon?

  1. How MANY ratings does it have?
  2. What’s the rating?

We’re looking for social proof.

When we see tons of other people that bought in and supported a product, Leaving awesome reviews, we’re more likely to judge that product as being favorable and a higher quality.

3 – My old personal finance blog

I manufactured a nice collage of several readers holding “I <3 The Smarter Dollar!” notecards lol. I didn’t specifically do this to build a social proof thingy…but it sure worked.

Plus, it was just super fun to put on my homepage!

I couldn’t find the collage, but I did find the individual pics people sent me. Here are two examples 🙂

Comment below with your thoughts from the episode! I’ll give away a t-shirt to one commentor 🙂

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