From Nobody to Authority: How to Build Credibility and Make Your Content Unforgettable
Even in the Most Crowded Niches
Photo by Alison Wang on Unsplash
There’s one metric most creators forget about.
It’s a metric you can’t gauge with a tracking pixel. It’s a metric that is hidden from all CRMs. Yet, it has a profound impact on your results.
This metric is called credibility.
Sometimes you could have everything right: a starving audience, an irresistible offer, great copy… Yet, sales are just not coming through.
The reason? You may lack credibility.
In today’s letter, you’ll discover a simple way to build credibility in any market. And you’ll see that this strategy works even better in hyper-competitive markets.
It’s as simple as… simplicity.
Simplifying ain’t easy
The good ol' Leo Da Vinci said it hundreds of years ago: “Simplicity is the ultimate level of sophistication.”
This means that simplicity comes at the end of the complication spectrum: when everyone else in your market exhausted the most advanced-ninja complicated tricks.
Don’t be fooled: Simplification ain’t easy.
It requires deep understanding. It requires experience. It requires looking at the small details most people aren’t willing to spend time on.
You also need to look at the problem you’re solving through different lenses and extract which components are necessary and which aren’t. And this doesn’t happen overnight.
Did you notice? Here we have it again. The 8020 principle in action.
Simplification means uncovering the 20% that counts for the 80%.
How to add value by doing… less!
Everyone’s screaming about adding valewww!
Yet most people don’t have a clue what value truly is.
Let me tell you what it isn’t: adding more stuff.
By more stuff, I mean adding more steps. Adding more features. Adding more words.
More, more, more.
This is because humans are greedy by nature. We always want more. But “more” doesn’t necessarily rhyme with happiness.
Let’s bring this back to content creation: People who mix up between adding more and adding value are losing the game. The reason is that we’re busier than ever.
Despite robot vacuum cleaners, voice assistants, and ChatGPT, life’s more complicated than ever.
We all have to manage 326 things on a daily basis. And your audience certainly doesn’t have the time or the bandwidth to spend more time on your stuff unless you give them overwhelming proof that they should.
And even if you did, they may end up procrastinating. That’s how humans are.
Instead, learn to cut out the excessive fat to make your content tastier and more nourishing.
This is where real value resides.
Simplifying ain’t for dummies
Simplification is a superpower.
But you can only harvest its benefits when you start thinking deeply: You need to recognize patterns. You need to extract mental models. You need to be able to connect the dots.
This is the type of work most of your fellow creators don’t want to do. Either because they don’t realize the importance or because they’re just too lazy. That’s a blind spot that you need to focus on to build your competitive advantage.
You see, I preach simplicity.
It pours all out of my content. The reason is that I value my audience’s time. I personally have no threshold whatsoever for people who waste my time.
One of the best ways that helped me preach this simplicity is my note-taking system.
It’s where I save every interesting idea I stumble across. Then, I use the super features Obsidian has baked in to find connections between ideas.
As an example, hers is the graph view I used to create this letter:
The connections between the ideas emerge in a simple and elegant way. It’s like having a thinking assistant at my fingertips.
And the good news is that you can build this too.
You can start becoming the one who simplifies everyone else has made complicated. You can be the one that helps your audience achieve results faster and with less work.
And this, in fact, is what your work as a content creator is all about.
Get all info by clicking on this tiny juicy link…
Matt Giaro