Here’s a great example of leveraging a blog site for credibility. This helps generate some traffic to the site (note the link to Basement Systems), but really, will pay dividends for converting existing traffic into leads, as well as leads into sales.

Check this out:
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/08/entrepreneur-grew-sales-using-5-success-principles.html#comment-665972

Basement Systems, Inc. has a dynamic owner who has built education, integrity, and caring into his company’s culture… but no one knows this except his employees. So, as marketers, we have to get this message out… and we are lucky, as it’s a great one!

Of course we can write about all the great stories and unique selling propositions (USPs) on our Web site, but as everyone does this — whether it’s true or not — it has little value. Getting this from a third party, however, delivers a ton of value.

Building Credibility to Improve Lead Conversion

So we solicited Small Business Trends, a great site with lots of traffic and Google trust (PR6), to interview Larry Janesky, the owner of Basement Systems, Inc. They did the interview and it went great. The writer, Anita Campbell, did a fantastic job, and on the first evening the article already had 9 comments.

I added the 10th comment, shown below.

Comment on the Blog to Build Credibility Even More

This gives Small Business Trends’ pretty loyal readership even more reason to promote and talk about Larry Janesky and Basement Systems. To get our next article or interview, we will point the next writer / news outlet to this article so they can see the value of a new story about us.

What We Have So Far

• We have an article on a trusted Web site.
• We have a link back to our Web site.
• In the article the writer linked to a comment by business guru Tom Peters.
• We have a comment linking to a blog post by author and marketing consultant Perry Marshall for more credibility to a facet of the story (the book in this case).

That’s pretty good stuff, but something’s missing. What about the people who don’t visit Small Business Trends, they won’t know about our company and all of our work seems to be wasted on a relatively small population.

So we blog about it on a couple of our own Web sites, (and not only Basement Systems, but Larry Janesky also owns Total Basement Finishing, Inc., and Foundation Supportworks, Inc.) and link this back to the post on Small Business Trends. Now we have an article that will help build credibility and improve leads and sales. We’ve helped build link popularity of the third-party articles that exist about us, and this is a never-ending loop that we follow.

Blog on your own site to let your visitors know how great you are seen from other people's points of view.

The only difficult part is the leg work to get a writer or news outlet to publish our story. And once these things start coming, they get easier to get.

Look for your great internal messages and use these as your USPs. Solicit third-party outlets, and interlink them to leverage each article to its fullest benefit. Showing the outlets that you will be marketing their site and can help them drive traffic and build popularity for their site will help you get published as well.