 I have to stand here. Delight. I see the light. You're doing a brilliant job, by the way. It's cool. Hi, my name's Guy, and a force. Not gooey, and a force. I feel like I'm holding the podium up now. I'd like to move a bit, but I can't. Can I move? I wonder what I have to wear. If I've got the dicky bird on now, what do I wear tonight? I didn't think that through. My talk... Hang on. How cool is this? Let's go. Anyway. My talk is really about how to overcome the curse of knowledge to grow your business. Who in this audience considers himself an expert at what they do? Who's good at what they do? A lot of people. So, I've got ten minutes, and I'm going to try and do two things. I'm going to try and explain, and it's easy to grasp, what the curse of knowledge is, and the second thing is I'm going to try and give you some tips to overcome that in order to start growing your business. This is going to apply to your website, and how you talk about your business. So, when I was waiting around, I think it was yesterday, I was waiting around yesterday, around, I think it was yesterday, for the unconference board to appear, and it finally arrived. I was like, oh, God, I've got my topics. I went and I wrote four topics on the board, and then a little time later, I got a call from... I got a tweet, actually, from Dennis. I don't know where the Dennis is yet. Dennis said, can you come and come back? Come back, Guy. I'll use one of your topics. So, what I did is I put four topics down, because I thought, oh, this is... I've got so many good ideas, or I've got so many ideas. I often think my ideas are good, but that's just one of those things. And I wrote four sentences instead of writing one sentence. Now, that's kind of what I'm getting at, which is write one thing instead of four things. Don't make people think. Don't make them choose. Just be really, really simple and straightforward. What I would like, firstly, I'm going to explain the phrase, the curse of knowledge. It comes from a guy called Pinker, Stephen Pinker. He's an author. He's a linguist at Harvard University, and he's written a book called The Thinking Persons Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. It's a very good book. And in this book, he talks about the curse of knowledge, which happens to anyone who knows their subject intimately. And it goes like this. The more of an expert you are in your topic or your subject, the harder it is for you to write simply about it. Okay? So that's in a nutshell what it is. I would like two volunteers from the audience. Two volunteers. You don't have to say anything. I'm going to use you as sort of markers. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you. There we go. And one over here. There we go. Brilliant. Well done, guys. My headset is drifting. Okay. Position you here. There's a brilliant talk. I like Bertiel talks, by the way. And if we go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And could you come stand over here? I have lost my mic. Oh dear. Would you mind? Thank you. I've got funny ears, you see. It's the ponytail. There we go. You're doing a great job there. Thank you. Good. Awesome. What we have here, you're an expert in what you do. Brussels. Luxembourg. Sorry. I'm from Africa. I'm not very good at European geography. He's an expert in what he does. Here is a potential new customer. There are ten steps between them. You really know your shit. You know your stuff, right? And you've worked really hard on your marketing. You've got your marketing automation in there. Using get drip. So what was it? Active campaign. Active campaign. So you've optimised your website. You've optimised your communications. You can take one, two, three, four steps towards your customer. And you've worked really hard doing this. You've done lots of work. Active is still really, really big. So what we're trying to do, in the absence, I loved what you were talking about, the communication between two people on the website. We lose sight of that behind the technology. So we've got these two people here. You're selling something and you're being really clear about what you're offering. He has done, you talked about a Google search, you were looking for the content, all of that stuff. They're too far away. Five minutes, really. No. That's cool. You guys can sit down. The purpose of the demonstration is to give you a visual image of the gap between what you offer and the people trying to buy from you. And even though our man from Luxembourg, Luxembourg, had worked really hard to clarify his message, he'd optimised his pages, he had clear calls to action, he had internal links, upbound links, brilliant content strategy, social sharing, email marketing, it was rocking. He still suffered from the curse of knowledge. In my example, I'm sure it's not actually the case, but so my example earlier I came here to do this talk about how to overcome the curse of knowledge. I still suffered the curse of knowledge in trying to choose my topic of, ah, here are four things. And why? Because I felt insecure. I didn't know what the people wanted. I thought, let the community choose. That's the democratic thing to do. And Dennis was standing there and he said, no, you must choose. He's a German guy living in Italy. And he said, you must choose one. So I turned and I was like, I had a crisis, I was like, how do I know what you want to hear? You know? But being an expert, I just turned and I looked and I and I chose that topic, how to overcome the curse of knowledge. It seemed like the most relevant. And then I went away and I thought, well, it's in the hands of the gods now and we'll see what comes back with. And here I am standing on the podium. So it kind of goes against my intuition which was to give people a choice. Don't be dictatorial. And that comes down to the curse of knowledge and understanding that. The next thing that I want to talk about and this is, if I can leave you with two things to do. The first thing is how you talk about your business and go and look at your website. So I've done some networking here. It's been really fun. You sit down next to someone and they say, you go, what do you do? And they go, I'm a developer. They go, what do you develop? I develop plugins. What does the plugin do? It's an extension for WordPress for WooCommerce. WooCommerce? I'm not getting any commission for that, by the way. But by this point I've had this conversation with four or five people. I'm really tired. I don't know what problem do you solve? How are you making people's lives better? So what they could have said is we make it easy for you to join your website but you are counseling software so that you can figure out how much money you're making. Right? Sorry, how much? Two minutes ago. No pressure. One and a half. All the back and forth. Can I get another 30? I'm joking. So that's really the point. So what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to go away and look at your website, the homepage on your website. Do you say clearly what problem you solve for your customers? Not what you do and you're very good at what you do. Most people who do what they do are very good at it but that's not the thing that's going to lead to the conversion as we say in marketing. So and while you're here don't say to the next person who says what do you do? I'm a developer. So try something different. It'll be really uncomfortable the first time you say it because I used to be a web designer. I used to say I design websites. I don't say that anymore. So and I don't design websites either by the way. If you want to find out what I do you can ask me afterward. I'd like to end off saying this has been an amazing conference. I love WordPress. The community is awesome. This venue is amazing. It's a city. So I'm just really grateful to be part of this. I'm grateful to be part of the community. I'm grateful to help people in their businesses. And I wish you guys have a great boogie tonight at the ball. Cool.