learn to speak YOUR audience’s language

Hey my friend 👋

Type: 💡 Messaging & Positioning

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“So… they don’t want you to teach the next session, they asked me to do it instead. I’m sorry.”

I felt my throat becoming so dry I couldn’t speak, my cheeks blushing, and my chest silently exploding from anger and an overwhelming feeling of unfairness.

I wanted to say so much, but I just mumbled something in reply.

I was devastated.
I was defeated.
And I was frustrated.
Because this whole situation wasn’t my fault.

Only it was.

That conversation happened 8 years ago with a guy who had invited me to teach SEO to a team in a big corporate company.

I prepared my presentation. It was great. Had fun examples. Great talking points.

Only it didn’t land. I remember while going through one example, I looked at the audience and felt my confidence evaporating: 21 pairs of empty-eyed faces with no smiles looking at me as if saying, “So what?”

Considering this, it made sense that the team didn’t find my presentation relatable. That’s why they asked that guy to teach the next session instead of me. Even though he wasn’t an expert on the topic. I was.

But he knew how to talk to that team. And it was more valuable.

That’s how I learned an important lesson:

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​From that moment I have been spending at least 50% of my time on researching the audience I talk to before creating anything.

And that’s exactly what helped me make over $1M in digital products.

(And also go on teaching over 80,000 SEOs, including those working at Google, Patagonia, GetResponse and other big companies.)

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Here are 4 things to help you get into your audience’s heads so that you can speak their language

I call this approach the “Audience Research Temperature Scale” because the process goes from researching what strangers are saying online to listening to people who trusted you enough to pay you.

The colder the stage, the more distance between you and your audience. The hotter it gets, the closer — and more valuable — the data becomes.

❄️ Cold: Analyze posts and comments in your niche

Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit. All gold mines if you know what to look for.

Your goal here is simple: understand what people are already talking about and what problems they keep running into. This tells you what problems your course or group program can solve before you build it.

🌤️ Warmer: Talk to real people from your audience

Do 7 to 10 calls with people from your target audience.

This is market research. And it only works if you’re strategic about it. The questions you ask will make or break the insights you get.

(I just wrapped my own market research calls, thank you so much to everyone who chatted with me! I’ll be digging into the data over the next few days. 💛)

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🌡️ Warm: Use a Message Miner instead of a waitlist

When most people launch a course or group program, they build a waitlist.

That’s a mistake. Waitlists collect emails. They don’t tell you anything useful about why someone wants in.

​I explained what to use instead and why it works here.​

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🔥 Hot: Create a Messaging Refinement Loop

Once you have students, your research doesn’t stop. It levels up.

You put a few things in place to collect first-hand insights from the people who actually paid you. Why did they join? What almost stopped them? What language do they use to describe their problem?

This is the data that sharpens your messaging even further.

💡 Quick tip:

One thing to keep in mind: know what you stand for. It helps you separate feedback that matters from noise that doesn’t.

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P.S. Behind the scenes: I’m excited that I’ve been featured in Kit’s newsletter: (And hi 👋 to everyone who joined me from this feature. Get cozy, we have a lot to talk about monetizing your expertize).