These 3 Questions Will Sharpen Your Entire Offer

All right everyone, welcome to our February 2026 Circle, Inner Circle workshop. Today we are going to be talking about the marketing trifecta. So you are here because you have signed up and showed up for this workshop. You are in the right place. If you would like to learn more about the 3 questions that you must be able to answer to succeed on Substack or whatever platform that you are using as your primary permission asset. So I'm gonna be talking about Substack cuz that in the examples, that's my primary permission marketing hub. But if you're using a website with an email list, or if you're doing this on, on social media or through your podcast, you could just substitute those platforms. The, the things that we're gonna talk about apply. Indeed, the marketing trifecta questions are great questions to answer whenever you are trying to communicate and connect with the right people, whether that's on your permission-based asset or your social media posts or your Substack notes or posts or podcast episodes, what have you. These questions are really important. Uh, what you should do next, those of you that are Inner Circle members have access to the worksheet now. And those of you that are Circle members will have access to this, this replay immediately. Well, not immediately after, but sometime before the end of today, you'll have access to the replay. And if you have signed up but weren't able to show up, as long as you're a Circle member who has RSVP'd, you'll have access to the full replay. Inner Circle members will get the replay sometime this weekend along with all the other resources and The entire replay will be available for Circle members sometime either at the end of this month or very early next month. And subscribers, if you're tuning in, you have access to the preview. So what I am— what, what happens after we're all done is my intent is that you will leave this workshop with a lifestyle freedom priority statement. I know we've talked about this many times, but it's really important. So we're going to talk about it again. You're going to have an understanding of and should be able to have some draft responses to the Marketing Trifecta questions, and you should have a plan for what your next step is. All right, let's get this party started. So the first thing that we want to talk about when we're talking about the Marketing Trifecta is how it is the antidote to our proclivity and our default programming and conditioning to be checking the wrong scoreboard. So whether it's Substack or some other platform, most of the advice that you are hearing about how to grow your audience or engage your audience is advice that is coming in the form of some sort of tool, tactic, maybe strategy. So if you are on Substack and that is your primary audience connection and conversion mechanism, then maybe it's chasing a bestseller badge or trying to go viral on Notes or trying to pursue some other subscriber growth hack on Substack. If you are a purpose-driven difference maker who wants greater prosperity but wants to build that through impact, not becoming an expert digital marketer, then all of these things can very quickly turn into what are called false proxies. And for anyone that's not familiar with that term, a false proxy is a metric that is easy to measure, that actually doesn't matter. So a lot of us are familiar with false proxies through our social media profiles, and that includes Substack Notes, which I consider a social media platform as well. If you are chasing virality, if you're trying to get as many clicks as possible, if you're just trying to get as many likes as possible, that is a false proxy. That is something that you can't— that, that, that is easy to measure because you can count how many likes you have, how many comments you have, how many restacks you have, at least on Substack, but it doesn't really mean anything if you don't connect with the right people. And so anytime that you are chasing after the easy-to-read metrics, most of the time you are playing a stupid game for stupid prizes. And if you are, again, purpose-driven and striving for prosperity and trying to achieve that prosperity through impact, it's not the number of followers, the number of subscribers, it's not the number of likes or comments, it's the number of the right people, the smallest audience is a topic we'll talk about quite a bit today. That's the metric that actually matters. Having 1,000 people like your Substack post matters very little if none of them want to start a conversation with you. If you have a post that only gets a handful of likes, but you get a conversation or two out of it, that's going to be a much better metric for measuring, and it will actually lead to the kind of conver— conversion that you're looking for, which is to get a conversation going with the right kind of person that's going to work through your conversation engine and become a customer or client. So the important thing here is whether it's Substack or any other platform that you're leveraging as your primary permission asset, that platform is not a strategy. It's a tool-based tactical distraction unless you are leveraging it with intent and with integrity. So today, instead of playing the stupid game for stupid prizes by just trying to collect meaningless metrics and based on false proxies, we are going to do the quote unquote grown-up version. And we're going to first define what success means to us. What is our lifestyle priority, our lifestyle freedom vision? Then we're going to build our Substack or whatever your, your permission-based asset platform is around your answers to the 3 trifecta questions, the 3 marketing questions that are called the marketing trifecta. Just a quick note, the marketing trifecta and the questions that we're going to discuss all come from Seth Godin's marketing seminar, and they are repackaged and framed slightly differently in his book based on the marketing seminar called This Is Marketing. Just for those of you that aren't familiar with my context with all of this, I am a graduate of Seth Godin's alt-MBA, which which was the program that preceded the Akimbo Workshops and the Marketing Seminar. The Marketing Seminar was the first of the Akimbo Workshops. I was part of the initial coaching team for the Marketing Seminar after going through it twice as a student. I coached half a dozen sessions or so before I became a head coach in the Freelancers Workshop and the Creatives Workshop. So I'm very familiar with these questions, with this whole approach that Seth uses and talks about in the Marketing Seminar. And this is marketing. Book, the first thing that I would encourage you to do is to answer this question. And again, you can substitute whatever your, your connection platform is for, for Substack if you're not really on Substack or leveraging Substack as your communication distribution channel. But in one sentence, on Substack, success means what? So as an example, for me on Substack, Success means a permission asset that fills my offers through 1,000 engaged, meaning 3-star or higher, free subscribers and a vibrant community of 100 paid subscribers. That is what success means to me. And yes, I am measuring some metrics that I just said could be false proxies, but they're not false proxies to me because I've already defined through my— and we've talked about this earlier this year when I showed you all the numbers in my communication engine— I have determined that if I have a certain number of free subscribers, I can guess or come really close to knowing the number of paid subscribers I'll have. And based on the number of paid subscribers, I know what percentage of those paid subscribers will become clients in my low-ticket and mid-ticket and high-ticket offers. So I have validated that these metrics matter to me in terms of that, of, of confirming or being able to worth an assertion or a hypothesis about what it takes for me to get 10 Boxer Velocity clients and 3 Cornerman coaching clients. If I have at least 1,000 free subscribers, I know that I'll have at least 60 paid subscribers, and I know that I will, through those conversations, be able to have at least 10 of those people become Boxer Velocity clients, and 3 of those people become Cornerman Coaching clients. That's why those numbers are there for me. Your mileage will vary. Do not— and this is my cautionary tale— don't try to apply my numbers and my examples to your situation. If you don't yet have a thousand subscribers, then you can confirm based on the number of subscribers that you have what your percentage of paid subscribers are and what your conversion rate through your conversation engine is giving you the number of clients that you have. Once you have all those numbers, and we've talked about this in other workshops, then it's just a matter of optimizing wherever it is that you will get the biggest return on your investment, usually towards the end of the conversation engine chain. So the important note here is the principles and practices that we're discussing today can be applied to any platform, not just Substack, whatever platform you're using to create your permission based asset. So that is the setup. So although we have talked about this just in the last, last month's workshop, and we've talked about it many times, it's still something that I find people struggle with, not in just being able to name some sort of lifestyle freedom vision or name a lifestyle freedom priority. But what I often see is that there's a lack of specificity. In naming this vision of lifestyle freedom. So whatever current answer to this question you have, I would just encourage you to challenge yourself to make sure, is this specific? Is it something I can actually measure? I can tell how far away or close I am to that vision. Is it achievable? Is it— am I being realistic? Is this something I can actually accomplish? Is it relevant to the life that I want to live and not just following some, uh, online guru or digital marketer's formula? And is it time-bound? Am I setting myself a reasonable timeframe for when this can be accomplished? So the big trap here is that most of the time we don't clearly define what success means to us in terms of the lifestyle that we want our business to fund and fit around. And so what ends up happening is the platform defines success for us, which is why so often we get stuck thinking we have to be everywhere all the time, all at once on social media, and that we have to do whatever we have to do to get as many eyeballs and clicks and likes as possible and get as many conversations going in DMs or whatever, you know, digital marketing strategy you're using. And that's just a recipe for burning out and blowing yourself up. As solopreneurs, you have a very finite amount of time, attention, reputation, and energy or effort that you can expend. And if you're trying to be everywhere all the time, all at once, the way that your favorite guru or digital marketer is, and don't— and fail to understand that that person, that their system works because they have a staff of people that are dedicated to social media, answering conversations, booking sales calls, actually conducting sales calls. If you're trying to follow their model as a true solopreneur that's doing most everything on your own, it's not only not gonna work, you're going to burn out and blow yourself up. So we're not chasing the views, the likes, the badges as part of our business model, the way that we're often encouraged. We are defining a version of success that allows us to define specifically what resources we need, especially revenue and time, in order to build that meaningful business that gives us our sense of fulfillment, but also funds and fits the life that we want. So the lifestyle. Priority statement. Again, this is review for most of you. I know I'm living my ideal life. What is happening on a weekly basis? What— how are you spending your time and attention and discretionary revenue when you are living your ideal lifestyle? And to accomplish this, I will need— how much money do you really need How much time do you really want to spend on the things that you want your business to fund and fit around? And that will give you a sense of how much revenue, what the gap is between the revenue that you're earning and the revenue you need to earn and the amount of time that you're spending and the amount of time that you can realistically spend while you're still doing all the things that you built your business for in the first place. So again, my example, and you've heard this before. I know I'm living my ideal life when I can spend 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM caring for my grandsons. That's Monday through Friday. To accomplish this, I need to work fewer than 10 hours per week and earn at least $60,000 a year. $60,000 a year is my enough number. If I earn $60,000 a year, I'm taking care of all of my financial responsibilities with enough leftover to do the things that my wife and I like to do., and anything above and beyond $60,000 a year is gravy. And if I am working more than 10 hours a, a week, that's time that I'm robbing from my wife and my grandsons. And I know that that's a gap that I need to start to close. This is my statement. Make your statement based on the reality of your situation. Where are you and where do you want to be? There's all sorts of resources. In the library, the archive around recapture and reallocate. If you haven't done that exercise, I strongly recommend it. It is the exercise I, I implore clients and community members to do the most. And it is the exercise that is done the least. And it is probably the reason why most people stay stuck. Is you don't actually know how much money you're actually spending where, and you're probably spending way more than you think on things that actually don't matter to you, that aren't helping you live the life that you want to live. So my encouragement here, if you have the worksheet, is to write your lifestyle freedom priority statement, keep it specific, keep it in a time window, know the number of hours that you need to work, know the amount of revenue that you need to raise in order to hit that ideal lifestyle that you want to live. The lifestyle freedom vision statement is your ruler. It's something— it's a very easy way to measure every decision and every action that you are doing. If what you are deciding on is not going to get you closer to that vision of lifestyle freedom, then it's probably something that shouldn't be acted upon right now. If it's not getting you closer to what you want, it automatically is getting you further away. Because if you're just adding another thing to your to-do list or adding another thing to your list of responsibilities, then you are creating additional drain on your precious resources of time, attention, money, and effort that are not getting you closer to what you actually want. So your lifestyle vision statement, the more specificity you have and the more actual detail you have in your numbers in terms of time and revenue, then it becomes really easy to start making decisions quickly in real time about what you should do and what you should not do, and maybe what you should stop doing. So the ruler becomes a filter that helps you weigh every tactic that, and every trend and every temptation that you have, whether that's on Substack, when you're considering a Substack Boost, a Sprint or Accelerator or Mastermind, or some sort of, uh, Substack Guru growth hacking workshop or course, and you can actually start making decisions based on this is what I need to do to help me achieve the things that I want to achieve. So with that, we're going to talk about the marketing decisions that actually support your definition of, of success. And the key thing here again is we have to remember that Substack is not a strategy. And it is not a tactic. It is simply a tool. It's a platform that actually has a collection of tools—posting, notes, email, podcasting, lives—that you can use to serve your tactics for creating engagement with the right people. And that should inform and, and promote your strategy for initiating conversations with the right prospects and leads that will help you turn prospect— good prospects into great leads and great leads into perfect fit clients. That should be your strategy. And tactically, how you're starting those conversations and moving those conversations along should be employing just the tools that you need and nothing else. And that is how you're going going to fulfill the principles of having an irresistible offer, an eager audience, and a system for getting that offer in front of the right people in your audience so that you can fund the lifestyle that you want. That's your, your philosophy is your lifestyle vision statement. So if you're, if you're on Substack or whatever platform you're using is stalled, you don't need to churn out more content with or without AI. You don't need to use more of the tools that are available. You need more clarity about what your actual goals are and what your actual strategy is and how you can leverage the tools and tactics that will actually help you achieve the tactics and strategy that will help you achieve the goals that you want with confidence. So you need more clarity about your goals and a strategy you can confidently execute based on philosophy and principles. Philosophy. What do you believe? What is the vision? What is the overall goal? The lifestyle vision that you want your business to fund and fit around. And principally, what are the 2 or 3 things that need to be true in order for you to achieve that vision? All right. We're just about to get to the marketing trifecta questions now. Okay. The marketing trifecta again. This comes— this is Seth Godin's intellectual property. It comes from the marketing seminar. It is explored a little bit differently in This Is Marketing, but the marketing trifecta are 3 questions that if you answer them cleanly, your writing will get sharper, meaning your content creation, your offers will get clearer, meaning it will be explicit as to the transformation that is on offer. And the promises that you can keep for a specific kind of customer. And your marketing will stop feeling like you're performing for a social media platform or for just through your content creation in general. And it will start feeling more like the kind of content that you need to create the connection with the right people that leads to the conversations for the right people that will help convert the right people to be perfect fit clients that you can actually help achieve what they want to achieve or solve the problem that they need, you need your help to solve. The 3 questions are