A Lesson In My Mistakes
I’ve always maintained that if you get the offer right, then everything else can be not-so-perfect.
The problem with this is that sometimes you have all the skills and will in the world, but the offer is a mess. It’s either too simple, not effective enough or it’s too complicated.
When you’re a guy who writes thousands of words a day and never releases anything, surely, you realise that you’ve fallen into the latter camp.
Or you don’t.
Here’s the thing: it’s a very simple solve, having the complicated offer.
What Do Your Audience Need Immediately
Your offer is a solution to a problem. That problem might range from absolutely, immediately and life-changing in its necessity, through to simply being a momentary cure for boredom.
Your approach will change significantly based on the answer to the implied question above, but you have to keep in mind that the reason behind implying the question doesn’t. It’s always what do your audience need immmediately?
Everyone asks, “What do your audience need?” as their first marketing question. It’s straightforward. As Direct Response people, we need to add the time constraint on, because that helps us simplify the offer.
(And, if you want to re-complicate it, remember that you’re operating differently in space-time to your audience; when we say what do they need immediately? For us, it’s the minute they click on the button to buy/subscribe/read. For them, that could occur now or tomorrow or three years in the future. But we need to focus on it like it’s now.)
My Examples
Firstly, there’s the mythical Vault.
Pure case of overcomplication solved by answering the above question. My audience don’t need all the advanced stuff when they – one day, we hope – hit the subscribe button.
I planned it as a catch-all kind-of thing, and while that might be what the audience needs in the long term, it isn’t what they need now as in, what they need when I launch and they hit subscribe.
They want to be hit with immediately practical stuff that they can’t get anywhere else.
My mistake was in thinking that was a quantity thing; answer every question before they ask.
Instead, it’s a quality question; give them the plan that gets them putting one foot in front of the other. Then we add to it.
Secondly, let’s talk about the blog.
Even as I write this article, I’m four-hundred words in and I think, “I’m only doing this for the sake of the streak.”
That’s not something you readers need; it’s something I need. But really, I want to be able to produce content every day that you’re happy to click on because you see the title or link and think, “I really need to read that before it’s too late!”
I used to be able to do this, and I can do it again. This is what I want the reader to feel, and it’s my job to do that.
There’s little point in writing subpar things. It’s a waste of energy and the results reflect that. But…
The Good News
The good news is that this simplification not only helps you when you’re lost, but it also generates new ways forward.
For instance, thinking about the Vault; what does a High IQ writer need immediately upon clicking the subscribe button and being taken to the members page?
There are two obvious answers, in all likelihood:
- He (or she, we’re not making a boy’s only tree club here) wants to get better at writing
- He (or she, we’re not making a boy’s only tree club here) wants to apply their skill to the real world
Usually, the second option involves making money. But by figuring out the upstream of that, you not only fix the problem, “what are we doing here?” but you generate new ways to come at the solution.
So, with that, we move forward.