Sounding Impressive Online Can Quietly Reveal You Have Nothing Clear
Most weeks I get a message from somebody who has just joined one of my courses, and plenty of them say some version of the same thing. They tell me they had seen all sorts of adverts promising easy money with AI before, and every one of those adverts sounded wonderful.
One of them put it more bluntly than most. She said she had seen so many opportunities to make money with AI, but thought it was all “bellony”.
That word has stayed with me.
It was never AI itself that put her off. It was the language sitting on top of it: powerful, proven, game-changing, repeated everywhere, with nothing solid holding any of it up.
Specific marketing claims are what finally brought her round, not louder ones.
If every promise on your page could appear word for word on a competitor’s page too, your reader cannot tell you apart from the people who let them down before. That is the gap worth closing, and it costs nothing to close it.
Why Your Best Words Might Be Working Against You
Open ten websites in the same market and you will likely find the same handful of words doing all the heavy lifting: proven, powerful, game-changing, customer-focused. None of these words are untrue. They are simply worn smooth from overuse, until they barely register with a reader at all.
A reader does not trust a word because it sounds confident. They trust it because it sounds like something that could only come from you.
I see this play out directly with people who come through my own courses. Many of them are retired, or close to it, and far more sceptical of AI than most.
They are not short of people telling them AI is life-changing. What they are short of is somebody telling them, in plain language, exactly what it does and how.
This is not unique to AI. The same thing happens in cooking, fitness, investing, anywhere a reader has already been disappointed once by a word that promised more than it delivered.
The Clichés Worth Dropping First
Start with your own homepage, or your most recent email. Circle every phrase that could sit on a competitor’s page without anyone noticing. That usually includes the words above, along with phrases like built with care, customer obsessed and cutting edge.
None of those phrases are lies. They are simply invisible.
A reader’s eyes slide straight past them, the same way yours do when you scroll past them on somebody else’s page. One more invisible phrase on your own site does not help a single person decide to trust you.
What Specific Looks Like Instead
Here is the part that makes the difference between a page full of clichés and one people believe. Replace the vague version of a claim with the one true detail underneath it, however small that detail feels. This is where specific marketing claims start doing real work.
Do not tell someone your support team cares. Tell them a real person answers within two hours. Do not say your approach is proven.
Say what it was tested against, and what the result was compared with. Do not promise somebody can be up and running in ninety minutes.
I have said for years that claims like that are rubbish, because there is always a pitfall nobody mentioned, and your reader usually finds it the hard way instead of hearing it from you first.
A reader does not trust a word because it sounds confident. They trust it because it sounds like something that could only come from you.
That one swap, vague confidence for a plain fact, changes how a whole page reads. It stops sounding like advertising and starts sounding like evidence, and evidence is what persuades somebody who has already been let down once before.
The Cost Of Sounding Like Everyone Else
I have written about this kind of thing before, in other articles I have shared recently, and the same pattern keeps turning up. People rarely fail to persuade a reader because their offer is weak. They fail because their words could belong to anyone else in the same market.
Specific marketing claims protect you from a slower, quieter cost too: the reader who almost trusted you, then clicked away. Nothing on the page gave them one reason to believe it was true for them, specifically, rather than true in general.
Think about the people you are writing for. Somebody weighing up whether AI is worth their time does not need another word like transformative. They need one example close enough to their own situation that they recognise themselves inside it.
This matters even more with an audience that has already been disappointed once. Plenty of the people reading your page have seen a dozen opportunities before yours, and every one of those used the same breathless language.
A reader who has been let down reads your page looking for the catch, not the benefit. Specific detail is the fastest way to show them there isn’t one hiding anywhere.
Borrow From What Already Worked, Once
You do not need to invent fresh proof from nothing. Look back through what you have already built, said or delivered yourself, and find the detail that is already specific. Then say it plainly instead of dressing it up.
You may already have one specific number worth sharing: a genuine turnaround time, or a particular thing you fixed for one real person. Start there instead of a cliché. A small, honest figure persuades more than an impressive sounding word ever will, because nobody has to wonder whether it is true.
The same applies to a result, a number, a turnaround time or a guarantee. If it is true and specific, it earns more trust sitting in plain sight than it ever will hiding behind a word like proven.
Slow and steady wins the race here too. You are not trying to impress anyone with one clever line. You are trying to be believed, one honest detail at a time.
Apply This To Everything You Write About AI
Many of the people you want to reach are not short of AI opportunities landing in their inbox already. They are short of one that says plainly what it does, who it suits, and what it will not promise.
Instead of calling something easy, say how long the first result took to appear, or what someone needed to already know before starting. Instead of calling something powerful, say what specific task it replaced, and what the person no longer has to do by hand because of it.
Instead of promising it works for everyone, say plainly who it does not suit. Let that honesty do the persuading instead of one more adjective.
None of this requires giving away anything you would rather keep private. It simply means trading a word that sounds good for a sentence that is true, said plainly, to the exact person reading it.
A Simple Test For Your Own Page
Pick one page on your site today. Read it the way a stranger would, not the way you wrote it. Circle every phrase that could appear on a competitor’s page unchanged, word for word, without anyone noticing the difference.
Then replace each one with something that could only come from you. A number. A timeframe.
A detail about how something is really done, rather than how it sounds when it is described in the best possible light. More haste, less speed applies here.
You are not rewriting the whole page overnight. You are swapping one tired word for one true sentence, then doing it again next week.
Nothing about this test takes long. Ten minutes with your own homepage will usually turn up more invisible phrases than you expect. Each one you replace earns back a little more of the trust a cliché quietly spends.
Do this consistently and your page stops reading like an advert. It starts reading like proof, built on specific marketing claims rather than borrowed words.
It reads like somebody who knows what they are talking about, not somebody using the same ten words as everyone else in the market.
If you want help putting this into practice, One Letter From Retirement is worth a look. It is built around writing one honest, specific letter to your reader instead of a page full of borrowed marketing language.
It goes a good deal further into the detail than I can here. If turning clearer, more specific writing into something that brings in sign-ups sounds useful to you, it is a sensible next step from everything above.
None of this needs a rewrite of your whole business in one sitting. It needs one page, one honest look, and the willingness to swap a tired word for a true one. Start small, let the page you have today get a little more specific, and let the rest follow from there.
