The story so far…

• To get people ready to buy, you need to establish certain beliefs (e.g. that they have an important problem worth solving, that you have a unique solution that will work for them, etc).
• But to establish those beliefs you need their attention and interest.  To do that you must focus your content on the things they care about.

What I'm about to describe is a simple method for doing that.

It'll feel a bit mechanical the first few times you do it. But over time it becomes second nature and you do it without even really thinking about it.

Your starting point is a problem or goal your potential client has that you can help with.

Whenever you create content about your clients' biggest problems or goals you're on safe ground. You know that inherently they're going to be interested in the topic.

Your next step is to find a hook. Something interesting about the topic that will get their attention and get them to read or watch or listen for long enough for you to get your message across.

From my experience, there are a handful of hooks that will consistently get the attention of potential clients:

• Revealing the real root cause of the problems they've been having
• A diagnostic that will allow them to understand their problem better
• Benchmarking and examples of what their competitors or other successful businesses are doing about the problem/goal they have
• Quick wins and immediate actions they can take to make progress on their problem/goal
• A roadmap, masterplan or step-by-step guide they can follow to achieve their goal
• A new insight, idea or method that will give them an edge and allow them to achieve a goal or solve a problem in a new way
• New research or insights from other fields into the problem they're facing (e.g. new psychological research into motivation)
• New examples of famous people dealing with similar issues they're dealing with (e.g. lessons from sports stars, historical figures, business leaders)
• Your own experiences with the problem/goal

There are many others I'm sure, but this is a good starting point. For any particular client problem or goal you can look down this list and find at least 2 or 3 different ways you could talk about the topic.

The next step is to then think about how you can use that topic to establish one of the beliefs you've listed as being necessary for someone to be ready to buy.

The hooks I've listed tend to lend themselves nicely to some beliefs:

• Root causes and diagnostics can build the belief that they have an important problem they need to address.
• Benchmarking and new research can highlight that what they're doing now won't get them to a solution.
• Quick wins, roadmaps, and talking about your own experiences with a problem can all establish your credibility.

For other beliefs you have to work a bit harder.

For example, if you want to show that you'd be great to work with a good way to do it is to talk about a client's success and mention a couple of things you did with them.

You could do that when you're teaching a quick win by talking about what the client did to get quick wins. Or show how they applied your roadmap or new methodology.

Or you could mention some of your clients in the form of benchmarking best practices.

All it takes is a little thought and you should be able to find a way to illustrate or explain the topic in a way that gets across the beliefs you're trying to establish.

As I said, it can feel a bit mechanical and forced the first few times you do it, but simply going through each of the topics and hooks you've come up with one by one and thinking about which of your target beliefs you can establish with them really does work.

You might not be able to weave every belief into a short content series, but you can always do enough to serious increase your chances of getting someone ready to buy.