October 8, 2022
Reading Minds For Fun And Profit
When someone new first lands on your website a smart thing to do is to let them know that they’re in the right place. That if they invest some time in exploring, they’ll be glad they did. That they can trust you to deliver a positive ROI on the time they spend reading.
The most effective way that I have found to create this sort of initial reaction is to prominently display 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!”
- “It feels like you have a camera in my office!”
- “Whoa, get out of my head! ;-)”
- “Man, do you have our ticket!”
- “I LOL’d so hard that I forwarded your site to my partner.”
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 you genuinely want to help.
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 or 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., guessing).
Guessing rarely works.
If you’ve ever launched a blog or a mailing list 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