But then your interrogator offers you a cigarette, asks about your family, and takes you on a walk through the German countryside. He laughs at your jokes. He already seems to know everything about your squadron anyway. And somehow, by the time you’re back in your cell, you’ve told him things you never planned to share.

That was Hanns-Joachim Scharff. Famous for never threatening or torturing a single person to do it. Yet he was called the ”Master Interrogator.”

If your writing isn’t generating the response your hoped for, Scharff’s method is worth studying closely. Turns out the principles that made him the best in the world at getting people to open up translate surprisingly well to a blank page.

Let’s dig into how he did it.

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Who Was Hanns-Joachim Scharff?

Hanns-Joachim Scharff was the Luftwaffe’s most effective interrogator of Allied airmen during World War II.

Scharff found himself in an unusual position when the war began. His fluent English and his unique instinct for conversation was quickly recognized by his superiors as a weapon they could use agains the allied.

He was assigned to question captured American and British fighter pilots at an interrogation center close to Frankfurt. Over the course of the war, he interrogated hundreds of them and his success rate was extraordinary. Pilots who’d been trained to say nothing left his sessions having shared operational details, squadron information and tactical insights — often without realizing they’d done it. Furthermore, he achieved his results entirely without coercion.

After the war, the Americans were so impressed they invited him to brief U.S. military intelligence on his methods. He later emigrated to the United States, became a celebrated mosaic artist, and created the stunning mosaics you can still see today inside Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World.

A man who built a career on extracting information through kindness, and ended it decorating fairy tales. There’s a lesson in that story alone.

Why Did Scharff Reject Coercion When Everyone Else Used It?

Scharff understood something that most interrogators (and most marketers) never figure out: pressure makes people shut down.

The standard approach to interrogation in that era relied on intimidation. Isolation, threats, psychological stress, sometimes physical force. People talked, but what they said was unreliable. A person under extreme duress will say whatever they think will make it stop.

Scharff took the opposite view. He believed that a person who feels safe, respected, and understood will eventually share far more than a person who feels cornered. Because the threatened mind’s only job is to protect itself. But a comfortable mind gets curious. It wants to connect. It lowers its guard.

Sound familiar?

Think about the last cold email that made you immediately defensive. The post that felt like a promotion. The offer that screamed desperation in every sentence.

Your brain recognized the threat and raises its guards.

Now think about the content that made you stop scrolling. The email you read twice. The newsletter you forwarded to a friend. It probably didn’t feel like marketing at all. It felt like someone understood your situation better than you could articulated it yourself.

That’s the Scharff effect applied to words on a page. Let’s unpack exactly how he created it.

How Did Scharff Build Rapport So Quickly?

When the door opened and it was Scharff, prisoners relaxed. After weeks of cold cells and hostile faces, a conversation with him felt like talking to an old friend.

Scharff knew that before any information could be extracted, a relationship had to exist. And he was meticulous about building one: he greeted pilots by name. He knew their backgrounds, their home states, their family situations — details that made them feel seen rather than processed. He offered cigarettes, good food, and conversation walking in the woods outside the facility. He arranged chess games and social interactions with other prisoners.

None of this was accidental. Every gesture of warmth was deliberate. Not manipulative in a cynical sense, but strategic in the way that all good communication is strategic. He was creating an environment where the natural human instinct to connect could flourish.

Here’s what this looks like in your writing: the first job of any piece of content is to make the reader feel recognized. When someone lands on your landing page, opens your email, or finds your article through search, they’re asking one question before anything else: does this person understand my situation?

If your first paragraph is about you. You’ve already lost the room. But if your first paragraph makes them think “this person gets exactly where I am right now,” you’ve created the same opening Scharff created with a cigarette and a handshake.

What Was Scharff’s “Illusion of Complete Knowledge” Technique?

Scharff would present himself as already knowing everything, making prisoners feel that withholding information was pointless.

Before sitting down with any pilot, Scharff did extensive research. He studied squadron records, cross-referenced information from previous interviews, read Allied newspapers and military publications, built detailed profiles of units and personas. When he walked into the room, he genuinely knew more about the pilot’s squadron than the pilot himself.

He would begin conversations by casually mentioning accurate details, the pilot’s commanding officer’s name, a recent mission, a specific aircraft modification. The effect was immediate and the pilot’s resistance changed completely. If this man already knows all of this, what exactly am I protecting?

Now transpose that to your content.

When you write for your ideal reader and you demonstrate that you understand their world in granular detail. They stop evaluating whether to trust you and start engaging with what you’re saying.

This is why the best-performing newsletters, landing pages, and cold emails all have the same quality: they feel like the writer has been inside the reader’s head.

The practical application: do the research. Know your reader’s specific frustrations, their vocabulary, the exact objections they raise, the solutions they’ve already tried that failed. When that knowledge shows up in your writing, you don’t need to prove credibility. Your writing does it for you.

How Did Scharff Use Confirmation Instead of Direct Questions?

Rather than asking open questions, Scharff made statements and waited. A technique that bypassed natural resistance entirely because people can resist a question, but almost nobody can resist correcting someone who’s wrong.

Direct questions trigger a defense response. ”What can you tell me about your squadron’s operations?” immediately reminds a trained subject that they’re being interrogated. Instead ”I understand your group has been flying out of Leiston. I imagine the conditions there have been difficult lately” is a different kind of move. It’s a statement, not a question.

It invites a response without demanding one. And if Scharff had any detail wrong, the subject’s own desire to be heard correctly often overrode the instinct to withhold.

Think about how this applies to the way you write about your reader’s problems. Stating their situation with precision: ”You’ve probably tried posting consistently for a month and then stopped because nothing seemed to happen.” That statement lands because it seems that you know what you’re talking about.

You describe your reader’s experience so accurately that they want to nod along and add details. Their defenses lowered, and they’re engaged in a conversation that feels like it was made for them.

You’ve created the same dynamic Scharff created in that room.

What Was the “Ignoring New Information” Tactic?

When prisoners revealed something genuinely valuable, Scharff would react with indifference. So they’d keep talking, not realizing what they just disclosed.

This one is subtle. And it’s the technique that most reveals Scharff’s understanding of human psychology.

Most people assume that if they say something important, the reaction of their audience will signal it. Excitement, attention, follow-up questions. When those signals appear, a person knows they’ve crossed a line.

Scharff avoided those signals. When a pilot said something that was genuinely valuable intelligence, Scharff would receive it with calm disinterest, moving the conversation along as if nothing notable had been shared. The result was that pilots often kept talking past the point they should have stopped, believing that what they’d shared was either already known or unimportant.

The lesson here is that necessity is visible in writing. When every line is trying too hard to close, to convince or impress, the readers sense it. The writing that works best has a quality of indifference. ”here’s something genuinely useful, take it or leave it” always outperforms “please, please think this is valuable.”

Why Did Scharff’s Approach Work Psychologically?

Scharff’s success came from the understanding of how human beings actually function under social pressure. When people feel cornered, they perform resistance. When they feel seen and respected, they perform connection.

What Scharff engineered, conversation by conversation, was a social environment where the instinct to connect was stronger than the instinct to resist. He was creating conditions where their most natural human impulses was to talk.

Later analysis of his techniques by military psychologists confirmed that his approach was a systematic method with reproducible components:

• Pre-research.

• Rapport-building.

• The illusion of existing knowledge.

• Confirmation-based questioning.

• Emotional neutrality in the face of disclosure.

Anyone willing to do the work could deploy these elements.

The same is true for the written marketing equivalent. You don’t need to be a born copywriter. You don’t need a natural gift for words. What you need is a systematic approach to understanding your reader deeply, then reflecting that understanding back through your writing in ways that create trust rather than resistance.

There was something I had sensed for a while but couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I noticed that some people using the exact same tools were getting completely different results. Same AI. Similar prompts. Completely different output.

I couldn’t explain why.

Then one day I realized.

AI can write you five headlines in three seconds. But it has no idea which one will work. No sense of which subject line will make someone open the email. It’s good at generating but not at judging.

That judgment has a name: Intuition

Here’s the thing though, you can’t shortcut your way to intuition. No prompt gets you there. No plugin. No workaround.

But you CAN build the thing that leads to it.

That thing is taste. And once you understand how taste becomes intuition, the gap between people who get extraordinary results from AI and people who get mediocre ones becomes completely obvious.

Want to know how to get to the right side of that gap? Keep reading.

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What Exactly Is AI Missing?

Here’s what AI actually is: a probability machine.

It predicts the most probable next word based on everything it’s been trained on. Not the one that will make your specific reader stop. Not the one that fits your voice or your audience.

It generates. It doesn’t feel.

That’s fine. Generation is useful. The problem comes when you outsource your judgment along with it. When you take the first headline because it sounds good. Accept the first draft because looks polished. You end up letting the tool decide because deciding is hard.

Most people do this without realizing it.

They hide behind AI text because it feels safer than saying what they actually mean. Like the generated block gives them cover. It doesn’t.

Hit publish and your name is on every word. Whether you wrote it, approved it, or never read a line. The reader doesn’t know who drafted it. They know who signed it.

That’s why you have to have the last word on everything that goes out under your name. Complete ownership.

AI produces. You judge.

What Is Intuition?

Intuition is the cumulative weight of everything you’ve studied, every mistake you’ve made and every pattern you’ve seen. Compressed into a feeling that comes from somewhere deeper than your brain.

Think about how athletes train. They repeat the same movement thousands of times until it becomes second nature. They’re not thinking anymore, they’re just acting. Their body has internalized so much repetition that the right response just happens.

Intuition works the same way.

When you’re starting you’re guessing, hoping for the best. But after seeing hundreds of clients, thousands of cases you start seeing things others don’t. You feel like you’ve been there before, in slightly different versions, enough times that your brain has built a pattern library nobody else has access to.

Take a real estate agent. First apartment they walk into, they see what everyone sees: the kitchen, the finishes, the price. But after hundreds of properties? They walk in and immediately feel something is off. The windows won’t get sun in the afternoon. That corner is going to have humidity problems. The street noise will be unbearable by July.

Nobody told them that. Their gut did. Because they’ve seen that exact situation play out dozens of times before.

That’s a sixth sense. That’s compressed experience.

That’s intuition.

What Is Taste and How Does It Lead to Intuition?

Taste is your ability to know if something is good enough.

Not good enough for some abstract standard. Good enough for you. For the quality of work you want to be recognized for.

Nobody is born with it. And the taste you have today is not the taste you’ll have ten years from now, after you’ve seen enough.

But keep going.

You start to see patterns. What works and what doesn’t. What resonates and what falls flat. And slowly you build your own standard. A filter. Until one day you look at something and just know.

This is good enough. This isn’t.

That’s taste.

Right now, in a world drowning in AI-generated content, taste is becoming a rare skill. Everyone has access to the same tools. Not everyone can tell the difference between output that works and output that doesn’t.

That difference is everything.

But taste alone isn’t enough. You have to take it into the real world. Ship things. See what lands. Watch what people respond to and what they ignore. Feel the difference between a decision that worked and one that didn’t.

Do that enough times and your taste will become a feeling.

And that feeling? That’s intuition.

Taste is the path. Intuition is where it takes you.

So How Do You Actually Develop Good Taste?

Fill the tank with quality. Your brain can’t develop standards if it’s never been exposed to.

Think about how AI was trained. On massive input of quality examples. Your brain works the same way. You become what you consume. And if you’ve been consuming average, average is your standard.

You have to fill the tank.

Want to know what changed everything for me? I started asking why does this work. Not just reading but pulling everything apart. Asking why every sentence was there. Why this ad worked and not other? Why this color and not another?

The question: why does this work builds taste in every field.

Go deep in your field.

If you want to write great copy, read the greatest copywriters. Not just read — copy them out by hand. Word for word. There’s something that happens when your hand moves across the page writing someone else’s brilliant sentence. You feel the rhythm. You internalize the structure. You start to understand why it works, not just that it does.

Same goes for any field. Want to write better? Dissect bestsellers. What made people unable to put it down? Want to build a great brand? Study the ones that make you feel something. Don’t just admire them. Pull them apart.

Ask why. Always ask why. That question is what builds taste.

Go wide outside your field.

Here’s what most people miss. The copywriter who only studies copywriting has narrower taste than the one who also studies great film, jazz, design... Because pattern recognition transfers.

That cross-domain taste is rarer. And harder to replicate.

So study your field obsessively. Then get out of it completely. Read widely. Watch great films. Listen to music that moves you. Visit museums. You constantly have to be educating yourself.

Your brain will connect the dots. Do this long enough and you stop needing to ask why something is good. You just feel it.

That’s when taste starts becoming intuition.

How Do Taste and Intuition Make You Irreplaceable?

For years people have been saying AI will replace white collar entry level jobs.

Do you know why exactly?

It’s because entry level workers are still developing the one thing that makes a human squeeze all the juice out of AI.

Intuition.

Your job is no longer doing the work yourself. It’s orchestrating, evaluating, and refining. Execution has moved up one level.

Here’s how I use it in practice.

1. First I have a clear idea of what I want: a real sense of the outcome I’m after.

2. Then I get the model to generate different options based on that input.

3. Then I explore combinations, push in new directions, discard what doesn’t feel right.

That last part: ”discarding what doesn’t feel right” Is taste and intuition doing their job.

The judgment is the job now. The person with developed taste leads the tool. Everyone else gets led by it.

Bottom line

Here’s what I want you to remember from everything you’ve just read.

Execution has moved up one level. Your job now is not to do the work, it’s to know what good work looks like. To direct, evaluate, refine. To have the judgment that makes all the difference.

Study how great work looks like. Do that in your field, and outside it. Tear things apart, be critical, ask yourself why they work. Do that long enough and you’ll build an internal standard for quality: taste.

Then take it into the real world. Ship things. See what lands. Feel the difference between a decision that worked and one that didn’t.

Do that until your taste becomes intuition. That sense of knowing which output is right.

That’s your edge in this new paradigm.

AI can generate. But it will never feel.

That’s yours.

Motivation doesn’t disappear because the work gets harder, it disappears because you lose the thread of WHY you’re doing it.

And when you work for yourself—no boss setting the direction, no team pulling you forward— that thread is entirely your responsibility to hold. Nobody is going to hand it to you.

Most people don’t realize this when they start. And by the time they do, they’re already lost. The slow month where things go sideways. The client who drains you and you have to chase to get paid. The Sunday evening dread that creeps in for working in your own business.

”why is this happening?”

That’s what happens when you’ve been operating with the wrong perspective for too long. But don’t worry, there’s a way to structure your thinking so that doesn’t happen, and It starts with three workers on a medieval construction site.

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The Three Masons

Picture a construction site somewhere in medieval Europe.

Dust in the air. Striking sounds of hammers hitting the hot iron. Three workers, side by side, doing the same job: cutting and laying stone, hour after hour in the scorching sun.

A traveler passes by and asks a question. What are you doing?

The first one was prompt to answer. ”Laying bricks.” He’s honest. He knows his task, he does his task and then goes home.

The second straightens up, wipes his hands, looks at the rising walls around him. ”I’m building a cathedral.” You can hear the pride in his voice. He’s part of something bigger than a single stone. He can see where this is going.

The third sets down his tools. He looks at the traveler, then at the site, and then he says ”I’m bringing people closer to God.”

Same work, completely different reasons to keep going.

The Secret Isn’t Passion. It’s Timeframe.

The third mason isn’t more talented or loves cutting stone more than the next one. He also didn’t find a secret discipline hack that keeps him going when things get hard.

His secret is perspective. He sees the same work from three different distances.

• The bricks are today. The task in front of you, the deliverable, the proposal, the conversation you’ve been putting off. This is where the real work happens. It deserves your full attention.

• The cathedral is this year. The thing you’re actually building: the body of work, the reputation, the clients accumulating over time. When a project falls through, it hurts. But the cathedral is still standing.

• The vision is the decade. The reason any of this matters at all. The change you’re oriented toward. The person you’re becoming through the work, and the live you built because you showed up.

Here’s what that gives you: a bad week can’t shake a decade. A lost client can’t collapse a cathedral. The grind stays the same but it stops feeling hollow, because you know what the bricks are for.

The Question That Brings You Back

When motivation dips, most people reach for tactics. A new offer. A new system. Something to shake off the feeling.

Sometimes that helps. More often it’s a distraction. The real problem is that you’ve been living at brick level for too long and somewhere along the way you lost the real reason you started.

Unlike the third mason, not everyone has a vision. But everyone has a reason.

Ask yourself: what is all of this actually for?

Not the version you’d put on your website. The honest one. The selfish reason that gets you out of bed on the days when nothing is working and nobody is paying attention yet.

For me it’s two things. I burn out fast when I can’t see the value in what I’m doing, so I need work that feels worth it. And I want my days to be mine. To wake up and decide how I spend them without answering to anyone. That’s the real reason I built this.

That clarity removes every ounce of ambiguity about why you’re doing this. And when there’s no ambiguity you stop second-guessing yourself. Your conviction show up in your work, in your conversations and the way you talk about what you do.

You can’t fake that. People feel the difference between someone who knows why they’re doing something and someone who’s still working it out.

Find that reason. Write it down. Come back to it when a hard week tries to convince you to quit.

The cathedral gets built one brick at a time. But the mason who knows exactly why he’s building it never loses the thread.

Next Sunday, June 14th, the UFC octagon goes up on the South Lawn of the White House.

I couldn’t let this moment pass without writing a special issue. Because the fact that the UFC is staging a historic event at the White House — on the 250th birthday of the American independence — tells you everything about what this company figured out.

Today the UFC is valued at $23 Billion, but what people don’t know is that only 25 years earlier it was a dying promotion that was bought for only $2 million. A x13,000 meteoric rise puts the UFC as one of the most successful turnarounds in sports history.

in 2001 the UFC was agonizing. The promotion was banned in most states called ”human cockfighting” by many politicians. The company was bleeding money and was widely considered a niche curiosity with no mainstream future.

Dana White and the Fertitta brothers bought it anyway. And fifteen years later, they sold it for $4.2 billion.

You can’t build an asset this big without knowing exactly how business work nowadays. we are going to explore how Dana finally understood what they were selling and how can you use it in your business to have similar results!

Okey, you are right. Maybe not similar results but at least you will understand their secret sauce.

Why Was the UFC Struggling in the First Place?

The problem was that nobody cared about the fighters.

The sport was only appealing to the hardcore MMA fans. And they were a thin slice of the pie.

The rest of the population would tune in, see two strangers fight, and leave. There was no reason to be emotionally invested before the first punch was thrown. Without that investment, was difficult for people to stick around for too long. So pay-per-view numbers stayed flat. The audience never grew and the money never came.

What Did Dana White Understand That Nobody Else Did?

He wasn’t selling fights. He was selling stories about fighters.

Dana put his eye on the WWE and realized that professional wrestling isn’t popular because of athletic ability—plenty of other sports have more impressive athletes. It’s popular because of characters, rivalries, betrayals, redemption arcs. People watch wrestling because they’re emotionally invested in what a win or loss means for someone they care about.

Dana saw that the UFC had the same raw material—real people with real stories—and was wasting it. Instead of building emotional investment before the fight, they were just announcing fights and hoping people will come.

That realization changed everything they did next.

How Did a Reality Show Save the UFC?

The Ultimate Fighter launched in 2005 on Spike TV. The UFC was so cash-strapped they didn’t charge a licensing fee—they practically gave the show away to get it on air.

The format was simple: put fighters in a house together, film the drama, document the competition, and let the audience watch personalities emerge over weeks before anyone threw a punch in the finale.

By the time Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar stepped into the octagon for the season 1 finale, viewers already knew them. They’d watched these men train, struggle, compete, and reveal themselves over weeks of television. The fight wasn’t a random matchup between strangers anymore, it was the culmination of a story people had been living with.

The fight itself was extraordinary: three brutal, back-and-forth rounds that neither man would quit. Dana White called it ”the most important fight in UFC history.” because of what it meant for them and for an audience that was already emotionally invested to both fighters.

That fight went viral and the UFC found its business model.

What Business Model Did the UFC Actually Build?

Build an audience that is emotionally invested in the fighters themselves, then the events become a natural outlet for that investment. The drama, the trash talk, the rivalries, the gossip. All of it is content that deepens the relationship between fan and fighters. The fight is the payoff, not the product.

This is why Conor McGregor made the UFC a billion-dollar business almost by himself. His fighting was elite. But what drove those PPV numbers was the character: the trash talk, the suits, the swagger, the storylines with opponents. People bought the fight because they were already in the story.

The UFC doesn’t sell fights. It sells stories that culmen in a fight.

What Does This Mean for Your Business?

Your business is a story whether you like to admit it or not.

There’s a version of you that exists in your audience’s mind built from every piece of content you’ve written.

The articles, the emails, the notes—that’s your TUF season. That’s where people meet you before they ever consider buying from you. Where they decide if they trust you, relate to you, believe you understand their problem. Where they become emotionally invested in whether you succeed.

The offer comes later. First, you build the relationship.

Start by asking yourself one question: what does someone know about you after reading three months of your content? Do they know your perspective? Your story? What you believe and why? If the answer is ”not much,” you’re selling a fight nobody has any reason to care about.

Storytelling made the UFC go from $2 million to $23 billion—your business has the same opportunity.

Start with the next thing you write.

This is a continuation of my latest post that was talking about Aristotle formula for persuasion and it’s modern cousin AIDA. If you don’t know what this is, I recommend you reading that article before to know what we’re talking about here.

Knowing the formula doesn’t guarantee that will work, you have to understand what you’re doing and each case will be different. That’s why I recommend to study other copywriter’s work to develop your own intuition.

Let me show you what I mean with a real example. I found this Instagram funnel many years ago from some random online guru and I’ve been using it as an example ever since.

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Here’s the ad that I noted with the distinct parts of the AIDA formula.

The formula is technically there, and yet failed to convince anyone. Why?

• The attention step is a cliché so worn out it’s invisible. “Do you want to achieve your dream life?” has been repeated across so many ads, so many landing pages, so many Instagram bios that your brain processes it as noise. It doesn’t stop anyone. It doesn’t surprise anyone. The only job of your oppening is to grab attention. It needs to be be impossible to ignore. This isn’t it.

• The interest step fails because it stays vague. “Achieve your goals using our personal development strategies” could mean anything. And when something means anything, it means nothing. Compare that to something like: quit smoking for good after 3 hours of unpublished NLP audio recordings. Suddenly you can picture a specific person reading those tapes and makes you feel something.

• The desire step has the energy of a terms and conditions page. And here’s a little tip that will make this whole article worth your time: the word can. “You can access it.” “You can achieve your goals.” Can creates distance. It makes everything feel hypothetical, optional, uncertain. Eliminate the word Can. Write those statements as a commands instead. Access it for $799. It’s online. Start today. These commands read like thoughts, for our brains there is no difference and sometimes action will follow.

• The action step is actually the strongest part. There’s a bonus, there’s urgency, there’s a reason to move now rather than later. Buying tension is real, without it even interested readers procrastinate indefinitely. A deadline, a limited bonus, a closing window: they’re the final nudge a genuinely interested person needs to stop thinking and start acting.

As you’ve seen, knowing the formula doesn’t mean you’re going to know how to execute it well. Aristotle’s sequence and AIDA give you the architecture. But architecture without the right knowledge is just an empty frame. You still need to know your readers well enough to name their exact problem. You still need language precise enough to create real feeling. You still need to study the market to know what angles work and which ones don’t.

Master the basic things and the formula becomes genuinely powerful. But if you Ignore them you’ll apply every point and still convert no one.

The biggest brands in the world use it. The best copywriters on earth use it. But most of them don’t even know how to use it properly. There’s a big gap between understanding the structure and knowing what each step actually means.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through Aristotle’s 2,500-year-old persuasion sequence, its modern twin AIDA, and more importantly, what separates the version that converts from the version that gets ignored. You’ll leave with a framework you can use today on your landing page, your next cold email or your next newsletter to maximize it’s effect.

Ready? Let’s get into it.

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What Is Aristotle’s Persuasion Formula?

Aristotle’s formula works because it mirrors the exact sequence the human brain needs to trust someone and act.

He called it a four-part sequence for orators, but really it’s a map of how persuasion actually moves through a person. Stress-tested for 25 centuries and still works when you read an ad, a post, or any sales page that makes you reach for your wallet, without you even noticing what happened.

Let’s get with the formula but before, you must understand that following blindly won’t get you the results you expect. When I first started I treated these formulas like recipes. Follow the steps, get the result, but It doesn’t work like that, there is more to it. I’ll show you what I mean in a minute.

The Formula:

The Exordium. Pattern interrupt. Make someone stop whatever they’re doing and pay attention to you. Two things cut through better than anything else: a surprising statement, or stories. Humans are suckers for stories. Our brains are wired to absorb information better if it comes in form of a narrative. Facts get skimmed. Stories get remembered.

The Narratio. Name their problems The idea is, if you can articulate their situation better than they, you win. Name the specific frustration the already feeling. If you can do this their skepticism will drop and they will be interested in what you have to say.

The Confirmatio. Is where you offer your solution. Your product, your service, your method. This step only lands if the previous one worked. If your reader felt understood first, your solution will feel like help. If not, will feel like a pitch.

The Peroratio. The close. Be clear on the benefit of acting now. Make the benefit specific. Make the next step obvious and give them a reason to move now rather than later.

How Did Aristotle’s Formula Evolve Into Modern Advertising?

Aristotle’s four steps formula got a rebranded a couple centuries ago. Meet AIDA.

Sometime in the late 1800s, advertising pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis distilled the same persuasion sequence into four words that every aspiring copywriter knows: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Different names. Same human psychology underneath.

Attention is your exordium in disguise. The question you need to ask yourself every single time you write an opening line: would this make ME stop scrolling? Is it surprising enough? Specific enough? Does it break the pattern of everything else competing for attention? Most openings don’t. They start gently, warm up slowly, and lose the reader before the second sentence. Grab them or lose them—there’s no middle ground here. You got them or you don’t.

Interest is your narratio. Remember how Aristotle said to name the problem your reader is already having? That’s exactly what this step is. Tune in with the story they already have in their head. If you speak to that problem, Robert Collier says ”you are joining with the person. You get on the same train that they’re riding.”

Desire is your confirmatio repackaged. Aristotle offered the solution once trust was established—AIDA does the same thing, just makes the emotional stakes explicit. Your reader needs to feel the gap between where they are now and where they could be. Vividly. The solution is just the bridge. Your job is to make them desperately want to cross it. And just like Aristotle knew: this step only works if Interest did its job first. Skip the problem (the trust), and desire will never materialize, no matter how good your offer is.

Action is your peroratio. Just like Aristotle’s closing statement, most people treat it as an afterthought and It shows. Every piece of writing needs to end with somewhere to go. Buy this. Read this next. Reply with one word. Even if you’re writing a newsletter with nothing to sell, leave them with a thought that makes them act differently tomorrow morning. Aristotle closed his speeches with a reason to move now. Your copy should do the same.

Two formulas, 25 centuries apart, built on the same insight that people don’t act randomly. They move through a predictable sequence. Learn that sequence and you can guide anyone from stranger to believer.

But wait!

Knowing the formula and using it well are two completely different things. I’ve watched smart people apply AIDA perfectly on paper and still convert nobody. The structure was right but they missed everything else—the nuances that really sell your offer.

Next week I’m going to show you exactly why. Using a real example of someone who followed every step and still missed. You’ll see where the formula breaks down in practice, what’s actually going wrong, and the small shifts that turn a technically correct piece of copy into something that genuinely moves people.

See you there.

”Make it different, even if it’s worse”

This really touch me because I recently learned this golden rule of marketing:

You want to differentiate your product from everyone else.

This has a very simple explanation. If there is no difference from your product to the competition, why would anyone choose you? Or even worse, why are you doing it if it already exists?

I’m saying this because recently I notice that many creators on Substack are copying Dan Koe style.

My feed is flooded with black and white thumbnails illustrations with titles like:

• If you have many interest don’t waste the next 2 years of your life.

• If you walk on 2 legs and breathe, this is how to fix your brain.

• How to get ahead of 99% of people in 1:37h a day using flow.

I understand that copying “The Creator Godfather” will help you develop your writing and social media skill, but I need to burst your bobble right now. This is very detrimental for what you’re trying to accomplish.

How do I know? Do this experiment next time you write an article:

Cover your logo and name so you don’t know who wrote it. If you cannot differentiate it from a Dan’s piece, you are doing it wrong.

When people see it, they don’t think about you. They associate it with Dan, giving him even more free publicity. I’m saying this for the sanity of the whole place, we don’t need more Dans, with one is enough.

I saw this before with Daniel Dalen.

He came up with this POV thumbnail style and soon after hundreds of other creators were doing the same. But instead of creating their own brand, what they were doing is validating Daniel’s.

When all content looks the same the only brand that gets reinforced is the original one.

I get it, you are starting and is difficult to come up with the full fledge strategy from the get go, but I’m here to remind you, that eventually, you want to create your own thing and be recognized for your uniqueness.

That is:

• The aesthetic you have

• The topics you choose

• The products you sell

All that, will become your brand.

Instead Of Being Better, Try To Be Different

In a social media feed where every post looks and sounds the same, being different is your biggest advantage.

This concept is known as the Isolation effect or Von Restorff effect.

in 1933 German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff identified that people were more likely to remember a distinctive item when it was presented alongside categorically similar items. The Von Restorff effect illustrates that when an element contrasts with others, it causes the brain to pay more attention, enhancing its memorability.

This concept is commonly used a in UI design. In this example we’re looking at zoho’s CRM pricing plans. They use the contrast to draw you attention to their Enterprise plan which is slightly different from the rest.

In the same way when your content is different, it suddenly stand out from the rest—regardless if it’s better.

[Update]

The space is alive!

While I was getting ready to post this, some information came out that confirms what we were saying.

Is Dan’s new app the cause of so many repetitive Dan Koe wannabes flooding the timeline? I don’t know. But I sure know if you indiscriminately copy other people’s content you’re never going to be recognized for what your brand stands for.

Copying is a diminishing returns strategy. You can copy winning hooks or trending topics, but every time that someone else uses it, it’s impact on others is reduced. Leaders lead, followers follow.

Getting inspired by other creators can work in the short term. But being recognized for your uniqueness? That’s the winning strategy for the long term.

How To Be Different In 2026?

Own a topic: writing about a specific topic is the fastest way to get recognize in the space. When someone thinks about that subject, your name should be the first one to come up. Being “the X person” is beneficial to attract readers that are interested in that specific topic.

Be specific: Go deep, not broad. Narrow, specific content that answers high-intent questions outperforms general advice every time. The riches are in the niches, as they say.

Personal stories over generic content: Replace generic information that could be written by anyone with personal stories that showcase your expertise and proves your authority in a way no amount of repurposed advice ever will. Generic information can come from anywhere, personal stories can’t be replicated.

Consistent, Distinctive Branding: Build a recognizable style or theme that becomes associated with your brand, ensuring you don’t look like everyone else. Consistent, distinctive branding means readers know it’s you before they even see your name. Your voice, your framing, your aesthetic are the signals that make you memorable.

All of this will takes time to refine it to the point you feel confortable with how your brand and content looks, It requires commitment. Most people won’t do it, because copying feels faster and safer. But for those who commits to it, their brands will become distinct, memorable, and authentically different.

This is going to be a different issue from my normal entries. The most personal letter I wrote so far because I’m at that point, and I need to share it.

If you’re still writing on Substack, keep reading because this genuinely interest you.

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This is that week for me. The week where everything feels pointless. The week where everything feels heavy and the effort far outweighs the results. I’m nine months into my Substack journey, and unlike a human pregnancy, nothing has come out of it yet.

My monthly subscriber rate is less than ideals. Less than 8 new subscribers per months and most of them came from a note I shared in January. If you are thinking ”this is because I am not doing the things rights.” I hold myself accountable to these standards:

• I post 3-4 notes per day sometimes even more if I’m on a roll but never skipping a day.

• I wrote an article per week, and mind you, It has all the SEO technical stuff with my Google Search Console connected, so it indexes the articles right when they come out.

After all this work, things are not moving. I’m swimming upstream in a river that’s slowly freezing, watching my views sink month after month since January, my peak.

I know why I am punished like this. Is because I don’t spend as much time in the platform as I used to at the beginning of the year. ”Sorry Substack, you are not the only thing demanding attention in my life.” I already work all day in front of a screen. The last thing I want when I disconnect, is to take on another obligation of scrolling and engaging for hours on your feed.

However, this brought me some positive results. I cut down my screen time from almost 4h to roughly 2h—my all time low. A whopping 50% decline! what a win. I can use this time to read, relax, and be more present in my life. Training myself to resist the urge to reach for my phone when I’m bored.

This freedom has trade offs, one of them is my influence on Substack.

It’s not easy to see other creators who just joined boasting that a single note brought them 100 new subscribers, or that their first post got them eight paid subscribers.

I can feel it… the resentment, the envy, the anger, the frustration. These are all sentiments that rise when you’re down there, at the bottom, at the end of the pit.
I can’t see anything; no light reaches this place. The air is damp, and I have to breathe quickly because there’s not much oxygen.

I have been here before, I know how despair feels. And my friends, this is it.

This is the point where you’re faced with two options: You either quit or you keep pushing, hopping that something is going to change.

To quit whining.
To quit self-pity.
To quit blaming others.
To quit making excuses.
To quit resenting people ahead of me.
To quit mistaking slow progress for failure.
To quit expecting the world to notice my effort.

This is what I realized:

I have a mentor—the man who got me into copywriting professionally. Before meeting him, I thought marketing was something spoiled girls studied at university because they didn’t know what to do with their lives.

He showed me the art of good communication, and how important is in all aspects of life. He also been an influence for me to start writing online. And this is what I noticed:

I met him in 2024. By then, he was already seven years into writing to his email list.

Seven years.

He had been writing every single day for seven years before I even knew he existed!

This gave me perspective. Your work needs time for the right people to find you.

You have to find a way to make writing sustainable for years. This is a stamina game that rewards the ones who keep showing up after the excitement fades.

Derek says that at month 6 you want to quit:

Matt says that it takes 12-18 months to find your grip:

I know it feels pointless when no one is clapping. If you are there, remember that you are not alone. And if you made it this far, let me share the mindset that keeps me going when things get tough.

Think Long-Term

If you fix you vision in the daily grind there is a lot of noise. Most of the time it paints a picture that is not accurate. Other creators hitting a home run with one of their notes, some of your subscribers unsubscribing for some estrange reason, the platform changed their policy and suddenly became a video-first platform. This is all noise.

Detach yourself from that noise and look for stability, and the only place where you’ll find stability is in the long-term.

The people that survives are the people that set their vision in the long-term. They stop focusing on the daily changes and focus on creating the habits and actions that will bring them results in the long run.

I could be upset for not having the traction I wish I had by now, but this is not going to stop me from acting like a professional and show up every day: writing every day, publishing every day, improving every day.

I know in the long run I have a better shot at winning than someone that decided to walk away because they didn’t see the immediate results we’re trained to expect.

By shifting your mentality from the short to the long term you already play a different game—one most people don’t have the patience for. It will probably take longer than you think, so learn to enjoy every day. Because this was never about getting somewhere. It was about becoming someone.

Stephen king is known for writing at least over 60 novels and more than hundred short stories. Many of them have been adapted into movies. I think last time I saw were 48 in IMDb, isn’t that crazy?

Someone that has written that much will know a thing or two about the craft. While I encourage you to read the book because is very entertaining and didactic, I wanted to highlight the things he considers that you need to do to become a professional writer, plus other more technical advice about writing style and editing.

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Read A Lot And Write A Lot

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

Like any other artistic discipline your creativity is shaped by the things you consume. And nothing can make you a better writer than reading as many books as you can.

“We read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. We read in order to experience different styles.”

Every new book will teach you something new: the good books will teach you the things you enjoy reading and want to imitate, and the bad ones will teach you the things you want to avoid in your own prose.

You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so.

I read because I enjoy reading, and I try to have a book with me at all time. Any waiting period is never wasted if is accompanied with a great story. In the same way when I have some free time or before going to sleep I usually read between 1 and 2 hours. Every page counts, I realized that I could read at least 10-15 hours a week, which makes a non-fiction book per week or if is a long novel maybe I can read it in 14 days.

Find you reading rhythm and try to enjoy it. Now I can’t imagine myself without reading at least a couple hours per day. And if reading is not your thing maybe writing is also not for you.

Daily Goal

You can read anywhere, almost, but when it comes to writing, King’s advice is to have your own space.

Find your sacred space, a place where you can sit and disconnect from the rest of the world. A place where shutting the door tells the world that you mean business.

”The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand.”

By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal. I suggest a thousand words a day with one day off a week.

With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met. Then get busy putting those thousand words on the page.

Every novel ever written has been written the same way he says: ”One word at a time.”

“Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like The Lord of the Rings, the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

Writing Style

He starts the book by explaining what is essentially writing:

“Nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing. Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence, since a sentence is, by definition, a group of words containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb); these strings of words begin with a capital letter, end with a period, and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer’s head and then leaps to the reader’s.”

“Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float.”

If you ever feel lost in the tangles of rhetorics, remember, you can always fall back to the simplicity of the noun-verb sentence construction. It provides a safe path that you can follow to put your thoughts down.

Passive Voice

“Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen.”

”You should avoid the passive tense.”

Passive sentence feel safe because the subject waits to receive the action. Is a construction for timid and lazy writers.

Then King writes this hilarious passage to illustrate this:

“Suppose, for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although “was carried” and “was placed” still irk the shit out of me. I accept them but I don’t embrace them. What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa. Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake!”

Active verbs are more visual and clear, you know exactly WHO is doing WHAT. And that’s what you need when you write.

Avoid Adverbs

Adverbs are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly.

With adverbs the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.

“Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you’ll get no argument from me… but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”

I am not against all adverbs, in fact some of them will be useful to convey some degree of credibility or some extra necessary information—look at me using credibility, in this case worked because added some extra nuance. The problem comes, like King said, when you can express the same idea with other better words. Most of the time adverbs become redundant and weakens the message you want to transmit.

The Two-Draft System

King’s always advice to write the first draft with the door closed meaning for yourself. Get the story on the page, don’t shut your creative flows thinking about anyone else. The first draft is for yourself, to get all the ideas out. You are telling yourself the story, that’s what the first draft is about. Doesn’t matter if it makes sense or if the sentences are sloppy. That’s what the second draft is for.

The second draft is with the door open, you polish what you wrote thinking about the reader’s experience. Remove any unnecessary parts that are not interesting, slow, or don’t add anything to the story. Rewrite clunky phrases, fix the grammar and reorganize sections if needed.

He gives this formula that once he received from an editor when he was trying to publish short-stories on newspapers and magazines:

”Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

She’s not used to write presentations for adults as she works with children most of the time. “This is one of the most stressful things I’ve done in my life.” She said. Quite relative as I think that working with 20 children is way more stressful than doing a presentation for your colleagues.

Anyway, I was just walking behind her and I read on of the slides and pointed out few things I thought she could improve. After a bit of back and forth I realized what she wanted to say in the slide and I helped her to write it in a way that will make it memorable and impactful.

The next day she came back to me while I was working: ”I need your help,” ”I need to make this slide good, like the other.” This, coming from my girlfriend is a win. She is a proud little animal that would not admit that I’ve done anything right, even if my life depends on it.

I ended up negotiating a price of 20€ per slide, almost as much as I got paid when I was working in consulting. By reading this article you will learn the keys I told her that are necessary to create a good presentation that people remember.

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What Makes a Presentation Memorable?

The key to make a presentation memorable is to don’t make them boring!

They must be interesting, exciting and to the point.

I’ve work in consulting for many years and sometimes I had to sit through gargantuan deck of slides that were doing very little to inform, persuade or motivate.

I grew against doing these kind of presentations.

I had to spend countless hours tweaking slides underneath a desk light when was dark outside only to see the people I was presenting attending to their phones or their emails in the middle of the presentation.

After so many people ignored my presentations I realized what make them pay attention and what not.

Here are the keys that changed that:

What Do You Want Your Audience To Remember?

When you finish your presentation what do you want to your audience to remember or think about?

I’ve seen this before, people jumping directly to write and design slides without knowing what idea they want their audience to walk away with.

Educational research confirms that people process presentations best when there is one big idea anchoring everything else.

• One main takeaway

• Backed by 3 to 5 supporting points

That’s your outline.

Getting clear on this is the first step to create an immersive presentation that will make your audience remember you after you’ve finished.

What’s ’The Story’ In Your Presentation?

Every presentation has a story. Your job is to find what‘s new or exciting about yours before you step in front of the room.

So dig. What makes this presentation different from every other one they’ve sat through? What’s interesting enough for them to stop checking their email and start paying attention to what you have to say?

People are distracted, except if they think that what you’re saying will benefit them. All they usually want to know is ”What’s new, and why does it matter to me?.” Answer that at the beginning of your presentation to keep them hooked.

Find the thing that genuinely excites you about this material. That excitement is contagious and will transforms an information delivery presentation into something people will remember.

Bring the news and the excitement into your slides.

Show Don’t Tell

Information doesn’t move people. Emotions do.

Think about the last presentation that genuinely stuck with you. I’d bet it wasn’t the slide with the bar chart. It was a moment, a story, an image, something that made you feel something. The bigger the emotion, the deeper the memory. That’s how human brains work.

I learned this firsthand during COVID. Our hardware supplier got hit by the supply chain shortages, and for months we had zero iPhone replacements for employees. I had to deliver this news on a company call.

I could have walked through the logistics. The timelines, the supplier issues, the inventory numbers. Instead, I told them a story about Mark.

”Last month Mark dropped his iPhone in the sink while he was in a conference call with a client. Unfortunately we could not replace his phone with a new one and he had to use al old iPhone 4 as a replacement for 2-3 weeks.”

Then Mark said that the phone was so tiny he kept double-tapping letters when texting. People had a good laugh, but most important, the message landed.

Same information. Completely different impact.

Use anecdotes, examples, visuals—anything that creates feeling. And when it comes to your slides, research is clear that text is one of the least effective ways to communicate in a presentation. Minimize it.

Make it Short

The best thing you can do for a good presentation is to cut it.

Deck building is slide discarding. Your job Is to cut until nothing is left that isn’t essential.

Any presentation benefits from being shorter.

• Bad Content & Long = Bad

• Bad Content & Short = Good

• Good Content & Long = Good

• Good Content & Short = Excellent

Is best to leave the audience willing to know more than not wanting to hear more about the topic.

I don’t mean the price or the deliverables. I mean the risk. Right now, it’s all siting on your buyer’s shoulders. That’s the reason prospects say “I’ll think about it” and vanish. They’re afraid. And nobody buys when they’re afraid.

What you’re about to discover is the secret ingredient that makes an offer impossible to ignore. It’s a single concept that flips the entire dynamic: moving all the risk from your buyer to you.

Done right, it makes people trust you even before they know you.

If you’re a solopreneur, consultant, or freelancer watching good leads slip away after what felt like a great conversation. This is for you.

And the best part? Most people are too scared to try it.

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What Is the Real Reason Prospects Say “I’ll Think About It”?

They’re not really thinking about it. They’re afraid.

You’ve probably felt this yourself on the buying side. You find something that looks great. You want it. But something holds you back. A little voice that says:

• What if it doesn’t work?

• What if I waste my money?

• What if this person disappears after I pay?

We live in the age of skepticism. Prospects have been burned before, and no matter how good your offer is, how polished your website looks, or how many testimonials you have. If the risk sits entirely on their shoulders, that little voice will win.

The problem of your offer Is who’s holding the risk.

How One Pizza Guy Figured This Out Before Anyone Else

Tom Monaghan build Domino’s with this garantee: 30 minutes or it’s free.

He drew a line in the sand and said: if we miss it, we pay for it. Not you.

He didn’t say “we’ll try our best.” or “we’re usually pretty fast.” He committed to an outcome.

The offer transferred all the risk from the buyer to him. And it made millions of people trust a pizza from a company they’d never heard before.

That’s the power of a real guarantee. A specific, measurable, slightly scary promise that signals that you believe in this enough to bet on it.

Are you following? Because here’s where it gets practical.

How Do You Write a Guarantee That Actually Closes Sales?

Make it specific. Give it a timeframe. Put something on the line.

Here’s a real example. A digital business consultant who says: “In 60 minutes, I’ll give you 3 concrete actions to increase your sales within a month — or your next session is free.”

Read that again. There’s a specific outcome. A timeframe. And a real consequence if it doesn’t happen.

That level of accountability makes the prospect think: this person must be really good, or really crazy. Either way, I want to find out.

Now layer in proof that can’t be faked. Real testimonials. Specific numbers. Client stories with enough human detail that anyone reading thinks: this can’t be fake.

When undeniable proof meets a bold guarantee, skepticism doesn’t stand a chance.

Now You

Take your core promise right now. Make it specific. Add a timeframe. Decide what happens if you miss.

Write that in one sentence.

Most solopreneurs never do this because it feels scary. That fear is exactly why doing it gives you an edge nobody else has.

Your competitors are playing it safe. You don’t have to.

• Content pillars

• Note templates

• Engagement strategies

• Optimal posting frequency

You read them, felt that little spark of yes, this is the missing piece, and then... nothing changes.

Maybe you wonder if you’re the problem: maybe you’re not consistent enough, or your positioning isn’t tight enough, or you haven’t found your voice yet.

But that is not what is really happening. The people teaching you how to grow on Substack have no idea why they grew in the first place.

When you finish this article you’ll know what is the cognitive trap the gurus use against you, so you think that they know how to grow on this platform. And let me tell you it has nothing to do with how many notes you post or your hooks—well, maybe your hooks.

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What Is Survivorship Bias and Why Does It Explain So Much?

Survivorship bias is what happens when you take advice from winners, even when luck caused their win.

Imagine a coin flipping tournament. Everyone who flips tails is eliminated. You do this over and over until one person wins—in this case by flipping heads more than anyone else.

Now watch what happens: the rest of the participants floods toward that person asking how they did it. Someone pulls out a notebook. Another person asks them to please do a webinar. Within six months they’ve got a course called The Heads Method and a waitlist of eager students paying to learn their “process.”

Humans brains give more weight to the words of someone who has been successful, even if that success was actually the result of random chance. Flipping a coins.

We call this Survivorship bias: the tendency to look only at the “survivors” or exceptions in any given situation. We ignore what didn’t survive and this can lead to false conclusion.

The winners genuinely believe they have something figured out. we look backward at their success and reverse-engineered a story to make sense of what happened. Consistency. Mindset. Showing up every day...

What we don’t see is the hundred people who did all the same things and got eliminated anyway!

What Did the Substack Growth Accounts Actually Do Differently?

Do you want to know their secret? They started 1 to 3 years before you. That’s their competitive advantage, in full.

The platform was less crowded when they arrived. The recommendation engine was actually working. The algorithm rewarded early movers. Their subscriber list grew during a period when growing was genuinely easier. This has nothing to do with their content strategy or anything they trying to sell you.

And now? the algorithm favors accounts with larger subscribers and it shows the content to more people, while we mistake them with authorities because they have 5 figures in their subscriber count.

When I look at the writers who now position themselves as Substack growth experts, the variable that correlates most with their success isn’t their posting times or their hook structure. It’s only their start date.

But I don’t blame them because they can’t see it either. Their brains found a narrative that explained the outcome. So they teach that narrative with total sincerity. They’re as fooled by survivorship bias as their audience is.

How The Self-Fulfilling Growth Wheel Works?

The growth account builds an audience. Eventually they launch a course or a paid community. A hundred people sign up. Ninety-nine spin their wheels and see modest results. But one of the through some combination of effort, timing, and luck actually grows.

That one person becomes the case study.

Suddenly there’s a testimonial. A screenshot. A success story that gets turned into a post, then a sales page, then a pitch for the next cohort. The survivorship bias wheel spins again, this time with fresh students who saw the proof and thought: that could be me.

I’ve seen this exact playbook in trading. The forex guru with a course full of testimonials from the one student out of hundreds who actually made money. The rest are invisible. They don’t post about their losses. The system doesn’t need everyone to win. It just needs enough winners to keep the story credible and the next wave of students buying.

One survivor out of a hundred is enough to power the whole machine.

What Should You Actually Do Instead?

Keep writing, stay consistent, and build your own understanding of what works for you.

The real variables in newsletter growth are boring and unglamorous: clarity of audience, quality of writing, and showing up long enough for the compounding effect to kick in. None of those require a guru. All of them require you to develop genuine judgment about your own writing. Not borrowed tactics from someone who got lucky with timing.

Instead of learning to crack the platform’s algorithm learn to write words that move people. That skill is yours to keep, regardless of which platform you’re writing.

Focus on your writing. The rest is noise.

At first I thought it was because they are experienced writers, and while that might be true I realized that is because they write about something specific (sometimes very specific) and somehow that’s exactly what hooks you.

There reason for that is because magnetic writing comes from the intersection of who you are and what you know. That intersection is yours alone. Nobody else has lived your exact sequence of obsessions, failures, careers, and curiosities. When you write from that unique angle, you become uncopyable.

New writers strip their personality out trying to sound smart. They write the generic version. The professional version. The version that sounds like everyone else in their space.

And they wonder why nobody reads it.

You will see two famous cases where only them could have written it. They will inspire you to write more around your unique interests.

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What Can Michael Lewis Teach You About Writing From Your Weird Background?

The Big Short was written from the perspective of an art historian turned bond trader who knew the jargon from the inside and also knew exactly which parts to translate into plain English.

He studied art history at Princeton before he did a master’s in economics. And somehow he ended up with a front-row seat to the birth of mortgage-backed securities in the mid-1980s. The exact instruments that detonated the global economy in 2008.

Wall Street in the ’80s was packed with people who understood those instruments deeply but Lewis could also see them the way an outsider would. That double vision, insider knowledge filtered through a humanist’s eye, is what turned a balance-sheet disaster into a page-turner.

So what’s your art history degree on Wall Street? What do you know from one corner of your life that nobody in your current field is applying? The thing that makes you feel like an outsider is probably the most valuable thing you bring to the page.

Lewis looks for a technical world that insiders take for granted, find the misfits inside it who see reality more clearly than everyone else, and tell the story through them. He did it with baseball in Moneyball. He did it with Silicon Valley in The New New Thing. He kept returning to the same pattern because that’s how his mind works.

You probably have an instinct like that too; a way of seeing things that keeps showing up across everything you do, a thread that runs through your work whether you planned it or not.

Most people dismiss it. Lewis built a career on it.

How Did Andy Weir Turn a Niche Obsession Into a #1 Bestseller?

Andy showed his work in public and let it speak. From a free entry on his blog, to a kindle compilation of his best articles to a blockbuster movie.

Just a guy who loved hard science fiction since childhood (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and couldn’t stop writing it—even when nobody was reading.

He’d post chapters to his personal website. A small mailing list of a few thousand fans would read them. That was the whole operation.

Sounds familiar?

Then his readers asked him to put The Martian on Kindle so they could read it more easily. He shrugged and listed it at the minimum price Amazon allowed: 99 cents.

Within weeks it was rocketing up Amazon’s sci-fi charts.

Publishers came to him. A movie deal followed. Ridley Scott directed it and Matt Damon starred in it. Grossing over $630 million worldwide.

He grew up in California. His dad was a particle physicist and his mom an electrical engineer, so hard science was normal dinner‑table talk.

At 15, he was already writing software at Sandia National Laboratories. And spent the next 25 years as a working programmer in companies like AOL and Blizzard. All that while writing science fiction on the side, for a few thousand readers who genuinely loved his stuff.

All of it started with a guy who couldn’t stop writing at the intersection of everything he loved—orbital mechanics, survival puzzles, the kind of sci-fi he’d been devouring since childhood. He even wrote his own orbital mechanics software to make sure the trajectory calculations in The Martian were accurate to the minute. That’s not a writer doing research. That’s a programmer who happens to write fiction. A man writing from the absolute core of who he is.

Project Hail Mary came from the same place: a pile of abandoned ideas he’d been collecting for years, fragments that never fit anywhere, concepts he loved but couldn’t find a home for. One day they snapped together. He built the physics constraints first and modeled what was actually possible.

”I first models the science (orbits, energy budgets, biology assumptions) until the numbers work, and only then I write the scenes on top.” Weir said.

Pretty incredible if you ask me.

He didn’t find his niche. He’d been living inside it for decades. He just finally started writing from the dead center of it instead of the safe edges.

Are you writing from the center of your obsessions, or from the edges where it still feels safe and generic?

Before you write any more articles there’s a decision most creators never consciously make: what kind of newsletter am I actually building, and how does it make money?

There are two types of newsletters and five different ways to monetize them. The combination you choose will determine whether this thing supports your life or slowly drains it.

You don’t need a hundred thousand readers to build something that supports your, there are other paths and by the time you finish this article you’ll know which one is the right model that fits your goals, your time, and your actual life.

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Is Your Newsletter a “News” NEWsletter or a “Letter” NewsLETTER?

News-style newsletters aggregate information. Letter-style newsletters share your unique perspective.

That distinction sounds small. It isn’t. News-style newsletters—your industry briefings, your daily finance roundups, your marketing digests—are fundamentally an information logistics business. The value is in the curation, the speed, the reliability. Readers come back because you save them time scanning the internet.

• News-style newsletters are information logistics. Think daily finance briefings, marketing digests, AI updates. The value is speed and curation. Readers subscribe because you save them time scanning the internet. This model only works at scale. It’s built to grow to tens of thousands of subscribers before the ad revenue makes sense.

• Letter-style newsletter is a completely different animal. It’s your perspective: personal essays, opinions, frameworks, stories. Your take on a specific problem a specific kind of person has. Coaches, consultants, freelancers, and solo experts thrive here. Is relationship-driven, not volume-driven.

Each model has different characteristics, and the question for you is which game would you like to play? What are the reasons for starting your newsletter? Would you like to work on curating news? or would you rather be telling your own stories and experiences?

The answer will shape your editorial calendar, your monetization path, and how many hours a week this thing will cost you.

How Many Subscribers Do You Need to Make Money From a Newsletter?

Fewer than you think. It depends entirely on your business model, not your audience size.

Most creators grind for more subscribers before they’ve figured out how those subscribers will ever pay them. There are five newsletter business models, each with completely different math and timelines. You need to know which line you’re running before starting the race.

✉️ Model 1: Creator / Expert — “Letter” territory

Keep everything free. Write to build trust. Then sell what you know — consulting, coaching, courses, workshops, done-for-you work. The newsletter isn’t the product. It’s the engine that warms people up until they’re ready to buy.

The math works fast even at small audience sizes:

• 1k subs → 2–3 consulting clients/mo at $500 = $1,000–1,500/mo

• 5k subs → a $297 course selling 10 copies/mo = $2,970/mo

• 10k subs → multiple products + a group program = $8,000–15,000/mo

You don’t need scale for this model. You need trust.

💳 Model 2: Paid Subscription — “Letter” territory

The writing itself is the product. Free tier plus paid tier, or paid-only for professionals willing to pay for your specific insight. No advertisers. No products. Readers pay because what you write is worth money to them directly.

The key variable isn’t audience size — it’s engagement. A deeply engaged list converts at 8–15%. A cold, passive one barely hits two.

• 1k subs, 10% paid at $10/mo → $1,000/mo recurring

• 5k subs, 8% paid at $15/mo → $6,000/mo recurring

• 10k subs, 5% paid at $20/mo → $10,000/mo recurring

📰 Model 3: Media / Ad-Supported — “News” territory

Finance briefings. Marketing digests. Tech roundups. Advertisers pay for access to your audience — which means your audience size is what you’re actually selling to sponsors. This is a volume game, and the first two years feel like publishing into a void. That’s not failure. That’s the cost of admission.

• 1k subs → almost nothing. Too small for sponsors to care.

• 5k subs → $500–1,500/mo in a valuable niche

• 10k subs → $3,000–8,000/mo depending on niche and engagement

Go in knowing the timeline.

🔗 Model 4: Affiliate / Commerce — fits both “News” and “Letter”

You recommend products, tools, or services and earn a cut on each sale. This one layers naturally on top of any free newsletter — especially curation or review formats. The word that matters here is _relevant_. Affiliate revenue from a list that doesn’t trust you is basically zero.

• 1k subs → $200–500/mo if recommendations are genuinely on-topic

• 5k subs → $1,000–3,000/mo with strong niche alignment

• 10k subs → $3,000–8,000/mo with the right affiliate relationships

🔀 Model 5: Hybrid — where most profitable newsletters actually live

Subscriptions plus ads. Creator products plus affiliate deals. Free reach at the top, deeper paid offers at the bottom. Most newsletters generating serious money are mixing models.

The trap is treating it like a grab bag from day one. Pick one primary model. Let everything else layer in once the core is working. A “Letter” newsletter built on the creator model can add affiliate deals without confusing anyone. A “News” newsletter built on ads can add a paid tier for its most engaged readers. But start with one.

How Do You Pick a Newsletter Model That Actually Fits Your Life?

Are you a curator or a thinker?

Do you get excited scanning your industry every week, filtering the noise, and packaging what matters into something useful? You’re a “News” person. Or do you prefer writing from experience? teaching what you know, sharing lessons learned the hard way, sending something that feels more like a letter from a trusted friend than a briefing? You’re a “Letter” person.

If you are starting, the free newsletter with back-end sales is probably your fastest path to monetization. You don’t need to convince anyone to pay for a subscription upfront. You build trust through the writing, and when someone’s ready to go deeper, you have something to offer them. A consulting call. A course. A service. The newsletter does the warming up. You close when they’re ready.

If at some point you have enough readers that would pay for your articles you can start a small paid newsletter model but I wouldn’t start there.

And if you genuinely want to build something at scale and you have the time and consistency for it, go for the big ad-sponsored media model. Just know that is a multi-year build and probably not a side-hustle-like job.

Don’t overthink the monetization model. You can’t predict what would work for you anyway. Most newsletters making money are running some combination of the five models we just covered. You’ll start with one, learn what your readers actually respond to, and your model will reveal itself over time.

Start writing. The rest will fall into place later.

• Views are everyone who landed on your piece.

• Reads are the people who stuck around past 30 seconds (roughly 130 words.)

On most posts those two numbers are embarrassingly far apart. Hundreds of views. A handful of reads.

Here’s what that gap is telling you:

Those first 130 words are the most important words in your entire piece. Get someone past that threshold and the probability they finish jumps dramatically. Lose them before it, and every insight, story, and offer you worked so hard to write becomes irrelevant.

Most writers respond to this by obsessing over their headline. Better title, more clicks, bigger numbers. But the headline gets them to the page. What keeps them there is something most writers barely think about.

It’s called the lead. And once you understand what those words are actually supposed to do, you’ll never write an opening the same way again.

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What’s the Difference Between a Headline, Subject Line, a Lede, and a Lead?

A headline grabs attention. The lede is your first sentence. The lead is the opening section that earns the read.

People use “lede” and “lead” interchangeably, which creates confusion. Here’s the distinction worth keeping in your head.

The headline is 6–12 words. Its only job is to get the click or the open. Subject lines in emails do the same thing—under 50 characters, built to get opened. Nothing else. Get them from whatever they are doing to your actual words.

The lede is your first sentence. One sharp, direct line that hands the reader a reason to read the second sentence. Journalists invented the term, spelled “lede” deliberately, to avoid confusion with the lead metal used in old printing presses. It’s the most compressed, highest-stakes sentence in your piece. Get it wrong, and none of the rest matters.

The lead is the opening section—the first few hundred words—that does the heavy lifting before you get into your main argument.

Think of the three as a funnel. Each layer’s job is to get your readers into the next. The headline gets them to the page. The lede keeps them past the first sentence. The lead earns their full attention.

Miss any layer, and the whole thing leaks.

Why Does the Lead Matter So Much in a Sales Letter?

This is the story of two identical sales letters: same offer, same guarantee, same price. But with two different leads the sales letter can produce response rates two to three times apart.

Nothing else changes. Just the lead.

Copywriters discovered this through testing. The results shook people when they saw them. How could a few hundred words double or triple the response of the otherwise same letter? That’s not a small difference, it could be the difference between a successful campaign or one that doesn’t even cover the costs.

Why does it have that much power?

Direct response writing has one job: produce action. And to do that, you have to move the reader emotionally before you persuade them intellectually. Not the other way around. Logic doesn’t open people up. Feeling does. The lead is where that emotional connection either gets made or not.

Every reader scanning your words is quietly asking three questions:

• What is this?

• Is it for me?

• Is it worth my time?

They’re not asking them out loud but they’re deciding in seconds. Your lead should answers those questions fast enough to keep them reading.

Most leads bury the answer. They warm up slowly, explain context, build background. By the time they get to the point, the reader is already gone.

What Makes a Lede Actually Work?

A great lede tells readers something they didn’t know, want to know, or need to know—in one punchy sentence.

Robert Collier, one of the most successful copywriters of the last century, described it this way: you have to meet the reader where their thoughts already are. Your first sentence isn’t an introduction. It’s a point of contact with what they’re already thinking, feeling, or worrying about.

I used to open everything with context. Set the stage, explain the background, warm the reader up before getting to the point. Readers didn’t care.

Your lede doesn’t introduce your topic. It enters a conversation that’s already happening. It mirrors something the reader is already feeling. It names a frustration before they’ve had to articulate it. It surfaces a tension they’ve been carrying around without realizing it.

Done well, it feels like mind-reading. The reader hits your first sentence and thinks—wait, how did they know that? That trust will carry them through everything that follows.

Keep it short. Keep it direct. One sentence, maybe two. If you need more than that, you haven’t found the real point yet.

Write your lede last—after you know exactly what you’re trying to say and why it matters to them.

How Do You Write a Strong Lead for Any Format?

Open with the drama. State the stakes, the problem, or a surprising truth before you explain anything.

Doesn’t matter if you’re writing three sentences in a cold email or three thousand words on a sales page. The length changes. The principle stays the same. Get them emotionally engaged before you ask them to think.

Three entry points that work every time:

• Problem lead: start with their problem, named with uncomfortable precision. ”You’ve done everything right, and the clients still aren’t coming.” It creates instant recognition. They feel seen before you’ve asked a single thing of them.

• Curiosity lead: lead with something surprising or counterintuitive. Something that challenges what they think they know. The split-test story above is a perfect example. Same letter, wildly different results.

• Empathy lead: mirror their internal dialogue so accurately it feels like mind-reading. ”You’ve probably thought about this...” When readers encounter this they place you on their side, you are describing a situation that’s familiar to them and will listen to what you have to say. This is the one I used in this piece.

Pick the entry that fits. Then get them feeling something before you ask them to think about anything.

The Sentence That Changes Everything

Most writers obsess over their headline and forget the lead entirely. The headline is what gets you found and gets people to the page, the lead keeps them there.

You can have a brilliant idea, an irresistible offer, and flawless writing, and still lose your reader in the first 130 words because you made them wait for too long.

Fix your lead, meet your readers where they are in their mental conversation instead of where you want them to be.

Next time you write a piece. Read the first three sentences. Ask yourself: does this enter the conversation already in their heads or does it make them wait?

Write those sentences last. Make them the sharpest sentences in the piece.

The readers who keeps reading are the readers who buys.

You sit down, open a new tab, and type it into Google.

And there they are. Three people. Five. A dozen. Already doing exactly what you imagined—some of them for years.

The excitement drains out. You close the tab. Maybe you tell yourself you’ll think of something more original. Something no one has claimed yet. Some pristine, untouched idea that’s yours alone.

And just like that, before you wrote a single word or sent a single email, it’s over.

Here’s what I want to tell you: you’ve been asking the wrong question. “Is someone already doing this?” is the wrong thing to Google. It was never the right question. By the end of this post, you’ll know what to ask instead—and why the answer changes everything about how you build.

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Does Having Competition Mean Your Idea Is Dead?

Competition proves demand. The real question is whether you can serve that demand better.

Look at every business you admire.

• Sam Walton didn’t invent the department store: he made it cheaper and more accessible than anyone else had bothered to, and built Walmart into one of the largest companies in history.

• Ray Kroc didn’t invent the hamburger: he just executed the idea better than anyone else and turned McDonald’s into a global empire.

• Howard Schultz didn’t discover coffee: he made it fashionable, invented an ambiance around it, and built Starbucks from scratch.

The pattern repeats everywhere you look. Netflix didn’t create DVD rentals—they just noticed that late fees were making people miserable and built a better experience around that frustration. Facebook didn’t invent social networks—MySpace had millions of users before Zuckerberg wrote a line of code.

These companies exist because someone looked at an existing product and thought: we can execute this better.

Why Do Most People Abandon Good Ideas Too Early?

They assume “someone is doing it” means “it’s already solved.” It almost never is.

Among 8 billion people on the planet, the odds that something valuable hasn’t been thought of yet are essentially zero. And yet people shelve perfectly good ideas the moment they find a competitor.

Picture this. You want to build an online directory for local contractors. You’re fired up. You’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Then you search and find a dozen companies already doing it.

For a moment you think about closing the tab and abandone the idea. But what if you looked closer first?

Those directories are buried on page four of Google. The websites feel like they were built in 2009 and never touched again. Half of them don’t even work on mobile. The need is there and the execution is just terrible.

So you build it anyway. You make it fast, clear, and easy to use. A decade later, every one of those competitors has vanished or become irrelevant.

The goal was never to be first. It was to be better.

What Actually Separates the People Who Build Something From the Ones Who Don’t?

Execution. The idea is just the starting point.

Garbage collection has existed since humans have walked the planet. That didn’t stop Wayne Huizinga from starting Waste Management with a single truck and a handful of customers—and building it into a Fortune 500 company. Daniel Ek didn’t invent music. He just looked at an industry drowning in piracy and built a cleaner, simpler way to listen. Today Spotify has 600 million users.

Nobody handed them an original idea. They just looked at something being done poorly and decided to do it better.

The people who never start are waiting for the perfect idea to arrive. The people who build something are too busy improving on what already exists to worry about who got there first.

Your Move

Pick one competitor in your space. Look at what they’re doing. Then ask yourself: where are they falling short?

Maybe their product is slow. Maybe their service is impersonal. Maybe they’re impossible to reach. Maybe they’ve been around so long they’ve stopped caring about the details.

That gap is your opening.

The market isn’t saturated. It’s just waiting for someone willing to do it better.

Go be that person.

You’re describing what you DO—the tasks, the deliverables, the stuff you produce. But your clients don’t wake up thinking ”I need to read more newsletters.” They wake up thinking about their business problems: revenue targets they’re missing. Leads that aren’t showing up. Customers who should exist but don’t. etc.

Don’t worry I got you covered. I’m going to show you a simple three-question framework that transforms ”I write newsletters” into something that makes clients ask you ”How much?”

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Why Does Your Service Description Fall Flat?

You’re selling your process instead of the business outcome your clients need.

Most freelancers and consultants make the same mistake. They describe their work at the tactical level—the actual stuff they deliver.

”I help founders with their Substack newsletters.”

Sounds professional, right? Clear service, clear platform, clear audience.

Except nobody cares.

When you lead with what you do, you’re asking prospects to connect the dots themselves. You’re making them figure out why they need you. And busy people with real problems don’t have time for that.

They’ll smile. They’ll nod. And they’ll never hire you.

Because you’re speaking in tasks while they’re thinking in outcomes.

Let me show you how to fix this.

How Do You Find What Clients Actually Pay For?

Ask ”why do they need this?” three times to reach the real business outcome.

This is stupidly simple, but it works every time. Take whatever service you offer and ask yourself: ”Why would someone hire me for this?”

Then ask why two more times.

Watch what happens.

Question 1: Why should they hire you?

Let’s say you’re offering a newsletter writing service on Substack.

Surface answer: ”To publish regular newsletters.”

Okay. That’s what you deliver. But that’s not why they’re paying you. Keep going.

Question 2: Why do they need regular newsletters?

Dig one layer deeper: ”To build an engaged audience and establish authority in their space.”

Now we’re getting warmer. This sounds more meaningful. Building audience, establishing authority—these matter to business owners.

But here’s the problem: this still isn’t the money reason. This is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Let’s go one more level down.

Question 3: Why do they need an engaged audience and authority?

And here’s where it clicks: ”To generate qualified leads and convert them into paying customers.”

Ding ding ding!!

There it is. The real reason someone opens their wallet.

They’re not paying you to write newsletters. They’re not even paying you to build an audience. They’re paying you to create a system that turns strangers into customers.

That’s the job. That’s what they actually need.

And once you see this? Everything changes about how you position yourself.

You’re not a newsletter writer anymore. You’re a lead generation system builder who happens to use newsletters as the mechanism.

See the difference?

One sounds like a commodity anyone can do. The other sounds like a strategic partner who understands business.

What Do You Actually Deliver Once You Know the Real ”Why”?

Package your service around the business outcome, not the deliverable format.

Now that you know the real job—turning readers into customers—you can design your offering around that outcome instead of around ”writing.”

Here’s what this looks like in practice.

Before, your service was: ”I’ll write you two newsletters per month.”

That’s a task. It’s forgettable. And worse, it forces clients to price you based on time and effort rather than value.

After running through the three whys, your service becomes:

Same skills. Same work. Completely different positioning.

You’re not selling words on a page anymore. You’re selling customer acquisition.

And customer acquisition? That has a clear value tied to revenue.

Think about it from the client’s perspective. If they know each new customer is worth $5,000 to their business, and your system generates even five new customers over three months, you just created $25,000 in value.

Suddenly charging $3,000 for your service doesn’t sound expensive. It sounds like a no-brainer investment.

This is why the third ”why” matters so much. It connects your work directly to the metrics your clients actually care about: the numbers that show up in their bank account.

The Before and After

Let me paint you the full picture of what changes.

Before:

• You: ”I write newsletters.”

• Prospect: ”Okay, so you’re a writer. Probably expensive. Do I even need a newsletter? I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

After:

• You: ”I build lead generation systems using newsletters that convert readers into qualified prospects ready to buy.”

• Prospect: ”Wait, so you help me get more customers? How much does this cost and when can we start?”

Notice what happened there?

You went from describing a task they’re not sure they need to describing an outcome they desperately want.

Your clients don’t care about newsletters. They care about revenue. Growth. Customers who show up ready to buy.

When you position yourself around that final ”why”—the business outcome that matters—everything gets easier. Your marketing makes sense. Your pricing feels justified. And clients understand exactly why they need you.

Your Turn

Here’s what I want you to do.

Take whatever service you’re currently offering and write down how you describe it. Just the simple version: ”I do X for Y people.”

1. Now ask yourself: ”Why do they need this?”

Write down the answer.

2. Then ask again: ”Okay, but why do they need THAT?”

Write it down.

3. One more time: ”And why does THAT matter to their business?”

That final answer? That’s what you’re really selling. That’s the transformation clients will pay for.

Rewrite your entire positioning around that third answer. Change your website, your pitch, your proposals, all of it. Stop talking about what you do and start talking about what you help clients achieve.

Because here’s the truth most freelancers and consultants never figure out: your clients don’t care about what you do.

They care about what you help them accomplish.

Start selling outcomes, not outputs. And watch what happens when you finally speak the language of business instead of the language of tasks.

Some business owners go to copywriters desperate for a magic formula. They’ve tried everything else and now they’re convinced that the right words will finally save their business.

Good copy can give that final push. But it doesn’t bring prospects to the edge of the cliff. Something else does.

Dan Kennedy’s direct marketing hierarchy reveals what successful businesses know:

Copy is the THIRD most important element in your marketing.

Until you fix the first two, Not even the most genius copywriting in the world will save you.

Let’s see what they are.

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What Actually Determines Marketing Success?

Traffic, offer, then copy—in that order—determine marketing success.

Dan Kennedy identified three keys to direct marketing success:

1. The List (your traffic/audience)

2. The Offer (your deal/value proposition)

3. The Copy (your message/words)

Notice what’s at the bottom?

A great offer can succeed with mediocre copy. But the world’s best copy will fail with a bad offer pitched to the wrong people.

Think about it: If someone comes to you and offered the latest iPhone for $299 would you buy it? probably. They wouldn’t have to say much to sell it to you. Well, maybe because seems dodgy but you get the point.

You can write like Ogilvy, but if you’re selling to the wrong people or offering a weak deal—you’re toast.

Get the hierarchy right, and copywriting becomes easy. Get it backwards, and you’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Why Your List Matters More Than Your Words?

The right audience will buy despite imperfect copy; the wrong one won’t buy at all.

Gary Halbert, the legendary direct-response copywriter, would ask a room of aspiring writers: “If you were opening a hamburger stand, what would you want most?”

They’d answer with things like “high-quality meat” or “prime location.”

Halbert would shake his head and reply:

“The only advantage I want is... A STARVING CROWD!”

That should be your list, a starving crowd: qualified prospects with a specific problem or desire that are actively looking for what you sell.

Most entrepreneurs chase everyone, which means they convince no one.

Your copy “isn’t working” because you’re selling vegan cookbooks at a steakhouse convention. No clever words will fix that.

The good news: Once you identify the right audience, you stop manipulating strangers and start articulating value to people who want to hear it.

Why Your Offer Trumps Even The Best Copy?

An irresistible offer sells itself; brilliant words can’t save a weak deal.

Your offer—the actual deal, the value proposition, what people get and why they’d be stupid NOT to buy—does the heavy lifting. Copy just presents it.

Kennedy’s principle: mediocre copy with a killer offer outperforms brilliant copy with a weak offer every single time.

Your offer isn’t just “buy my thing.”

• It’s the result they get

• The risk they avoid

• The price that feels like a steal (in their favor)

• Bonuses that overdeliver

• The urgency that compels action NOW

Most entrepreneurs have a product and a price. That’s not an offer—that’s a transaction.

The beautiful part? Creating an irresistible offer is completely under your control. Structure a deal so compelling that the copy almost writes itself.

If you want to learn more about how to craft irresistible offers, read this article next when you finish with this one. 👇

So When DOES Copy Actually Matter?

Copy matters when it connects the right people to the right offer.

You DO need copy. But its job isn’t to work miracles.

Copy is to prepare, persuade, and present.

Real example: A business sold a $97 ebook. Traffic arrived. People clicked “buy,” saw the price, and... was’t justified.

Why? No sales letter to warm them up.

A good sales letter prepares readers for the price and presents it as the bargain it is. It handles objections and builds value.

But copy only works AFTER you have people who want what you sell and an offer worth presenting.

Your next step:

• Weak traffic? Stop writing—actually, don’t stop writing but find the right people.

• Right audience, no sales? Fix your offer, make it more attractive with the key we saw before.

• Got both? NOW write the letter.

The Formula That Works

Stop agonizing over copywriting until you answer two questions:

1. Am I talking to the right people? (List)

2. Do I have something they actually want? (Offer)

Get those right first. Then use your words to present that offer to qualified prospects.

Fix your list. Build your offer. Then write the letter.

List + Offer + Copy = Success. In that order.

”Give away 90% of your value for free, charge for the 10% that‘s left.”

Do you think the person saying this wants you to make any money from your writing business?

Sounds like they want you making 10% of what you could be earning.

Imagine your business is a bucket. Every drop that goes in is revenue that your writing generates. Now punch holes in the bottom until only 10% of the surface remains.

How much water would you need to pour in just to drink a glass?

You’d be thirsty most of the time. Yet this is the advice new creators hear all the time.

And giving away all your value for free isn’t even the worst thing that can happen. The content creation space has changed dramatically in recent years, and the advice floating around doesn’t work in this new competitive environment.

So pour yourself a glass of water. In the next 3 minutes, you’ll discover exactly how this advice is damaging your brand and the simple technique that’ll fill your bucket to the brim.

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Why Does Free Content Feel Good But Convert Poorly?

Free samples work. Free meals don’t.

In some supermarkets, they’ll offer you a small cube of cheese on a toothpick. You taste it. You like it. You buy a chunk. Simple. But what if they handed you the entire wheel? You’d eat until you were satisfied, say “thank you very much,” and walk away.

That’s exactly what you’re doing with your content.

Have you ever poured your heart into creating a complete guide where you share your best frameworks? The comments roll in: “This is amazing!” “So much value!” “You’re the best!” But when you check your bank account? Zero.

Here’s what happened: you were feeding people the entire meal. They left satisfied but never needed to buy. Why would they? They already got what they came for.

Your job isn’t to give your value. Your job is to sell your value. There’s a difference.

When Should You Actually Give Real Value?

Once a month maximum. Use it as an authority punch, not a habit.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying never share real value. I’m saying be strategic about it. High-value content works as an authority demonstration, not a sales strategy.

Here’s how I use it: Once a month, I send something genuinely meaty. A complete framework. A detailed lesson. Something that could easily be part of a paid product. People respond exactly how the gurus say they will: “Wow, if this is free, what’s the paid stuff like?”

That’s the authority punch. It shows you know your stuff, but you don’t have to give all your knowledge away for free every time you write.

Here’s where most creators mess up—they do this every single time to feel validated. The likes become addictive. People tell you that you’re amazing. You’re the best. So generous. And if you’re not careful with your ego, you’ll keep chasing that feeling.

As JK Molina says: “Likes ain’t cash.”

Standing ovations don’t pay your rent. Last year when we tracked my client’s data, we found that the more “valuable” the content, the lower the conversion rate. People loved it. But it wasn’t making any money. You have to decide what’s more important to you—likes or cash.

Give one authority punch per month to demonstrate expertise. The rest of the time? Entertain, engage, and sell.

Why Don’t People Act on Your Free Value?

Because they’re distracted, tired, and scroll past educational content.

Even when people genuinely appreciate your free lessons, they don’t implement them. The feed isn’t a classroom. People aren’t taking notes. They’re scrolling between meetings, waiting in line, or half-watching TV.

Your carefully crafted lesson gets the same attention as a cat video—maybe three seconds before the thumb keeps moving.

Free content isn’t valued. Even when someone comments “saving this!” they won’t. Even when they say “this changed my perspective,” they’ll forget it by tomorrow.

Can you recall a single note you read yesterday?

Free viewers just feel good temporarily. But the people who actually do the work—the ones with skin in the game—are your paying customers. They pay to access the right environment that creates the transformation they’re after. Save your valuable lessons for them.

Let me show you how this works in the real world.

What Happens When World-Class Value Goes Unrecognized?

Even genius goes unnoticed when the context is wrong—just like your free content.

In 2007, the Washington Post ran an experiment where they placed Joshua Bell—one of the greatest violinists in the world—in a DC Metro station during morning rush hour.

Three days earlier, Bell had played to a sold-out concert hall in Boston. Tickets were nearly $100 each. People dressed up, arrived early, and sat in reverent silence as he performed.

Now he stood in a train station with his $3.5 million violin, playing the same pieces from Bach that had earned him international acclaim.

2,000 people walked past during his 45-minute performance.

Six people stopped to listen briefly. Twenty tossed money but kept walking. When he finished, there was no applause. No crowds. No recognition.

Less than one percent of people stopped for more than a minute to hear one of the finest musicians on Earth play priceless music on a priceless instrument.

Think about that.

If Joshua Bell can’t capture attention in a train station, what makes you think your free guide will stop someone mid-scroll?

This is your content in the feed. The context is wrong. People are in commuter mode, not concert hall mode. They’re rushing somewhere else. They’re not there to appreciate genius—they’re there to be entertained.

Bell himself said it perfectly after the experiment: “It takes an appropriate setting to help people appreciate a performance.”

Your appropriate setting isn’t the feed. It’s not the inbox of someone who’s never paid you. The appropriate setting is the paid environment, where people arrive ready to pay attention. Where they’re not commuting. Where transformation actually happens.

You’re playing world-class violin in a train station and wondering why nobody’s listening.

Stop Playing in the Train Station

The path forward isn’t more generosity. It’s strategic positioning.

Save your best work for people who pay for it. Use the occasional authority punch to prove you know your stuff, and the rest of the time? Promote yourself.

People won’t value what you give away. They’ll value what they pay for. That’s just how human psychology works.

Want a quick test? Look at your last ten pieces of content. How many were teaching versus promoting? If more than one was pure teaching, you’re giving too much away.

Your expertise is worth paying for. Create the right context for it. Stop performing in train stations and start selling tickets to the concert hall.

That’s where people will actually listen.

• AI everything.

• Gambling apps.

• Crypto promises.

• Weight loss drugs.

They feel less like advertising and more like a mirror held up to everything broken in our society. And I’m not even pointing to the obvious commercials that proved this with files and dogs.

Let’s take a step back and not focus on the products they sell but on the idea that you can get everything you want, instantly, without putting in any effort on your side.

You don’t think so? Keep reading.

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What Do Super Bowl Ads Reveal About Modern Culture?

Super Bowl ads expose our collective obsession with instant results and minimal effort.

This year’s lineup made it crystal clear: we’ve built an entire economy around shortcuts.

• AI that will do your work

• Weight loss without discipline

• Betting platforms for quick wins

• Crypto brokers for instant wealth

Why wait and work when you can have everything now without any effort?

How Can You Take Advantage of this Instant Gratification Culture?

Things worth having cannot be bought. They must be earned.

Naval Ravikant nailed it when he said:

”A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought—they must be earned.”

None of that fits in a 30-second spot. None can be gambled, medicated, or automated.

We live in a culture of instant everything:

• Shortcuts

• Cheap hits

• Quick wins

Everyone chases instant gratification, but here’s what they miss: the moments that truly matter in life are the ones that cost you some effort.

Learning a language costs time. Finishing your education costs dedication. Building a business costs patience and discipline. The hard-won achievements in life require work.

Almost nobody is looking there. They’re too distracted by the constant stream of easy dopamine.

This is your advantage. Committing to the hard, slow, meaningful work will separate yourself from 95% of people.

The things worth having always cost something. They’re worth having precisely because they’re inseparable from the process of becoming the kind of person who possesses them.

What Happens When You Think Long-Term Instead of Short-Term?

You start playing a completely different game. One where most competition can’t even see the field.

Think of it like this: Short-Term thinkers are like rabbits, nose in the grass, only seeing what’s directly in front of them. Long-Term thinkers are like eagles, circling high above, watching the entire valley unfold.

The rabbit sees threats everywhere because its view extends a few feet. You see the whole field. Your plans look nothing like theirs.

By adopting a different mentality, you’ll start to see wins and setbacks with a completely different perspective. Suddenly the goals that you haven’t hit yet are just bumps in the road when you’re building for a decade.

Master delayed gratification and you’ve unlocked something borderline unfair. While everyone else bets on instant wins and pops pills for quick fixes, you’re building something that compounds over time.

This is what Bill Gates meant when he said we overestimate what we can do in one year but underestimate what we can do in ten.

Your writing sharpens word by word. Your expertise grows project by project. Five years from now, you’ll be exactly where you planned.

Won’t make a flashy Super Bowl ad. But it’ll serve you well while everyone else is still wondering why nothing ever works.

Change Your Mentality and Win

Those Super Bowl ads aren’t reflecting you. They’re reflecting the majority.

Build for the long term. Develop the patience to earn what you want instead of gambling, medicating, or hacking your way there.

You’re playing a different game now. Time is your advantage. Delayed gratification is your weapon.

That’s how you win while everyone else chases the nearest shiny thing.