Jordan Peterson published a book called 12 Rules For Life, a dense, 400-page book about life advice that tells you to clean your room.
Unlike every other dense, 400-page book about life advice that tells you to clean your room, 12 Rules For Life shot to the top of bestseller lists.
Why were people buying a dense, 400-page book about life advice that tells you to clean your room? Because around the same time, Jordan Peterson went viral for something completely unrelated.
He was protesting a law about gender pronouns. Someone filmed him and the video went viral.
Now all of a sudden a bunch of people knew Jordan Peterson as the guy who “owned the libs”. So they read his book. Some of them really liked it.
This isn’t a political email — I’m not trying to be pro- or anti-Jordan Peterson. But there’s a lesson here.
The lesson is, there’s always a gap between what people think they need, and what they actually need.
20-year-old men thought they needed a viral video where this Canadian professor with a funny voice “owned the libs”. But they actually needed a 400-page book about life advice that told them to clean their room.
Similarly, your audience thinks they need one thing, and actually needs another thing.
People who want to lose weight think they need to discover some “magic diet”, but they actually need to develop healthy eating and exercise habits.
New business owners think they need some marketing hack to make millions of dollars, but they actually need to get clear on who their audience is and develop good products to sell to those people.
You know what they actually need, because you’ve been on the journey they’re going on. The problem is, they don’t know what they actually need. They’re out there looking for what they think they need.
So you need to offer them what they think they need. You need to give them some “hook” or “bait” that gets them into your orbit.
Then once they know, like, and trust you, they’ll give you a chance with the other thing.
If you need help creating that “hook” content — and then getting the people you hooked to know, like, and trust you — then check this out: