A short conversational transcript (Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss, April 19, 2009) discussing online credibility and how to gain traffic without prior high-profile success. They argue that the internet lets niche, passionate creators attract large audiences by producing great content, finding where interested readers gather, demonstrating small-scale results, admitting weaknesses to build trust, and focusing deeply on narrow topics.
Chapters
Let's take this question here. Credibility. This is a great one question about credibility. Tim, you had a successful dropshipping company, Ramit. You were successful with PBWiki. Do you see people gain a lot of traffic without first having previous success? Yeah. Online is the place to do it. Yeah. Yeah. There are plenty of blogs where basically people have disintermediated the gatekeepers of media and they've said, look, I have a unique angle on this, or maybe it's a unique niche that no one has tackled before. For example, I love cheap but really effective pens. I bet if I started a blog on this, I could get 20,000 readers a month within six months. How? Because I'm really passionate about it and I could find where those people hang out. The key is writing great stuff and then finding out where people who would want to read it hang out. And too often people say, if I build it, they will come. No, you got to go out. Tim, you met me when you came and we met in a coffee shop and you, I mean you drove up there to meet me and we became friends a few years ago. But that was a great example of if you build it, you got to tell people so that they care. If you do that though credibility, in my opinion is construed, it's not created. So if your readers believe you are credible, then you are credible to them based on results. So if Tim is saying like, I'll teach you how to use chopsticks and he helped 50 people use chopsticks, then that's credible. That's how I see it.
Yeah. And I think credible also if we look at credible, what does that mean? It means, I think in its most fundamental respect, that people trust you. So you have to look at how you establish trust. And I think that coming back to your earlier point, part of establishing trust is accepting and recognizing your weaknesses, expressing emotions that may not on the surface seem to work to your benefit. That is, if I'm having a frustrating time and I'm terrible at swimming and I write a post about that and this is how I overcame that, or if I deliver bad news quickly or if I make a mistake, and I recognize that these are all things that you can do without having been the CEO of a company or the co founder of a company, and if you have even a very small but focused inch wide, mile deep area of expertise, even if it's paper packaging, I mean, there are blogs, design blogs that are exceptionally successful that focus just on packaging or typesetting, then you establish credibility that way. And I think that you can be credible without being an expert, and you can be an expert without. Without necessarily being credible or having people trust you. The challenge is to. Or the task is to try to combine those two.
