Things I’ve been thinking about lately.

TL;DR: Most coaches look at their Instagram likes and think that’s engagement. It isn’t. The gap between Instagram saves vs likes tells you something far more useful: what your audience actually needs versus what they’re willing to publicly acknowledge. A like is a nod. A save is someone quietly saying “I need this later.” When…

TL;DR: A divorce coach spent three years creating thoughtful, empathetic content and getting almost no enquiries. Then she spent one weekend doing proper niche research for coaches, the kind that involves reading what people actually write in anonymous online spaces when nobody’s watching. She found 40 pain points she’d never heard a client say out…

TL;DR: If you’ve found your coaching content not working despite doing everything right, you’re almost certainly making one of three mistakes. You’re writing for peers instead of clients. You’re using your own vocabulary instead of theirs. Or you’re teaching when you should be describing. I watched three coaches fix these problems over the past year,…

TL;DR: The ADHD coaching niche is one of the fastest-growing spaces in the coaching world, and one of the most misunderstood. This article follows an ADHD coach called Nic (name changed) who spent eighteen months creating content about executive function, emotional dysregulation, and habit-building, and couldn’t work out why none of it was landing. The…

TL;DR: AI audience research sounds like the obvious shortcut. Type a prompt, get a customer profile, skip the hard work of actually listening. And it does work, to a point. AI is genuinely useful at clustering themes, spotting patterns across large datasets, and giving you a starting picture of who your audience might be. The…

TL;DR: If you’re a coach or consultant trying to understand your audience, Reddit for coaches is the most underused research advantage available. Not because it’s trendy, but because it solves a problem nothing else does: people are honest when they’re anonymous. Surveys give you polished answers. Facebook groups give you performance. Instagram comments give you…

TL;DR: Google’s AI Overviews are changing what content gets found, and most coaches are responding with the wrong instinct. The knee-jerk reaction is to either panic about SEO dying or start gaming a new algorithm. Neither helps. What AI Overviews actually reward is content that demonstrates genuine, specific expertise and answers real questions in plain…

TL;DR: Pain-language mapping is a voice of customer research technique where you build a structured document that puts your professional vocabulary next to your audience’s real words. Two columns. Left: how you describe what you do. Right: how your clients describe what they’re going through. The gap between those columns is the reason your content…

TL;DR: Audience surveys don’t work the way coaches think they do. Not because the questions are bad, but because people edit themselves when they know someone’s watching. A coach sends out a survey and gets responses like “I want more confidence” and “I’d love better work-life balance.” Reasonable answers. Also almost completely useless for creating…