Did you know that talking about the amazing results that your clients experience with you could actually be turning them away?

Yeah, you read that right. This big hairy copywriting mistake is extra dangerous because, on the surface, it seems like the smartest thing to do. Why wouldn’t you want to talk about the extraordinary ways you change your clients’ lives?

The trickiest part? The more successful an entrepreneur is (and the more incredible their results), the more I see them making this copywriting mistake.

For the answer to this riddle, you’re going to want to eavesdrop on my two girlfriends (double the RKA, double the vocal fry) in this episode of Awkward Marketing. They’re having the world’s most improbable coffee talk. And yet, as ridiculous as it may sound, their conversation reads like a paragraph from so many — too many — of the small biz websites I come across these days.

This awkward copywriting mistake happens when:

1. You start from the end of the story, instead of the beginning, skipping over the part that attracts your clients to work with you in the first place.
2. You are so close to your business that you get bored of your core messaging and start assuming your audience knows that stuff, anyway.

When you’re so close to your business and the results you provide, you start losing sight of the initial needs and pain points that bring clients through your doors in the first place. Or maybe you think those early pain points are too basic and superficial to write about in your copy, so you leapfrog right over them to get to the juicy, high-level stuff.

But that’s where you’re losing clients: by skipping to a marriage proposal before the first date.

The pain points that first attract your audience to your work may not ultimately be why they stay your clients, rave about you, or send all their friends your way. So, it makes sense why you’d want to highlight the transformation people experience as a result of your work. Come for the pain points, stay for the transformation.

But, the danger is, if you skip past those urgent pain points in your copy to get to the juicy transformation story, folks won’t ever become your clients in the first place. Simplicity sells, folks. You have to open the door for your clients before they can walk through it.