Clarity Lab Issue 91 – How To Complicate A Door Handle

Hey friend,

Good morning/afternoon/evening. If you’ve never tried typing with a mechanical keyboard, I’m here to tell you to give it a shot because wow, the joy that’s coming from writing to you on a new, very satisfyingly clicky, mechanical keyboard is real.

It took me a few tries to find one I like, but the Razer Hunstman Tenkeyless keyboard is making me clickety clackety tap tap happy.

There are dozens of mechanical keyboards on the web. Most are designed for gaming, but some are made just for typing. (Ali Abdaal has a great video on the best ones here.) Because I just signed up to be a member of the International Association for Mechanical Keyboards, expect me to tell you about other keyboards I love in the future.

Alright, let’s gooooo. Here are the 5 best things I found for you out in the wild interwebs that can help your business make more money.

 

1
How to complicate a door handle

Making money from your newsletter doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t have to get all internet marketing aggressive to pull it off. Focus on publishing useful content for your audience, grow your email list, and use a little code to automate dynamic calls to action for people on your list to have a look at your products. Brennan Dunn shares the details about his method for uncomplicating this whole process.  (My mind read this and made a complicated mind map about it. I will learn nothing from this irony.)Should You Be Yourself Online?

 

2
Take me to search

Here’s a stark statistic: In 2020, 65% of Google searches ended without the searcher clicking on any search results. (That percentage is likely higher now, in 2022). What else isn’t going great for us content marketers? Social media platforms will hide any post you make that links out to another site, including your website. Facebook ads don’t work nearly as well as they used to, thanks to the war between Apple and Facebook. And your kids no longer think you writing blog posts and newsletters is cool, because they watch the “real” content creators on Tik Tok and Youtube. Sigh. What’s a content marketer to do in 2022? Amanda Natividad has some clear insights in this Twitter thread.

 

3
A barrel of one

The sales page on your site. It’s quite possibly the most important page on your entire site. If you have a small business, your sales page is your sales team. (That’s how it is for me, and man, you should see when me and my sales page go out for drinks on Friday.) There’s a lot happening on a successful sales page, but the most critical part? Is the first 500 words. Write that part well and people will read the rest of the page. This is one of the most brilliant explanations of how to do this I’ve ever read: Focus. On. One. Thing.

 

4
Stop and sell the roses

Every year, almost without fail, I seem to stir things up in my life in a way that leads to me digging deep into where I’m going with my business. This time around, with some help from a friend (hi Ryan), I’ve come to realize a crucial perspective I’d forgotten to take when asking where you’re going with your business: getting dead clear about who you want to help and what you want to help them with.

In the past, I’ve been known to tangle myself in knots trying to arrange my business to optimize doing things I enjoy that also overlap with solving problems for people. Here’s how I’ve come to look at this from a better perspective: Instead of asking “what do I enjoy doing?”, ask “what problem do I want to help people solve?” Instead of “what am I good at?”, it’s “what problems can I solve?” Instead of “what do people want?”, it’s “what problems do people want solved?” And instead of “what will people pay for?”, it’s “what problems will people pay to get help solving?”

This shift in perspective makes all the difference. It makes you look deep into the core of what you’re selling in a way that prioritizes solving a specific problem for your market. (And finally, finally, I’ve reached some clarity: I’m going to show people how to enjoy donuts without gaining weight.) Here’s a short podcast with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson talking about this exact thing (the getting clear on what you’re selling thing, not the donut thing.)

 

5
Point blank change

In the coming months of this year, you’re going to keep hearing more about how paid ads, content marketing, social media, and SEO are not working like they did for online businesses even just one year ago. Things are rapidly changing, and we’ll need to adapt as business owners. Here’s Ryan Deiss with four intense minutes of one thing to focus on as the marketing world shifts under our feet. And holy cow how much caffeine does he drink please sell me a bottle of whatever energy he’s got because wow I could use some.

 

And that, my friend, is all for this week.

Go get after it, unless you’ve already gotten it and are out in front of it, in which case you should chill out on the couch and have a donut. (Sign up here for my free 90 minute Donut Diet webinar.)

~Forest Linden
Editor of the Internet

P.S. Here’s part of my secret, not-secret toolbox of business tools: Help Scout for customer support, Freshbooks for invoices and bookkeeping, Kajabi for an all-in-one marketing platform for online course owners, Satori for client session scheduling, Skitch for annotating and sharing screenshots, ConvertKit for best-in-class email marketing. Shhhh…don’t tell anyone. It’s not a secret.