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The Positioning Decision Worksheet

Three questions to answer and hold before you touch a word of copy, so you stop rewriting a homepage that will not sit still.

If your homepage has been rewritten five times and still feels off, the problem is not the words. Positioning is the decision. Messaging is the words that carry it. You cannot write your way out of a decision you have not made.

Answer these three in writing. Then stop, and hold them for a quarter before you change them.

1. What is the real alternative?

What is the buyer actually weighing you against, including the option of doing nothing at all? Doing nothing is usually the true competitor, and most positioning ignores it.

Write the alternative here, in the buyer's words, not your category's words.

2. What can you be genuinely best at, for a specific someone?

Not best for everyone. Name the someone. Then name the one thing you can be best at for them and keep being best at every time, for years.

If you cannot say who it is not for, you have not made the decision yet.

3. What do they have to believe for that to matter?

List the beliefs. If a belief is not true for your buyer yet, that belief is your content plan.

The subtraction test

A real position excludes. Write down what you are giving up by choosing this: the nine other things you would also like to be, the buyers you are letting go.

If nothing is given up, you have written a lobby, not a position, and buyers do not choose lobbies.

Before you write copy

Read your three answers aloud. If they are true, specific, and you would still defend them in a year, the messaging gets easy, because you are finally just saying a true thing you have already decided.

If you would rather have someone do this with you, that is what the audit is for.