Just dropped a mega post about the changing economy and how to adapt with your marketing in the $1 Product Community.

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I thought the post would be helpful to all though, so I've pasted it below for you.

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There’s been a huge shift in the market and it’s led to a lot of people experiencing…

• An increase in prospects giving the old “let us think about it”
• A reduction in engagement across owned channels (email lists)
• The open and click rates from cold email drioppiong to near zero
• An overall decimation of the results from formerly successful strategy

I’m seeing it across the board.

I’ve spoken to newbies who are struggling to get traction that was, once, easier to come by.
I’ve spoken to people running 6-8-figure businesses who are seeing their key metrcis slide backwards.

We’re all taking action to fix this, but most people are doing the wrong thing.

They’re thinking “more” is the answer.

… More ads
… More content
… More outreach

Whilst more is not a bad approach (when done well which I’ll explain below), most people are doing more one shot approaches.

We’ll reach out to more people with this one cold email.
We’ll serve this one ad to more people.
We’ll distribute this one article more.

This is a play for attention. When what’s actually needed, is more trust and familiarity.

The shifting economy

For a while now we’ve been in an attention economy.

Usually, the person who…

• Ran the most ads
• Sent the most emails
• Produced the most content

Would eventually end up the winner.

But it’s not working as well as it used to. The economics of this have been decimated because attention simply isn’t enough anymore.

Ask yourself, how many articles emails, or social posts do you actually engage with compared to 12 months+ ago? Much less right…

AI has made attention easier to acquire. Anyone can grab an account for $20 / month and spin up a thousand posts pretending to be an expert to publish on every channel.

Playing that game is a losing strategy right now.

So, what’s the new approach?

The economy is shifting now from an attention-based economy, to a trust-based economy.

People have become crazy sceptical of everything they see online because it’s become so easy to masquerade as an expert.

Hell, I used AI to spin up an offer in an industry I had ZERO experience in. Within 2 weeks, I had buyers. If you challenged me on anything within that niche, I couldn’t give you an answer.

Mine was a low-risk priintable offer.

But if I was doing coaching, consulting, to a service, I could really have damaged someone’s potential.

People have become more sceptical because - as usual - marketers have ruined thing (sorry).

So, what’s the solution to this?

The trust economy playbook

I’ll take you back for a minute to the mid-2000s.

A chap called Neil Strauss - a journalist by trade - released a book called “The Game”.

This book was about the super seedy world of “pickup artists”. Guys who went out and had the sole intention of getting women to sleep with them.

I need you to put aside your views on the goal of that book a minute (if you can put it aside for a while, I’d recommend reading it as these guys were masters of persuasion… or manipulation). I imagine the book has aged more poorly than any of us could imagine.

But that’s beside the point… there’s a lot of parallels with business IMO.

You’re trying to get a complete stranger to take a chance on you. To quiet the negative voice in the back of their mind and take a risk with someone they barely know.

There was one technique the pick-up artists recommended as a strategy to build more trust and familiarity.

And it’s insanely simple.

Pickup artists used something called false familiarity to simulate the feeling of a deeper relationship, fast.

Instead of doing one long date in a single spot, they’d split the date into 3+ shorter experiences across different locations. Something like…

• Drinks at bar A
• Walk to bar B for food
• Ice cream and a park bench chat

Why does it work?

1. Simulates multiple dates in one session… tricking the brain into thinking you've spent more time together.
2. Creates a sense of adventure and shared memories… which builds trust and emotional connection faster.
3. Triggers familiarity and comfort… which are core to trust.

In essence, it wasn’t about more time… it’s about more contexts.

This is what’s needed in business right now to blast through the high guards and sceptical view a lot of your prospects have.

It’s about trust - and more contexts - than just doing more.

Most people are still relying on one, friction-filled method to get strangers and turn them into high-ticket clients and buyers.

Like a…

• Long-form webinar
• A sales page that pushes a 40 minute sales call
• A 15,000 word sales page

When these things are now, generally speaking, easier than ever to create, they have less impact and are no longer as successful as they used to be.

You need to rework the system to be focused on building trust across multiple touchpoints.

The more trust-building touchpoints you can build, the better you’ll end up.

Some actionable tips…

So from a high level, it’s about building targeted trust over simple sending more slop out into the world.

But how do you do that?

Well, think about the longer form, big attention sucking assets and approaches you’ve got.

You can quite easily break those down into more bite-sized elements for the user to consume across multiple touchpoints.

• A 60-minute workshop becomes six 10-minute videos or sixty 1-minute shorts
• That big ass sales page becomes a 10 part email sequence to build trust over a week

… and so on.

Distribute across channels to increase recall and trust.

But if you really want to take this to the next step, here’s what you do.

You build a system that sequentially delivers new content to the users who have engaged with you in the past.

This system removes objections that prevent trust one by one.

• Touchpoint 1 focuses on the problem
• Touchpoint 2 focuses on the solution
• Touchpoint 3 focuses on how it works

… and so on.

When I help people build the ascension systems we create within ACCER, we focus on two things.

1. Sequentially removing doubts to build trust.
2. Hitting people on different platforms and channels to build familiarity across multiple “date spots”

This creates the familiarity, builds trust, and removes objections.

Now, if you really want to supercharge this, I recommend you do the below.

Get involved on video.

Text is so easy to spin up with AI, a real person speaking and sharing their knowledge is not something that can be faked though.

So lean into it.

Also, I’d recommend you zag. Everyone is zigging towards AI (myself included). But be careful and make sure there’s stuff you’re doing that’s not AI generated. People can tell, and it doesn’t hit the same as real content.

What about the overall system…

Don’t think that you have to tear everything down and rebuild from scratch.

You will need to optimise for trust, but the winners will be the same as they always have.

We’re all still in the business of generating good leads.

$1 products are still the best way to generate leads without losing money.

You just might need to build a couple more touchpoints in to sell them.

Once you get the volume, you own the relationship. And so the game of ascension and trust building to take them to the high ticket offer is easier as you can control it.

Some examples…

I want to run through the results from some recent observations of my own marketing.

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I tested 2 different campaigns.

One was static image only.

The other used video creative.

The static images got better clicks, lower costing clicks, and outperformed video in all fo the key “ad metrics”.

But the ads generated more sales and a better overall ROAS.

People trust people.

Putting yourself on video is a great way to cut through the AI slop noise.

Secondly, I’ve built retargeting into all my ad campaigns as a default.

The cold ad campaigns and ad sets for me often lose money. A current one is at 0.5 ROAS.

However, I make that money back by serving ads to the people who have engaged with me already.

They see one ad, they’re getting serviced another.

Those multiple touchpoints have resulted in a ROAS for that ad set of 3X+, which more than covers the losses for the cold.

In short…

Trust is key right now.

the old methods of getting someone in on a single asset’s use is going away.

You want to win? You’ve got to build systems that are focused on building trust and familiarity over simply being seen.

Any Qs, drop ‘em below.