You use AI (right?)

If you're reading this, chances are you use AI.

And there's a good chance you have a hard time getting it to either sound like you, or to give you the quality of result you're looking for… without a lot of copying, pasting, and re-explaining your business for the eleventeenth time.

You've probably also written hundreds of posts by now.

And hopefully at least a half dozen emails. (Preferably more.)

So what if your AI had access to all of it?

Every post and every email, with the metrics sitting right beside each one. So it knew exactly how you write, what sounds like you, and what your readers actually respond to.

Would that be useful for you?

If so, I'm putting on something called the Knowledge System Workshop.

Everyone who already raised their hand over the last two weeks got the full details in their inbox today. And in 48 hours, I'll be releasing those details to everyone else on this list (including you…)

But I’m not here to just rub it in your face that you missed out on early access.

Instead, I’d rather give you something useful.

Here's something I see all the time…

Everyone in the marketing and copywriting world quotes Eugene Schwartz and his five stages of awareness. Maybe you've heard of them:

Unaware. Problem aware. Solution aware. Product aware. Most aware.

Basically, people either know they have a problem or they don't. They either know about the solutions out there or they don't. And depending on where someone is in that journey, they need a different kind of message in front of them.

Hang around the marketing world long enough and you'll see this over and over and over again.

But what almost no one talks about is another idea from the exact same book.

One that’s arguably much more important.

It’s called:

Gradualization.

In Breakthrough Advertising, Gene Schwartz writes:

===

“If you violate your prospect's established beliefs in the slightest degree — either in content or direction — nothing you promise, no matter how appealing, can save your ad.”

===

Point is, if you start your marketing message with something your reader does not agree with, you will lose them entirely, and you’re unlikely to ever win back their favor.

So with gradualization, you begin your message with something your reader already agrees with.

Instead of fighting the battle to educate your readers, instead, you learn to empathize with them.

After all, you were in their shoes once.

You probably even remember what it was like to struggle with such a problem.

So you start out your marketing message with something that gets a resounding, ‘yes’ rather than trying to shake things up by pointing out “mistaken beliefs”.

And once you’ve got a yes, you move on to another, ‘yes.’ Then another, and another.

You do all this before you ever reveal that there might be a solution to all the challenges your readers just agreed to. And the reason you do that is because everyone has something for sale these days. Around every corner, someone's got a new thing to buy. If you're this, buy my thing. If you're that, buy my other thing.

At this point we’re all trained to spot the incoming sales pitch from a mile away.

As soon as we sense it, we start to tune out. Not because it’s automatically bad, but because if we don’t learn to keep our hard earned cash out of everyone else’s hands there’d be nothing left for us. So it’s a suitable shortcut.

Ignore everything that sounds like a sales pitch.

Well gradualization skips all that, and ethically I might add, because instead of sales pitch it’s simply a conversation. You focus on weeding out bad fits before they ever have a chance to hear what you have to offer.

After all, you wouldn’t walk up to a friend and say, “Are you a writer who struggles with AI?… buy my thing.”

You might say something like, “Hey, have you been using AI lately?”

And then you’d listen…

If your offer isn’t relevant, end of conversation. On to something else like how nice the weather is and when we should go play pickleball again.

It’s the same thing in your writing.

The people who have no relevance will bounce. And the ones who keep nodding along, are never “convinced” of anything. They’re simply recognizing themselves in your writing.

So… all to say, if you’re wondering how you might do that for your own readers, and your own audience, in your own niche…

Consider going back to the top of this email and reading it again.

That's it for today.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood