We should be friends
Hello,
I’m trying something new this week with the newsletter in that it’s being sponsored. Happily, it’s by an app that I’ve used for years and swear by/recommend all the time anyway. ClickUp keeps my business and life in order and I’d be lost without it.
Enough wanging on about ClickUp. This week I’ve been won over by the brilliance of website copy that made me change my buying plans. And it’s inspired this week’s long read because it highlights exactly how important it is to stick a bunch of personality into what you write.
One tool does it all—ClickUp offers all the features you need in one platform: Tasks, Docs, Whiteboards, Dashboards, Goals… and more! Switch today to explore our 100% customizable features!
We should be friends
It started a week ago when a post made me laugh. One of my contacts had commented on it, and there was this woman on my feed with blue hair and a sense of humour that would increase the profits of Tena Lady.
I went to check out her profile. Then the link to her website. And there I sat, reading the whole damn thing thinking: “I am your people, we need to be friends”. Everything about the copy on the website sucked me in. I could sense her personality, what she’d be like on a Saturday night in the pub, where she’d fit in the quiz team and how we’d get the same jokes.
Of course, this unnamed person isn’t my friend. She’s a woman on LinkedIn who was yet to even know I existed. But she’s offering a service that I am planning to need in the nearish future. A service that, until this moment, I had someone else pegged to deliver.
And that’s the thing about putting your personality into your copy, you attract people to you. Do it well enough and they know instantly if they want to work with you.
It’s no mystery that business people I speak to most often are the ones I have worked with or they have worked with me in one way or another. And, that these people are so very much on my wavelength.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen some content and immediately thought, “We should be friends”. And I’m sure if you take a moment to look at all the businesses you’ve bought from - especially if they are one-person empires - you will see a correlation between them and you.
When I was drafting this newsletter on a run earlier this week, I realised there were some personality traits, themes, commonalities or whatever, between me and the people I work with. It’s stuff that goes beyond values (although they help).
Take a conversation I had this week with a departing client. He said: “I wouldn’t want to guess your political leaning”
“Oh but please do,” I replied.
We’d never had a political conversation in the two years we’d worked together but we both knew where we stood on the big things without saying.
We have so much in common
If I look across the work that makes me smile the most, it’s with people who have a fondness for black or similar music tastes. They share my dry and dark sense of humour and have an energy you can bounce off. They do sarcasm incredibly well and probably lack filters. But possibly the most telling thing is they were the outsiders in school. Into the stuff that wasn’t the most popular of its time. They have the same cultural reference points as me and shared life experiences.
And it’s not that I sit down and interview people about this stuff. You just know.
You know from how they hold themselves, how they talk and their outlook on life. You know from their energy and, as I’m told by a psychology client, we also know from unseen clues we give off and pick up in our body language on a daily basis. We subconsciously know that we are part of the group without needing to be told.
So why does this matter?
In terms of business, content and writing it’s so important to inject it with all that “you” stuff. Over a screen, we can’t pick up the body language as we do in real life so we need to recreate it with what we create.
And this is more important now than ever. If you read The Thursday Brew a few weeks ago, you’ll know that I argued that we need to know what a good blog looks like more in the age of AI than before. I’m arguing today that we need to have more of ourselves in our content than ever before BECAUSE of AI.
To keep bringing in the people we want to work with and repelling those we don’t, our voices need to be front and centre for all the content.
Take my experience last week with the lovely yet-to-be-friend on LinkedIn.
I was going to use another service. In the space of an hour, that idea had flown out of my head. We hear a lot about sales funnels and warming people up to buy from you, but being able to see something of yourself in the person selling is the fastest way to build that trust.
I’m sure this lovely blue-haired woman has had people on her mailing list for years. Years of warming them up to buy her service and do her course. Then I swan in and two hours later message her to say: “Yep, I want to do this and this is when I want to do this and please can you keep messaging me thank you very much”.
That’s the kind of sales funnel you want, right?
And the most powerful part of that journey was the copy. It was reading her website and thinking, “I like you”. It was getting a real sense of who she was instantly and knowing that this was for me.
Don’t forget, that I’d already decided on a service provider. Someone who shared my values, I trusted their expertise and they’d proved they could deliver. In an instant of reading something else, I was gone.
That is how powerful tone of voice - for that is what we are talking about here - is in the process of selling your services.
I do not doubt that there are people who will read the same website and think: “what a load of bollocks”. It’s not for them.
And that’s a good thing.
Being personal is a risk
I get it, sticking lots of yourself into your copy is a risk. What if people don’t like it? That’s the same as saying they don’t like you, right? And that is a massive punch in the gut. No one likes to know they are unliked.
Now, this might be shocking to you but there are people out there who don’t like me. They actively cannot stand me. They think some awful things about me and have some quite big reactions about who I am and what I do.
But I don’t care.
I don’t like them either.
They are not my people. And if I worried about what “not my people” thought of me, I’d be spending all my time and energy worrying about it. You couldn’t pay me enough to ever work with them. In fact, for the people who I know don’t like me, you couldn’t pay me enough to sit in the same room as them. It’s a waste of my time and energy. Two things that are in short supply and I’ll never get back.
And it’s the same with clients. I only want to work with lovely people. People who respect what I do and can have conversations that flow like spilt milk.
This is why we need to make sure that our content - and especially our websites - is a reflection of who we are as much as what we do. We do this by making that content our own, by putting in our voice and by making that connect with those who matter to us.
So, if you think your website might not do this right now and you want to get your kind of people to buy from you, it might be time to take a look at making this happen.
How I can help:
Get your content mess sorted out with a Content Clear Out
Untangle your SEO with an SEO Audit
Solve your content conundrums with a Content Clinic
Right, I’m off to go find some more outsiders to befriend online and I’ll see you all next Thursday.
Fiona