What Does Your Costly Marketing Language Really Reveal About You?
You sit down to write an email for your online business, and the words that come out are not yours.
Proven. Powerful. Game-changing. The kind of marketing language that shows up on every page in your niche, including the ten tabs you had open last week while you were researching what to say.
None of those words are dishonest. They are just worn out. Said enough times, by enough businesses, they stop meaning anything at all. A reader’s eyes slide right over them the same way yours probably do.
Here is the part worth sitting with. Most of the products that taught newcomers this kind of marketing language were, in their own wording, not a get-rich-quick scheme. They were closer to a how-to-spend-your-money-quickly scheme, dressed up in exactly the vocabulary this article is about.
Picture two homepages selling the same kind of course. One says it is proven and powerful. The other says exactly what was tested, on how many people, and what happened. You already know which one you would trust with your email address.
If your own writing is borrowed from twelve other people’s writing, your reader cannot tell your business apart from the one that disappointed them last month.
Why Every Page Sounds Like Every Other Page
Visit ten websites in the same corner of the online business world. You will find the same handful of words doing the same tired job on nearly all of them.
Powerful. Proven. Authentic. Game-changing. None of them are lies, exactly. They are placeholders. They tell a reader, “we are a business, and we used the same playbook as the business next to us.”
I have bought my share of those playbooks. More rabbit holes than I like to admit, each one promising results that were never proven, each one using the same four or five words to say so.
Open your own about page right now and count how many of those words are on it. If you find three or more, you have found the reason a reader skims past you on the way to someone else’s page.
The problem was never that those words were false. The problem is they stopped carrying any real information the moment every competitor started using them too.
The Ten-Second Test For Your Own Website
Try this on your own homepage today. Give yourself ten seconds, then answer plainly: what does this business sell, who is it for, and why should anyone trust it?
If those answers are not obvious, you have found the page to fix first.
I have shared a few more small exercises like this one in other things I have written lately, and this one is worth doing before you write another word of marketing copy.
Most people fail the ten-second test not because their business is unclear to them. It is unclear to the reader, because the page describes it the same way five competitors describe theirs.
Replace The Promise With The Proof
Here is the shift that works, and it costs nothing to try.
Instead of telling a reader your product is proven, tell them exactly what you tested, on exactly how many people, and what happened. Instead of saying you are passionate about results, tell them the one thing you refuse to compromise on, even when it costs you a sale.
Notice what changed. You are not just removing a word. You are replacing a vague promise with something a reader can verify in five seconds, which is exactly the opposite of what the overused words were doing.
One customer of mine made his first sale recently, nine dollars, using a low-entry-point PLR product with his own name on it. That is a specific, checkable fact. It tells a reader considerably more than any version of “proven system” ever could, because a reader can picture exactly what happened.
That is one buyer’s experience with one product, not a typical result or a promise of what yours will look like. It matters here only because it is specific enough to check.
Specifics are memorable. Clichés are invisible.
Customers do not trust words because they sound confident. They trust words because they can be checked against something real.
One Direction Beats Ten Vague Claims
This is where a lot of newcomers go wrong, myself included for longer than I would like to admit. They keep spending money and keep spending new on this and that and changing direction, hoping the next product’s marketing language will finally be the one that lands.
It is rarely the words themselves that were missing. It was specificity. A business trying to sound like everyone else, instead of sounding like the one thing it does well.
Picture a customer scrolling past ten pages in one evening, looking for a reason to pick one over the others. The page that says something only it could say is the page that stops the scroll.
This is the time to get serious and just focus on one direction, in your writing as much as in your business. Pick the one claim you can back up, and say that clearly, instead of reaching for five vague ones.
I joined a group of marketers a while back, and enough people kept saying the same thing in the comments that it finally landed. Stop sounding like the products you have read. Start writing in your own voice.
What This Looks Like In Your Own Business
Pick one page on your site this week. Circle every word a competitor could use without anyone noticing the difference.
Then replace each one with something only your business could truly say. A number. A timeframe. A specific thing you did or refused to do. One real example beats three polished adjectives every time.
It will feel smaller than the big marketing language you are used to writing. That is exactly the point. A reader trusts a business that sounds like it is describing itself, not advertising itself.
You do not need a bigger claim. You need a truer one, said plainly enough that a reader can picture it.
None of this requires new skills or a new product. It requires looking at your own page as a stranger would, the way you looked at the ten tabs you had open last week, and asking which words you could keep if you were only allowed ten.
You do not need to rewrite your whole site today. You need one page, one honest sentence, and the willingness to leave the tired words out of it.
That is the whole exercise, and it is worth doing before you write another word aimed at someone still deciding whether to trust you.
Best, Karma, Lee Perrette, Marketer +50
PS: a couple of the tools I use for building and sending pages like these are worth a look if you want to see what sits behind the scenes of mine. More on that on a dedicated page soon.
