Simple Marketing For Smart People: The One Question You Need to Win Customers without Gimmicks, Hype, or Hard Selling

Upstream: Your Core Message

the best marketing we encounter we don’t even think of as marketing. Your home is filled with products you love, and it’s unlikely you remember the marketing material that led you to buy those products. This makes your job here more difficult because you have to ignore all the examples of marketing that readily come to mind—the icky examples—and em

When creating any new piece of content, I now ask, “Which belief is this going to instill or strengthen?” If I can’t find one, or if I already have a lot of content that reinforces that belief, I forget it. It wouldn’t be a good return on investment for my time.

So much of the marketing advice found online is about worshiping complexity for the sake of complexity. I see so many complicated funnel diagrams sold by the bundle, as if you can just flip a switch and watch the customers come flooding in.

If you’re an online course creator, you can have the most engaging material, but if people don’t finish your course and tell their friends, your business will soon shrivel up.

It’s harder to sell a product than make one.

With Building a Second Brain, I spent years working harder and harder, believing if I just made the course good enough, somehow the sales would take care of themselves.

If you’re a service provider, you could be the best at what you do, but without marketing, only a fraction of the potential market will benefit from your skill.

Once we educated their prospects and got everyone up to speed, people started buying. And not just that introductory course, either. Sales picked up for all the other products, too. This makes sense because these customers, after being more educated on my client’s topic, could now fully appreciate their advanced offerings.