You don’t mean for it to happen. In fact, your intentions are the exact opposite.
You spend hours researching and writing because you genuinely want to provide the most accurate, in-depth, and valuable information possible. You use precise, expert language because you want to get it right.
You craft the perfect piece... Edit it until every word serves a purpose... Hit publish with genuine excitement about helping your audience…
And get three views. Maybe four if you count your own refreshes.
Yet, someone posts a half-baked LinkedIn thought and gets thousands of readers.
The problem isn’t the quality of your work. It’s the hidden selfishness in your approach — unintentional as it is.
When Good Intentions Create Bad Results
Without meaning to, you’ve made the content about being “valuable” and proving your expertise, not solving their problem.
And in the world of content, anything that isn’t explicitly for the reader is, by default, for yourself.
I saw this with a client recently. He has a decade of experience, and an engaged email list of a few thousand people who told him exactly what product they wanted.
Should be an easy home run.
He built the product. Launched it to them.
And his conversion rate was 2%… (It should have been 20–40%).
These weren’t cold prospects — they’d literally asked for this specific solution. And after he built it, they wouldn’t touch it…
What the hell happened?
The issue wasn’t the product. It was the packaging.
His landing page was a monument to his own expertise — full of technical jargon, detailed methodologies, and high-level concepts that showcased how much he knew.
His audience had asked for a simple solution — which is what he built. But he put it in a complex package full of industry-jargon and credentials (his landing page).
So him and I rewrote the landing page to be simple, problem-focused, and spoke directly to their pain.
No fancy terminology.
No academic frameworks.
Just their problem and his solution in language they actually used.
His conversions jumped to 35%. More then 15x increase.
Same product, same audience, different language.
Be a Translator
If you want to build an audience, stop asking “How can I be as valuable as possible?” and start asking, “How can I be radically useful?”
This is part of what I call the “Serve First, Profit Follows” philosophy.
True authority isn’t built by using complex language, but by having the empathy to translate that complexity into clarity. It’s the generous act of meeting your readers where they are, using the words they use, and speaking directly to the pain they feel.
Now… This isn’t about “dumbing down” your content.
It’s about being a translator, not a simplifier.
A great translator doesn’t lose the meaning; they make it accessible. They take something valuable that exists in one language and make it available to people who speak another.
Your job isn’t to to sound smart (write “valuable” content). It’s to be radically useful.
How to Be Radically Useful
So how do you go from sounding smart, to being radically useful?
There’s a simple yet frustrating exercise I learned from legendary email marketer Andre Chaperon, that I use for this purpose.
Here’s the process:
- Step 1: Start with your idea. What do you want to write about?
- Step 2:
Ask yourself,
“Why would my audience care about this?”
- Step 3:
When you get an answer, ask again: “Why would they care about
that
?”
- Step 4: Keep going. “Why would they care about this new thing?”
- Step 5: Do this five times total.
By the third question, you’ll want to hit your head against a wall. That’s normal. Push through.
It usually takes about 5 questions before you get to the heart of the answer.
Example:
Here’s how I used this process to find the angle for my article: “why your best writing gets ignored”.
IDEA: I wanted to write about how people should pay attention to how they package their articles. Both the idea and the packaging are important, but packaging has a larger impact than most people realize.
But… Most writers don’t care about “packaging.” So I asked…
Question 1: Why would they care about packaging?
Well, if you don’t package the article right, you get fewer views.
Question 2: Why do they care about fewer views?
If you get fewer views, you don’t grow and build the audience you want.
Question 3: Why would they care about not building the audience they want?
Because you’re putting in all this work to write an accurate article. If you don’t build the audience you want, you’ll put in all this work for nothing.
Question 4: Why would you care about putting in all this work for nothing?
Because why bother putting in all this work if you’re just getting ignored?
BOOM! There it is. That’s the pain. That’s what the audience actually care about.
They don’t give a shit about “packaging theory.” They care about feeling ignored despite doing good work.
That’s how I knew this article needed to be about why your best writing gets ignored, not about the mechanics of content packaging.
Once you’ve found that deep, painful “why” — that’s your Angle. The thing your audience actually cares about.
Now, I run my Action-Angle-Antidote story system for writing the article.
The Action-Angle-Antidote System
Your original idea becomes the Antidote — the solution you’re offering.
Now you need a story that demonstrates the pain.
That’s your Action.
The chip hunt story in this article works because it demonstrates the Angle — the frustration of not finding a mislabeled solution. It doesn’t demonstrate packaging theory; it demonstrates the feeling of being lost when things are called the wrong name.
The reader feels that frustration with me. They’ve been there. That’s why they keep reading.
Service Is the Ultimate Growth Hack
When you build your content this way — engineered from the audience’s pain backward — you’re not just being generous. You’re being strategic.
The algorithm isn’t a mystery. It’s designed to reward resonance and human connection. When you speak directly to a reader’s pain, you get comments. You get saves. You get shares.
You get an audience that says, “holy shit, they get me.”
But more importantly, you build something that actually matters.
You turn your knowledge into a service for people who need it. This is how you build a business that serves both you and your audience. This is how you “serve first” and watch everything else follow.
Your expertise has value. Your knowledge matters. But until you package it in language that resonates with the person who needs it most, you’re just talking to yourself in a crowded room.
Stop writing to prove you’re an expert. Start writing to prove you understand them.
Serve first, and the audience you’ve been working for will finally find you.
If this resonated, you’re probably ready to build that first audience of people who get what you’re about. I’ve put together a free 21-day email training called “Your First 500 Followers” that breaks down the exact system I use. It’s not about vanity metrics — it’s about building an asset that pays you back. Join here.
