Attention is not the same as influence. They are different games with different rules.

Content marketing is how you play for attention. Your score is based on how many people you can reach.

Leadership is how you play for influence. Ten people or ten thousand — the score is how far they’ll follow you.

But it gets tricky when you scroll through LinkedIn or Forbes and read about what you need to do to succeed these days:

• Authority building

• Thought leadership

• Person of influence

• Expert opinions

• Subject matter expert

• Industry guru

It may be the Harry Potter or FIFA World Cup or Bass Fishing editions, but they are all the same game of Monopoly:1 buy property, avoid jail, collect $200.

We even have the research to prove that—somewhere in the scattered pile of plastic pieces and fake money—there is something that creates trust, credibility, and demand2 for those who play their cards right.

Wait, what’s this chess piece doing in here?

In 2011, J.L. Collins started a blog as an archive of letters to his daughter Jess. She was just graduating from college and he wanted to help her make wise decisions with money. His goal was not to build an audience and he wasn’t a traditional expert.

Collins had a degree in English Literature—not finance or economics—but he had a lifetime of learning about money the hard way. His only goal was to lead one person, Jess, down a simpler path to financial independence than the one he had taken.

15 years later, he is now called the Godfather of FI. Those letters, collected as The Simple Path to Wealth, have sold over 400,000 copies.

Think, record, share.

If you want anyone to follow you, you have to speak to them. Publishing is a powerful way to do that.

But following someone means orienting your decisions around them, not just consuming what they make. It has nothing to do with audience size.

Optimize for attention, and that’s all you’ll get. Optimize for influence, and you will get transformation.

And transformation is hard to keep hidden.

Scouting Ahead: The Funnel is Leaking

As I write, kindhearted humans are unleashing an army of algorithmic tools, trying to manipulate me into buying their shit.

We might call it marketing or lead generation. We might see it as no more than what it takes to stay in business. But it doesn’t change the fact that most of us now meet the internet with a similar posture: assume every claim is a tactic until proven otherwise.

We’ve learned to protect ourselves.

Unfortunately, if you are a lawyer, therapist, consultant (or any other form of expertise-based service provider), your livelihood depends on the same medium your future clients are being trained to distrust. The more defensive buyers become, the more the linear funnel1—the industrial model of marketing—decays.

Somehow, the traditional advice remains unchanged: increase visibility by doing more promotion, more content, more networking, more funnel tactics, more activity. This multibillion dollar industry rests on an assumption: if enough people see you often enough, they’ll buy from you.

Now, even well-intentioned marketing efforts don’t arrive as information but as pressure. And pressure activates resistance.2

These days, the more you optimize for conversion, the less people trust you.

Worth the Watch: Zero-Click Content Isn’t the Enemy of ROI – It’s the Future

Subscribe now

A Better View: Buyers Want To Guide Themselves

Let’s focus on lead magnets.

Yes, they worked, when information was scarce and expertise was gated. If a consultant or attorney handed you a free guide, you were getting something you couldn’t easily get elsewhere. So giving them your email in exchange felt like a fair trade.

Good ol’ reciprocity.

But do you really think people today haven’t seen a bunch of videos, articles, comments, and AI answers before they found your PDF or email crash course? The moment they see your free whatever, the most likely thought is, “So what?”

And that’s just the information problem.

The moment you ask for an email, you confirm people’s suspicion this is all just part of some mindless nurture sequence. Optimizing for conversion — better subject lines, sharper CTAs, more personalization — just makes it worse. The more polished the funnel, the more it reads as a system designed to move someone toward a decision they didn’t arrive at themselves.

In the age of Verified Trust, buyers don’t follow a path you lay out for them, they construct their own, looking for reasons to trust you that they can verify themselves. They research, compare, and show up decided — either for or against.

The funnel has no answer for that.

But you do. You just need a way to move them toward trust.

Moving Forward: Trust Engineering

You are not a content creator and you don’t need to become one.

I just want to lay that out before you think the answer is just finding out “what works today” and slap that on the old funnel system like some kind of marketing Flex Tape.

Instead, build durable, high-value assets that let people decide for themselves whether to trust you. These three are worth your time:

• A Differentiated Claim — this is more than a mission statement or a tagline. It’s a position, something you actually believe about your industry or the problems you want to solve. Think of it like a line in the sand that people are forced to take sides on. It doesn’t have to be aggressive, but it does have to repel the wrong people if you want it to attract the right ones.

• A High-Value Gift — solve a real problem completely with no strings attached. Not a teaser, not a checklist that ends with “want to learn more?” — something a prospect could use and benefit from without ever hiring you. When it works, they come back. And people share things that worked for them.

• A Paid First Date — a low-cost engagement with a clear outcome that lets buyers get a win and experience your work before committing to anything bigger. Paid, not free. If you want to think through what yours might look like, last week’s brief is a good place to start.

And guess what? They even work underwater!

Chau,
Ben

P.S. I try to keep the titles and subheadings in these briefs as statements, not hooks.

Clickbait-style headers — “The one thing marketers don’t want you to know” —optimize for curiosity at the expense of clarity. I’d rather you read a heading and get something from it than feel tricked into the next paragraph. If every line earns its place, you’ll trust that the next one will too.

So, yes, I try to practice what I preach.

Scouting Ahead: Buyers Don’t Want To Talk

Every tactic your prospects now distrust was invented by someone trying to be helpful. The free webinar. The complimentary consultation. The custom proposal. Each one a genuine attempt to make things easier. Each one now a signal that you’re up to something.

In the age of Verified Trust, buyers now complete between 61% and 69% of their purchasing journey before ever contacting a provider.1 61% to 75% say they’d prefer avoiding a rep altogether.2

The old playbook assumes buyers want to be helped into a decision. They don’t. They’d rather get there on their own.

That’s a problem if your whole approach starts with, “Let me understand your situation and create what will work best for you.” You’re requiring a lot from someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t trust you yet.

They don’t want a relationship, they want to know what they’re walking into.

Worth the Read (if you’re in a nerdy mood): From Asymmetry to Satisfaction: The Dynamic Role of Perceived Value and Trust to Boost Customer Satisfaction

Subscribe now

A Better View: The Friction Is Psychological

Most service professionals were taught two plays: the free consultation and the custom proposal.

The free call assumed that if you could get people in the door, you’d get a clean shot at proving your value. Eliminate the financial barrier, let people experience you, and they’ll stick around. But now it just triggers a set of new questions: Is this going to be worth my time? Are they going to hard sell me on something? Do they actually know what they’re doing?

Seems we don’t believe in free lunches.

The custom proposal has the same problem. Handing someone a unique 10- or 20- or 50-page document asks them to do serious cognitive heavy lifting — evaluating scope, imagining outcomes, deciding whether to trust numbers they can’t verify. The more you customize, the more you’re asking them to figure out.3

You end up creating the indecision that you find so frustrating.

So personalization isn’t what it used to be (cough…thanks AI…). Instead of trying to prove you’re worth it by making everyone feel special, make the initial experience as clear, easy, and predictable as possible.

Give people something they can’t help but say yes to.

Moving Forward: Leverage Productized Offers

Converting people to paying customers has always been the hardest part of the journey. The good news is that the same shift making buyers harder to reach also shows you exactly how to solve it: productized offers.

Productized services give prospects clarity. Fixed prices, a clear timeline, and a defined scope. All they have to figure out is if they want that particular outcome. Proposal acceptance jumps from ~25% with bespoke work to ~75% with productized offers, and sales cycles shrink from six months to six weeks.4

I get that not everything can be productized. Sometimes you genuinely can’t price work until you understand its scope. But since most people stop at that excuse, there’s huge opportunity for the rest of you: find one specific entry point that gets a client a genuine win.

The goal is to solve smaller problems quickly and well, which earns you the right to solve the bigger ones.

Here are a few questions to help you find yours:

• What’s a meaningful problem you could solve for a prospect in one to three days?

• What do they hate about how that problem gets solved now? (e.g. too many meetings)

• How could you solve it in a way that works for you and gets them a real win?

Chau,
Ben

Ads are like pickup lines—most are terrible, but they don’t have to be.

I won’t pass up the chance to share a few:

• “Are you an astronaut? Because your beauty is out of this world.”

• “Do you have a map? I keep getting lost in your eyes.”

• “If you were a vegetable, you’d be a cute-cumber.”

So bad. And so good.

The problem with pickup lines isn’t the line—it’s how far you expect it to take you. Similarly, ads don’t close the sale. They’re the opener, like saying hi to a stranger at a bar.

Picture two guys at a bar who see a woman they’d like to talk to.

Guy one is Chad (it’s always Chad). He crowds her space (why is he wearing so much cologne), drops the astronaut line, and might even get her to say yes to a drink. But she’s skeptical, and the second she realizes the whole thing is a tactic—that he’s running a script to close the deal—she’s out. Be gone, Chad.

Then there’s Mario, who gets that the first goal is to start up a conversation. Then he can see how that goes, find out what she thinks about a first date, and so on. He might use the same pickup line, but it’s a totally different approach. He’s not forcing it—but he’s not hiding in the booth praying she’ll turn around and fall in love with him.

Because the job of any first encounter is simple: give them a reason to keep talking.

It’s Not About You

Most businesses are self-centered, even when they don’t mean to be. They’re excited about what they do and want you to feel it too. Unfortunately, this leads to some gosh-awful ads.

The message is “Look how special we are,” which comes across as “You want some of this, don’t you?”

When it comes to ads, the experience is the message.

The best ads pick one job: entertain, support, inspire, challenge. Anything but come home with me sell.

Take Gamma’s Rainn Wilson commercial, produced by Sandwich.co (one of my favorite agencies). Gamma is an AI-supported presentation tool. The ad has Rainn visiting his friend Grant (Gamma’s CEO) to see what it’s like to be a tech CEO. Gamma is only mentioned once when Grant says “We don’t do PowerPoint here. We use Gamma.” That’s it. The rest is Rainn being Rainn, ending alone in Grant’s office asking if sitting in the CEO chair makes him the CEO of Gamma.

The goal isn’t “here are our features.” It’s “let me make you smile—and maybe you’ll come back for more.”

I know what you’re thinking: “But that’s tech. What we do isn’t sexy or exciting.” A lot of people assume boring is the only option if you’re a lawyer, a home builder, or a landscaper.

That’s like a guy thinking, “I don’t look like Henry Cavill, so meeting people at bars isn’t for me.” Really? There’s one Henry Cavill, and he’s not walking into this bar. (Though if he did, I would let him pick me up, physically and emotionally.)

And we have one of the greatest marketing campaigns of all time to prove it.

In 1959, Bill Bernbach had to sell the Volkswagen Beetle to Americans. The car looked boring: too small and too simple for the standards of the time. Worse, plenty of Americans still associated Volkswagen with Hitler. Bernbach’s solution? Lean into it. (The small part, not the Hitler part.)

Self-deprecating, fun, and honest—no pretending the car was something it wasn’t. It made people smile and think “huh, maybe simple and small is actually better.”

That was over 60 years ago, and most boring businesses still haven’t learned the lesson. The bar is low if you are willing to try.

4 Ways to Make A Great First Impression

Here are four approaches worth trying:

1. Radical Honesty

• What it is: Lead with what you’re not—or what you can’t do—then show why that’s a strength.

• The bar version: Walking up and saying, “I’m a terrible dancer, but I’d love to talk to you anyway.” It lowers the other person’s guard immediately because you aren’t trying to maintain a perfect facade.

• When it works: When you can flip a perceived weakness into a real advantage.

• When it doesn’t: When the honesty doesn’t buy the reader anything or it turns into whining.

• Example: Avis ran a famous campaign based on a simple admission: “We’re number two. We try harder.” They didn’t pretend to be the biggest car rental company. They leaned into being second place and turned it into a promise about customer service.

2. Social Proof

• What it is: Let other people your audience trusts talk about you.

• The bar version: You don’t have to tell the other person you’re great—your best friend is already doing it for you. It’s more believable when someone else says it (assuming your friend isn’t a total weirdo).

• When it works: When you can feature real people your audience respects or relates to.

• When it doesn’t: When the endorsement feels bought or generic.

• Example: Headspace used running coach Knox Robinson in their ads. To runners, he’s a credible voice. Instead of Headspace telling you meditation works, they have someone who actually does the thing you want to do saying meditation helps.

3. Common Enemy

• What it is: Go after a bigger problem in the world.

• The bar version: Leaning over and saying, “Any chance you also hate this music? Because this is killing me...” She may love electro-country music (in which case it wasn’t going to work out anyway), but if not, you’re instantly connected by a shared annoyance.

• When it works: When there’s a shared frustration in your industry that you genuinely solve differently.

• When it doesn’t: When the enemy is vague (bad customer service), fake (cough…Pepsi), or hypocritical (you’re part of the mess).

• Example: Dove has made fighting a common enemy a major part of their brand. Their campaigns—like this latest one against retouching apps—position them against artificial beauty standards. Their message: we’re on your side in this fight.

4. The Meme

• What it is: Lead with a simple, relatable image that pokes fun at a universal struggle in your industry. It proves you’re in on the joke.

• The bar version: You catch her eye after something weird happens at the bar and just give a “Can you believe that?” look. If you share a moment, who’s to say you can’t share more?

• When it works: When there’s a visual or situation everyone in your world recognizes.

• When it doesn’t: When the joke is too insider or it stops being playful and turns mean.

• Example: I made this for an estate-planning client. It works because it gives you that Jim-from-The Office look: we both get it, even if they don’t.

Now go hit the bars.

Chau,
Ben

Scouting Ahead: Trust has Shifted

I don’t think much about it, but 2005 was a big year. It was the last time we thought Blockbuster was still viable, the last time Facebook was invite only, the last time the White Sox would win a World Series (good riddance), and the last time U.S. trust in institutions would stay above 40%.

Today it’s 28%.1 But trust hasn’t disappeared so much as it’s been redistributed from titles, logos and credentials to peers.2

This redistribution of trust has affected how Americans view professionals like bankers, business executives, clergy, lawyers, doctors, and police officers. We still trust nurses and grade-school teachers the most.3 We still think lobbyists are Satan’s stenographers. But everyone, saints and sinners, is less inherently trustworthy in our eyes than they used to be.

We still trust, we just trust people like us more than someone above us.

Worth the Read: Nurses Continue to lead in Honesty and Ethics Ratings

Subscribe now

A Better View: The Age of Verified Trust

At the risk of oversimplifying to smart readers: experts4 need trust. For decades, you could signal trustworthiness with a few key assets: the license on the wall, a name on the door, and a well placed “…15 years in practice…” when first meeting a prospect. Now you’ll get more traction with a picture of you and Alex Hormozi at a Bigfoot convention. Everything else just signals baseline competence.

We are now living in the age of verified trust, a serious change for solopreneurs and firms that make their living from expertise.5

In this era, buyers research, compare, and pre-qualify experts before ever making contact. They consume content, compare websites, check credentials and third-party ratings.

Once hired, you no longer get to be the expert. You’re an expert—one source among many they’re triangulating.

Moving Forward: Conviction & Credibility

We still need experts. And I’m bullish on experts, despite the current difficulties, because of two opportunities I see for those willing to adapt:

1. Leveraging Conviction over Competency - 95% of buyers say compelling thought leadership makes them more open to sales and marketing outreach.6 But informational content won’t cut it. You have opinions, use them to stake your ground.

Two questions to start:

• What drives you crazy about how your industry operates?

• What do you wish every client understood before they ever hired anyone?

2. Building Credibility through Demonstration - Clients want proof that someone like them got real results. And as AI floods every channel, they’re hunting for signs you’re an actual human with whom they can connect.

Two ways to show both:

• Tell specific stories about specific wins for specific people (not case studies, stories).

• Treat every interaction as connection, not content. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it.

P.S. How This All Started

Two weeks ago I read the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer—one of my go-to sources when I want upstream data for marketing and business development. I planned to write a single essay about how trust has changed the expert-client relationship.

Now I have thousands of words written and a growing research pile: industry reports, sales cycle data, journal papers on AI adoption, and client behavior studies. I found something bigger than one essay could handle.

These briefs will be my way of sharing what I’m discovering in real time—distilled, practical, and focused on one thing: helping you build demand without making marketing your second job.

After 12+ years, three businesses, and hundreds of clients, I’m convinced of one thing: demand is your business’s lifeblood.

Here is my definition of demand: the number of people who want what you have and will pay you to get it.

Every other metric tell you about today, maybe the next sales cycle: clients served, cash on hand, whether you and your team are keeping up with the work.1 Demand tells you whether you’ll have what you need tomorrow to grow, or to even stay in business.

Most business owners understand this intuitively. We can feel the difference when people seek us out and when they don’t.

What’s less intuitive: not all demand is the same.

Power Your Work

Think of demand as the electricity that powers your workshop.2 If the power is steady—people want what you have and will pay for it—you can keep your tools running and do good work.

As the owner, you are responsible for generating that power: solar panels, a wind turbine, gasoline, even a hand crank. But these share a flaw: when the generator stops, the power stops. Unless you can store it.

This is the difference between generated demand and durable demand.

You can have great marketing, paying clients, and cash reserves and still be months from running out of power. Or you can have none of it and still have people waiting to give you their time, money, and attention.

Let me give you two examples.

LittleThings

In under three years, LittleThings became one of the country’s largest online publishers. By 2017, their feel-good how-to content for women had brought them 12 million Facebook followers, the platform’s most popular post in 2015, and the 23rd-largest site in the U.S.—ahead of LinkedIn and FoxNews.com.

By every visible metric—followers, views, monetization—LittleThings looked like a sustainable hit. Viewers loved what they saw and clients were happy with the engagement it delivered.

But you probably remember LittleThings about as well as what you ate for lunch three weeks ago. No, they didn’t last.

In early 2018, Facebook changed its News Feed to favor friends over publishers. LittleThings lost 75% of its organic traffic almost immediately, gutting ad revenues. With no other audience to reach, the 30-person editorial team was out of work in under two weeks.

The content stayed up, but the audience didn’t miss it enough to go find it. What looked like demand was a dependency on distribution. When the push stopped, so did the customers.3

Polaroid

In 2008, Polaroid shut down its film factories in the Netherlands as the 60-year-old company was broken up and sold for parts. Supposedly, nobody wanted analog.

But as store shelves emptied, photographers worldwide hoarded packs and scoured online markets. Polaroid did no marketing—it was a dead brand walking—and fans still gathered around the product. When Polaroid film disappeared from shelves, they paid outrageous prices for expired packs rather than switch formats.

What most people didn’t know was that three people stopped the demolition, raised investor money, bought the machines, and rented the building to try to save instant film.

They called it The Impossible Project—a fitting name considering they had to reinvent instant film from scratch. They released a Polaroid-compatible product after two years of R&D. And it still wasn’t very good.

But it didn’t matter. During the gap, photographers waited. They refused substitutes, paused their work, or rationed old stock. When it arrived, people embraced the imperfect revival because it kept analog photography alive.

In the first year, the company sold more than 500,000 units and generated over $4 million in revenue.

Today, after years of growth, The Impossible Project goes by another name: Polaroid.4

Subscribe now

That’s durable demand: people who want what you have and choose you over a credible alternative without needing more persuasion. Put simply, it’s the number of people who consider you the obvious choice.

So your capacity to keep doing good work without active marketing—your battery—depends on how many people think you have something they can’t get anywhere else.

A Bigger Battery

Here's the 80/20 on creating differentiated value:

1. Find people who are hungry

Find the people who are fed up with the way things are and want it fixed now.

• Look for switching triggers. What event, frustration, or realization makes someone say “I need a change.” Sometimes this is external like a diagnosis or merger announcement. Other times it is psychological, like someone realizing they are getting older (which, for example, may drive a desire to leave something special behind for their family members to remember them).

• Focus on who has the problem now, not who might have it someday. The CFO preparing for an audit is hungrier than the one who “should probably get better at compliance.” The new father holding his infant is hungrier than someone “thinking about estate planning.”

• Stop trying to convince people. Your ideal customer is already looking for someone who gets it. If you’re spending energy creating urgency, you’re talking to the wrong people or you need to solve a bigger problem.

2. Solve problems that keep them up at night

Solve problems people have with existing alternatives and problems that are top of mind.

• Fix what’s broken. Figure out what drives people crazy about you or your competition and fix it. If your clients say lawyers are hard to reach, make yourself accessible. If people say consultants hide their work, document and share everything. Remember: your biggest competition is often the choice to do nothing. Remove the barrier to action and you may have to start turning people away.

• Connect your solution to consequences that actually matter to them. “Better legal strategy” is meaningless. “Protecting your kids’ inheritance from your ex’s creditors” is real. “Improved team dynamics” is vague. “Preventing your best people from quitting during the restructuring” is urgent.

• Frame the transformation, not the transaction. People don’t buy estate planning, they buy peace of mind that their kids won’t fight over money when they’re gone. They don’t buy coaching sessions, they buy dedicated time with someone outside of their organization to process big issues.

3. Make your promise clear

Make it obvious why someone would choose you over credible alternatives, without needing more persuasion.

• Be different, not better. “We’re the best estate planning firm” is unmemorable and unprovable. “We help blended families avoid inheritance warfare” tells someone exactly when to choose you. Different wins by being specific about who you’re for and what you’re solving.

• Lead with conviction. If your answer to “why you?” could just as well apply to your competitor, then you have a problem. Positioning is an art (just look at cupcakes and muffins), but you can start with what you believe is true about the world and why you do what you do. Draw a clear line in the sand.

• Show off your approach, not just your credentials. “20 years of experience” doesn’t create trust like it used to. Compare that to something like “I only take cases where preserving the relationship matters more than winning.” Similarly, “I only work with founders who admit they’re part of the problem” says more about fit than “certified business coach.”

Remember: being the best choice people could find isn’t the same as being the only choice they will accept.

Chau,
Ben

—-