Miles Davis, the old jazz cat, wasn’t just cool, he was the birth of cool.

And like most people who have special abilities from another dimension, he had “eccentric” habits.

I was watching an interview he did a few days ago where he was asked why he almost never looked at the audience. 

A lot of people thought he was being rude for not engaging.

The answer?

He played to the band.

His focus was locked in on creating the best sound, so he picked a spot where he could hear his band the clearest, and allowed them to communicate with nonverbal cues. 

Every note had to feel right with the band before it could resonate with anyone else.

Might sound counterintuitive, but he knew the best way to make the music people wanted to hear… wasn’t to stare at the audience. 

The same thing happens in marketing. 

Too many people obsess over what looks good, or sounds clever and smart… and completely forget the people they’re reaching. 

No wonder you hear crickets and  your effort flops.

The market is your band. Focus on them.

Understand the problems they actually have. Build your message around their reality, not what you think looks smart. Once that’s in place, everything else falls into place naturally. Your offer, copy, Your emails and funnel.

That’s what the market responds to.

If you want help with this, check my calendar. Link below

Start with the basics if you want your market to think you’re brilliant.

A while back I had a very demanding client. 

This dude was obsessed with building authority. That was his main goal, it was the only thing he talked about… 

Sweet. I’m all about that.

A week of revisions later, it became apparent he didn’t care about building authority at all. 

What he REALLY wanted…was for people to praise his intelligence. To him, sounding smart was more important than having people understand the product. 

Long story short, I ended up firing him as a client, just because dealing with him was constant headaches. 

After that, I’m not sure if he wrote his own copy, or if he hired someone else, but it ended up sounding very confusing.

There’s a point to be made here:

 (aside from choosing clients carefully)

Clarity beats cleverness. Every single time.

If you assume people share the same knowledge as you, all the authority in the world won’t matter one iota.

People need to understand your offer. I’ll make it obvious. Book a call, calendar link below.

The movie Shrek helped me through tough times as a kid.

It also helped the clients I serve to sell millions of dollars.

How, you ask? Good question. 

Well, my parents loved alcohol and extreme violence. Oh. Too personal? Aight. We’ll keep this business-casual.

There’s a scene where the lovable Shrek compares ogres to onions, because they both have layers. Very similarly, over the last 13 years of writing copy, my methods have evolved ogre-like layers. 

Let’s jam on the second layer, what I call External Clarity. It has to do with how the market views your business. 

It’s not what YOU think you’re selling, it’s what THEY think you’re selling. 

If someone visits your site and can’t sum up what you do best in a single sentence, there’s no external clarity. 

Without external clarity, you sound like every other SaaS, coach, agency, whoever. And when the market can’t see the difference between you and your competitors… Nobody knows whether you’re the best, or the worst, or where you fit.

So if business is in the forgotten void realm, with all the lost socks… Fix your positioning and everything else (ads, funnel, copy) gets 10x easier. 

If you want help, check my calendar link below. There might be spots, they book quick. 

If your funnel struggles to position your business as the “go-to” choice in the market, the problem isn’t your price, or logo, or anything complicated.

There is a solution that is far more simple, and far easier to fix.

One thing that can help your business grow is that instead of showing how simple your product is, people feel confused by all the jargon you use on your website. 

A lot of businesses think that using buzzwords and complicated terminology makes them sound sophisticated, or smart. Truth is, it makes your product sound complicated. 

Nobody wants to do rocket surgery. 

People want a simple solution, if they don’t “get” what you do right away, they go back to Google to look for something that makes sense to them.

Adam Scott, the dude who created the “Dilbert” comic strip invented a word for this in the late 90’s, he called it “confusopoly”. 

Originally it was to poke fun at cell phone companies who made their plans so confusing that it was impossible to compare them to each other. One example that always annoys me is toilet paper, with their hypothetical mega-rolls.

Anyway, the dummy-easy quick fix here is to simplify your message. Use plain language and clear ideas.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your homepage or e-mails, check my calendar and book a call. Link below.