“I don’t know who to trust.” That is how one reader put it to me, and I have never forgotten it. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was true of almost everyone I talk to who is thinking about starting something online later in life.

Here is the part that stings a little. A lot of that mistrust is earned by the words we use, not the businesses behind them. Open ten sites in any niche and you will find the same marketing words doing the same empty work: proven, powerful, game-changing, passionate, authentic. None of them are lies exactly. They have just been said so many times they no longer mean anything.

If your readers are quietly skeptical of you, before you touch your offer or your price, look at your marketing words. That is usually where the trust leaks out first. Learning which ones are words that build trust and which are just noise is the cheapest fix you have.

Why Every Website Sounds the Same

Pick any five sites in your niche and read the About page on each one. You will likely find the exact same handful of marketing words repeated, in a slightly different order, on every single one.

That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when everyone reaches for the same safe language instead of their own specific detail.

A phrase like “customer focused” used to mean something. Now it is a placeholder, a way of saying “we are a business” without saying anything a reader can actually check.

Take a phrase like “award-winning service.” It sounds impressive until you ask which award, from whom, and when. A reader who has learned to distrust online claims will ask exactly that, even if only in the back of their mind. Replace it with the specific fact, the name of the award, the year, the number of entrants, and the sentence either survives the question or it does not. That single test tells you more about your own website than a week of tweaking your headline.

The Test That Tells You Where You Stand

Here is a simple way to find your own weak spots. Read your About page or your last few emails and circle every marketing word a competitor could paste onto their own site without anyone noticing the difference.

If a phrase would still be true with someone else’s name attached to it, it is not doing much for you. Specific claims cannot be borrowed that easily, which is exactly why they carry more weight. These are the words that build trust, and they are usually hiding in the details you have stopped noticing.

I have written a little more about spotting these blind spots in other posts I have shared recently, and it is a useful habit to build once, then repeat every few months.

What a Plain-Spoken Mentor Taught Me

Before I settled with the mentor I still work with today, I went looking for someone who talked like a business, not a stage act. What made me stop and pay attention was not a big promise. It was the opposite.

His emails were plain and business-like, with no big claims sitting on top of the message. That restraint is exactly the same discipline I am asking you to bring to your own marketing words, just applied before I ever spent a dollar.

I bought his book first, before committing to anything bigger, mostly because of what was inside it. Half a dozen case studies of regular people, from very different backgrounds, all quietly looking for the same thing I was.

Specific claims cannot be borrowed that easily, which is exactly why they carry more weight.

Later, when I had a support question, the answer came directly from the same person who had taught the material, not a separate desk giving a technically correct but disconnected reply. That alignment between the words and the person behind them is the same thing your reader is quietly checking for in your own writing, every time they land on your page. It is a small thing to notice, but skeptical readers notice small things, which is exactly the point of this whole exercise.

Trade the Cliché for the Detail

Once you see the pattern, fixing it is mostly a swap, not a rewrite. Take one worn marketing word at a time and ask what specific fact is standing behind it.

Instead of “fast support,” say exactly how fast. Instead of “a proven approach,” say what you tried, what happened, and what you would tell someone plainly went wrong along the way.

Take a real example. “Fast support” might become “a reply within one business day, most of the time the same afternoon.” “A proven approach” might become “the same three steps I use with my own list, in the same order, every time.” Neither sentence is more exciting to read. Both are far harder to fake, and that is exactly the quality your reader is quietly testing for. Vague language survives being copied. Specific language does not, which is precisely why it works as one of the words that build trust rather than against it.

This is where a lot of Second-Act founders undersell themselves. You already have specific detail sitting in your own history. A number, a date, a mistake you can name plainly. That is worth far more to a skeptical reader than another confident-sounding marketing word.

A Short Exercise Worth Doing Today

Pick one page on your site. Read it slowly, out loud if you can stand it. Every time you hit a word that would sound identical on a competitor’s page, stop and ask what true, specific detail could replace it.

Try it with your last three emails, not just your website. Emails often carry more borrowed language than the site does, because they get written faster and under more pressure. Read one from a month ago and see how many words in it, right now, could be dropped into someone else’s list with no editing. Whatever number you land on is a fair estimate of how much of that email was really written to your reader, and how much was written to sound like an email.

You are not trying to sound impressive. You are trying to sound like something only you could say, plainly.

Do this once a month, one page at a time, and you will notice something over a few months. The pages that used to feel a little flat start to sound like an actual person wrote them. That is the whole shift, and it costs nothing but attention.

Trust Is Built One Detail at a Time

Marketing words were never really the problem. Vague ones are. The fix is not louder language or a bolder claim. It is replacing the placeholder with the plain, specific thing that is only true of you.

Readers who feel wary of the online world are not looking for perfect copy. They are looking for a reason to believe the person on the other end of it. Give them one specific detail at a time, phrased as plainly as you would say it out loud to a neighbor, and the trust tends to follow on its own. That is the whole method: not louder marketing, just words that build trust, used consistently, page after page.

Think and do, then do it better next time.

John Zurales

You Could Be Just One Simple Letter Away From The End Of All Your Financial Worries...

... And If You Enter Your Mailing Address Below I Can Show You Exactly How To Write It!

Privacy Policy: We value your privacy. You can unsubscribe from receiving future emails with 1 click at any time.