How to Attract “Problematic” Prospects

Identify and serve the people most motivated to solve their problem.

Here’s a tale of two tribes. These groups represent two very different approaches to attracting an audience you’ll invariably run across (and likely have already attempted). 

First, there are the “internet marketing” people: 

These folks are obsessed with using paid ads to drive traffic to their funnels. After the email opt-in, they immediately sell a “tripwire” product as a self-liquidating offer that builds an email list for “free.” But make no mistake, building this free list requires spending money, having one or more existing products, and keeping up with the ever-changing dynamics of Google and Facebook advertising. 

Then there’s the “creator” crowd: 

This group began in the early days of blogging and morphed into the content marketing movement. They are obsessed with getting “free” traffic from search engines and social sharing. To build an audience, they work their butts off without a return for a year or more. They take an audience-first approach to offer development, where the audience reveals and validates the product. 

And then there’s an entirely different world: 

These are the freelancers, coaches, and consultants who either thrive on real-world referral networks or struggle to stay afloat on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. It's feast or famine — they're either swamped serving clients or scrambling to survive, leaving no time to think strategically about building an audience or developing their personal enterprise.

That Was Then, This Is Now 

For the last decade or so, the first two tribes have more or less merged, although there are pretty definite relationship lines that separate funnel folks from content creators (a bit like cliques). If you’ve been around the content marketing space from way back, you might remember I started a paid membership community called “Third Tribe” back in 2008 that intentionally brought together the best of both worlds. 

Some of this alignment has to do with the fact that there are best practices from both tribes that can be successfully and ethically implemented to grow a digital business. But most of it has to do with downright necessity. 

What I mean by that is neither of the approaches I described above delivers results like they used to. And yet you still see people pushing these exact tactics, even though they haven’t worked as advertised for a decade. 

The Funnel Flop 

First of all, content has never been king — the right audience is. This is something the internet marketing crowd understands implicitly. That’s because their techniques and philosophies tend to originate from the offline direct marketing world.

But do those “self-liquidating offers” still work? First, let’s define what that means. It essentially allows you to buy traffic with advertising, immediately sell a product, and break even. This enables you to build an email list at no cost — and without spending ludicrous amounts of time creating tons of content. 

Conceptually, this still works. In fact, the Personal Enterprise Growth Framework relies on an offer that not only pays for itself but also makes a profit. So, we’re good on this point. 

The problem is with the “tripwire,” or the idea of selling a low-cost (say $9-$29 product) that allows you to break even and build your list for free using Facebook ads. This is practically impossible, especially (and ironically) in the realm of people teaching internet marketing. 

To give you a concrete example, when I returned from sabbatical in 2019, I launched an online course priced at $495. I consulted with several Facebook advertising specialists about running ads to sell the product, and they all said the same thing: You’ll have a hard time making the kind of profit that you want at that price point. 

Put another way, I was trying to hire these people to help me run the ads, and they declined the work because they knew they couldn’t successfully do it on a return on advertising spend (ROAS) basis. It’s only gotten worse since then. 

A bigger problem than just the increase in cost is that the quality of the traffic and opt-ins from Facebook has declined substantially. And Google AdWords is even more outrageously expensive for people who don’t have seven or eight-figure advertising budgets. 

Plus, the internet marketing approach assumes you already have a product to sell — usually more than one — so you can make a profit off the upsell. But as we’ve discussed, the biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make is creating a product first and then trying to find people to buy it. 

The much smarter approach to developing a viable product is to start with an audience and find the patterns and indications that suggest what they want to buy. But how do you get the audience?

The Content Collapse 

Enter the content creators. Back when I started Copyblogger, creating lots of high-value educational content — content good enough to sell that was instead given away for free — was a revolutionary act. Then, as content marketing caught on, the flood of content that started with blogging became a tsunami. 

Today there is way too much content, and people have even less capacity for attention. Just consider how much content has been created in only the last decade. (Hint: it’s more than the entire history of the world up until that point — by a lot.) 

Also, consider the competition for profitable search terms in Google. It’s a brutal environment made worse by Google increasing the number of paid entries on the first page, pushing those hard-won organic results even lower. 

Now, think about the number of podcasts there are now compared to 2010. And consider how the discovery function of platforms like Apple Podcasts, which used to give new shows a chance, has changed to favor existing popular shows. 

You may be thinking at this point … what about all these people selling courses on blogging, content marketing, and podcasting? Are they all shysters? 

No, I don’t think so at all. I believe most are well-intentioned people who’ve built an audience in the past and now teach people what’s worked for them. The problem is that things have changed drastically, and often, the last person to realize how much things have changed is the person still enjoying the substantial fruits of their past labor. 

You’ve heard of the “curse of knowledge,” right? That’s where an expert in a certain topic doesn’t realize that things they know and take for granted are completely unknown to most other people.

In this case, you’re dealing with the “curse of the asset.” The audience asset, that is. Once you’ve built an audience by a certain (and often new-at-the-time) approach, that audience keeps providing huge benefits for a long, long time. 

Here’s what I mean: 

• Most people teaching blogging started blogging between 2004 and 2008. 

• Most people teaching content marketing started between 2008 and 2012. 

• Most people teaching podcasting started between 2010 and 2014. 

Let’s look at it another way. The work I did in 2006 and 2007 to build the Copyblogger audience paid off to the tune of over $70 million in highly profitable revenue over the next decade or so. 

But let’s face it: That audience was built at the beginning of commercial blogging and continued during what many call the Golden Age of social media — a time and an environment where great content of all types routinely went viral. I know I took advantage of that. 

And when that content went viral, it attracted links. All those links combined with basic on-page SEO led to incredible search rankings in Google, many of which persist to this day. 

That time is over. Plus, as important as building an audience is, it’s only one part of the equation. Developing the right products and services to sell is equally important. 

This brings us to the here and now.