Influence is one of those things that you hear about, and you think “Gee wouldn’t it be great if I could be a great influencer?”. Think of all the wonderful things that highly influential people do, and all of the benefits that come with it such as being rich, famous, and powerful. Think of what a difference it would make to your business if you were influential in your local market and community.

Pie-in-the-sky stuff right? Not according to Robert Cialdini, the author of the book called “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“. Here’s a quick sumary of what his ground breaking book teaches

1. Do good, do lots of favours. Be a good guy. Good people really do win in life. Doing good on a consistent basis will build reciprocity in the minds of those who have received from you, and reciprocity is what made the God Father so powerful and influencial in the God Father series of books and movies.
2. Build a sense of commitment. Once a commitment has been reached, even if the terms of the original agreement are changed in the last minute, the other party to the agreement will find it hard to back out.
3. Get social proof - people don’t mind buying or trying things that people they like have endorsed. This is why using a famous face on advertising works wonders.
4. Develop authority – we’ve been trained from birth to give exponentially more attention to the advice of experts such as doctors, lawyers, and other so-called respectable authorities. That’s why a lot of advertisements feature experts in white lab coats.
5. Be liked and likable – if you can develop a good rapport with your prospect, then you’ll be much more likely to strike a winning deal with them.
6. Create scarcity – when you think something is scarce, then you will be much more motivated to buy that product or service quickly.

Take a pen and paper and start writing down ideas of how you can implement one or two of these to influence customers in your business.

He didn’t just make this stuff up either. He’s a professor of psychology and actually created several undercover research projects to test and validate these little pearls of wisdom. To read more about Robert Cialdini – click here.

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3. 5 Benefits of Using a Blog for Small Business
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Tagged as: influence, local business, marketing, persuasion