A lot gets made about building trust with your audience.

Trust is a big reason why people start podcasts, blogs, and YouTube channels to help market the work they do. These mediums allow an audience to get to know us while also building our authority in the community we seek to serve and engage with.

Trust is essential in convincing your audience to not only consume your content but taking the next step and buying your product or signing up to work with you.

Luckily, the formula for building trust is pretty straightforward.

Make promises and keep them.

These promises don’t need to be big, in fact, many of the promises you make and keep to your audience will be incredibly small.

“I publish a new podcast every Thursday” is a promise that when kept, builds trust.

So is a Q&A post in your Facebook group when you actually show up and answer the questions submitted to you personally.

And while you may be making many small promises to your audience, you should also be making some big ones.

Big promises are what attract people to you in the first place. Big promises pique curiosity and draw interest. Big promises are about the transformational journey you’re proposing to take your audience on.

“I’ll show you how to lose 50lbs in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you’re limiting your lifestyle” is a big promise.

So is, “This is how to use podcasting to become the go-to authority in your niche.” (That’s ours at Counterweight Creative).

Every great brand is built on a big promise, that is ultimately lived up to. The same goes for great products.

The issue many entrepreneurs and creators face is that they lack the belief that they can deliver on their promises and end up not making any at all.

With no promises made, there are none to keep, they fail to build trust with their audience and fall into a cycle where they have fewer and fewer opportunities to make and keep their promises as their audience leaves to engage with someone who is.

If you find yourself in this camp, you’re not alone.

The curse of true experts is that they know just how much there is that they don’t know about the work they do, which keeps them from making any assertions at all. But they also know a whole hell of a lot more than their audience.

Start Small

Start with consistency. Commit to a content schedule, whether it’s a podcast, Youtube video, blog post, Facebook Live, or something else entirely and put it out consistently on the day you say you will.

Make promises with the actual content of your content. Your podcast title should make a promise about what your audience will learn or take away, and the podcast should deliver on it.

Think about a topic related to your niche that you feel like an absolute expert in. If you need to zoom in to a small subset of a subset of a topic, do it. Then schedule a webinar or Facebook Live and teach about it.

As you make and keep more and more of your promises, not only will you build trust with your audience, but you’ll also build confidence in your ability to deliver on ever greater promises.

This is where marketing gets fun, where you can tackle bigger and bigger problems for your audience and get them more and more meaningful results.

These are the promises that people will pay you to keep, the promises that you can build a remarkable brand around that earns not just trust but loyalty and even adoration.

But before you get there, you need to start with the small things.

What promise can you make to your audience today?

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