October 7, 2017

How to read minds

The best thing to do when someone lands on your website is to let them know that they’re in the right place. That if they invest some time in exploring, that they’ll be glad they did. That they can trust you to deliver more value than you take.

The most powerful way that I have found to create that trust is to put words on the page that seem to have been pulled directly from their innermost thoughts.

If you do this well, you’ll get unsolicited emails from anonymous site visitors saying things like:

“It was like you were reading my mind!”
“Whoa, get out of my head! ;-)”
“Man, do you have our ticket!”
“I LOL’d so hard that I forwarded your site to my boss.”

But how do you do this? How do you read the minds of total strangers? How do you plaster your website with their private hopes, dreams, pains, and fears?

Simple.

You get to know them.

But who is “them”? This is the tricky part. This is the part that most folks find challenging. You can’t get to know EVERYONE. You have to pick someone.

You have to pick an ideal buyer for your products and services. A buyer who stands to benefit the most from your superpower. A buyer who will literally thank you for marketing to them.

Once you pick an ideal buyer, it’s significantly easier to get to know them. You can do some of all of the following:

talk to them in person
reach out to them via email
interact with them in online forums
follow their social media feeds
spider the conferences they attend
study reviews they write about books they read or apps they use
answer questions they ask on Stack Overflow, Quora, or Reddit
fix issues they post on public Github repos

Does this take some time? Sure.

But the alternative is “thinking real hard” about what people might want from you (i.e., slow guessing).

Guessing rarely works.

If you’ve ever launched a blog post or a podcast or a workshop or a course or a service or anything else, and all you heard back was crickets... you know what I’m talking about.

Thinking real hard about why someone might invest their time or money into the thing you want to create almost never works.

Find your ideal buyer, get to know them, and then reflect your understanding back to them in your marketing.

(And, oh by the way... understanding your ideal buyer also makes it easier for you to reliably create more desirable - and profitable - products and services in the future.)

Yours,

—J