This post is follow up to the post which Neil Patel recently posted on Tech Crunch.
In Neil Patel’s post, he talked how we can deepen relationship with our users. So I thought it would be great to show how transparency can affect building relationship with your users.

Ask yourself: How many blogs do you read on daily basis and do you know owner/ authors of those blogs? Many of you will be knowing complete history about blog’s author/owner, right?

Now ask yourself again: How many blogs you read and you don’t know anything about their owner/author? Very few, aren’t they?
So why is this? Why people only love to read blogs about those who they know about?

Humans have tendency of allotting value to each and every entity. The more the value they allot, more they want to know about them.  Likewise same thing is applicable for websites and blogs. If you are a leader in some niche and dominate the marketplace users will love to read, buy, and share your stuff. And if you are not a leader but just an average guy, transparency factors can affect you the most, as no one knows about you why would they care reading, buying and sharing your stuff? The more you be transparent with your users, more they like you. It triggers the trust of being complete genuine person in the users mind.

How to be transparent?

Before you be transparent, you need to set your goals and targets in your mind. Once you do that you can act accordingly. Even tough being transparent is good thing, it also can hurt/damage you. So be careful on what you share and how you share. Try to be yourself and genuine. So here are the ways:

1. Have ‘About Me’ page: Having ’About Me’ helps user for understanding you more clearly. It is perhaps the most important thing you need on your website/blog. Having detailed ‘About Me’ page is big plus. Whenever I land on a blog for reading specific resource, I immediately search for ‘About Me’ page to know more about the author. Once he wins me over with his ‘About Me’ page, I subscribe to his RSS Feeds and keep monitoring him. There are many people like me out there, so don’t try to hurt us. J
2. Picture of you: Having picture of you on your website/blog is another factor of being genuine, don’t worry if you look ugly it really doesn’t matters. What matters is you are a real person. Add your picture on your about me page and wherever you feel appropriate.
3. About you on every page: This technique might not work for every websites but it definitely works for blogs. Adding a little piece of information about you on every page works great for readers like me. Also don’t forget adding Read More link which redirects to your about me page.
4. Share as much as you can: Many Internet Marketing Gurus or Experts shares as many things as they can, even how they got famous and how they get traffic and sales. This is the reason why they have such a great site with enormous amount of people subscribed/following their site. (Be careful here. Share as much as you can but not everything)

Sharing knowledge is not only going to win users heart but it can convince potential buyer to convert into real buyer for being a genuine and knowledgeable person.