Hello Reader,

As I've mentioned before, I ride my bike a lot. And since I live in the USA, this means being ultra careful about traffic, despite that I stay on our city's neighborhood speed-limited greenways that are designed for multimodal transportation (so kick scooters, roller skaters, runners, cyclists, etc as well as vehicles)—roads are roads, which means that you never know what's going to happen.

Being the big dork that I am, I started researching how to make my bike rides safer. And I found out that there are a handful of back lights for bikes with built in radar. They detect when someone is behind you before you even hear them, the radar light will buzz your bike computer (a little gadget you mount on the front), and show you how far away they are in increasingly bright colors so you can be more aware of your environment. Cool, right?

What I discovered after I bought mine, however, is an even cooler feature: the closer the vehicle gets to you, the more erratic and random the blinking of the light is.

The philosophy with this is that we humans SEE irregular or unexpected things earlier and more often that things that are predictable.

If we accept the premise that we humans pay more attention to things that are unexpected than predictable (and I certainly do—this tracks with my very real experience), does is make more sense to shine brighter, bolder, and bigger than what's expected?

I think it does.

The internet is noisy and chaotic, but it's also a vast sea of sameness and predictability. If we want to connect with the right people, it makes a whole lot of sense to be like my erratically blinking light and catch our audience's eye.

There are loads of ways to do this and communicate it to our people:

1. Your actual offers/services: So many folks package their services exactly the same way as everyone else in their industry, but that's not an indicator that's what your audience wants. Every single time I've packaged up something differently, it's done incredibly well—and my clients say the same.
2. Your message: Be bold, say what you think, tell folks why you're not the same as everyone else. When I added a few key phrases to my own homepage that I saw clients' ears perk up when I said them, it made an enormous difference in my engagement rate on my website. And people mention to me how much those specific phrases make a difference.
3. Your branding: Truly, this is the lowest hanging fruit of them all. Quite literally standing out visually (just like that magical radar light) can make a massive impact in people sitting up and paying attention.

You can dive deeper and deeper into this, but even those three elements will move the needle in rising above that noisy, crowded internet.

Or, if you're ready to workshop your next move towards shining even brighter within a supportive community next year, apply to join The Luminary Mastermind facilitated by myself and sales queen extraordinaire, Natalie Bullen.

Talk soon,

Sarah