People trust that if they leverage and invest in something, that will provide results at some point. For instance, people buy a corner space at a mall and expect that the location itself will pay off in having more customers to buy their products.

This also happens when a company gets shelf space at a supermarket. That will provide (they hope), more sales, brand presence and brand awareness.

In a Digital World, as Seth Godin so rightly put it, “… is slippery”. It’s straightforward to gain momentum and attention if we invest in advertising and have a great team converting traffic into sales. However, if you stop investing or the competition gets more budget, you’re in trouble. The only great “real estate” that you can build in Digital is Trust.

Trust as a Digital Currency

It’s Trust that will make people respect what you say (communicate somehow), pay attention to your brand and eventually search for you when needing to buy something in that category of products.

It will drive you a long way in getting the momentum your brand needs to be relevant to what your audience expects of you. However, building it takes a great deal of time and investment, but it only takes a moment to lose it.

So, it’s essential to have a continuous effort to build trust, consolidate all things with your business, and collect its value.

To do so, you sure need to invest in your digital real estate which you control and use all the other channels to feed your site with your targeted audience traffic.

Trust as a brand leverage

Instead of place all your eggs on your “neighbour warehouse” (for instance, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.). Use that as a channel and redirect this traffic into your own site. Work on everything you need to build it. Content, Tools, Referrals, Word-of-Mouth, etc. Do it all.

Spaces, Channels and Connections can be damaged or corrupted, but Trust you can have until you make a mistake. Build on Trust as a base since is the most important asset you can have in any medium.