{"id":181244,"date":"2024-03-04T11:14:12","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T17:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/?p=181244"},"modified":"2026-09-06T20:24:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T01:24:47","slug":"podcast-971-the-5-factors-for-crafting-simple-read-effective-messages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/finance\/career\/podcast-971-the-5-factors-for-crafting-simple-read-effective-messages\/","title":{"rendered":"Podcast #971: The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read: Effective!) Messages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whether you&#8217;re a teacher, parent, or entrepreneur, you want to be able to persuade your students, children, and customers with your messages. That&#8217;s a tall task in the modern age, when people are bombarded with 13 hours of media a day. How do you cut through all that noise to make sure you&#8217;re heard? My guest would say it&#8217;s all about keeping things simple.<\/p>\n<p>Ben Guttmann is a marketing educator and consultant who&#8217;s helped promote everything from the NFL to<em> New York Times<\/em>-bestselling authors. He is himself the author of <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3InEWiM\"><em>Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win\u2014and How to Design Them<\/em><\/a>. Today on the show, Ben explains the gap between how people like to receive messages and the self-sabotaging, complication-introducing ways people tend to send them. We then talk about the five factors of effective marketing that anyone can use to close this gap and craft simple, effective, influential messages. We discuss why you should highlight something&#8217;s benefits rather than its features, the question to ask to figure out what those benefits are, how to replace &#8220;and&#8221; with &#8220;so&#8221; to create more focused messages, how the fad of using the F-word in book titles shows the transience of salience, how to make your message minimal by imagining it as a Jenga tower and how minimal isn&#8217;t the same thing as short, and much more, including Ben&#8217;s most immediately actionable tip for crafting better, simpler messages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whether you&#8217;re a teacher, parent, or entrepreneur, you want to be able to persuade your students, children, and customers with your messages. That&#8217;s a tall task in the modern age, when people are bombarded with 13 hours of media a day. How do you cut through all that noise to make sure you&#8217;re heard? My [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":194701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[424,42377,156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-career","category-finance","category-podcast"],"featured_image_urls":{"large":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/971-538x280.png","medium_large":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/971-768x432.png","aom":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/971-372x230.png","reactor-320":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/971-320x180.png","reactor-640":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/971-640x360.png"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Podcast #971: The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read: Effective!) Messages | The Art of Manliness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/finance\/career\/podcast-971-the-5-factors-for-crafting-simple-read-effective-messages\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Podcast #971: The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read: Effective!) Messages | The Art of Manliness\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Whether you&#8217;re a teacher, parent, or entrepreneur, you want to be able to persuade your students, children, and customers with your messages. That&#8217;s a tall task in the modern age, when people are bombarded with 13 hours of media a day. How do you cut through all that noise to make sure you&#8217;re heard? My [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/finance\/career\/podcast-971-the-5-factors-for-crafting-simple-read-effective-messages\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Art of Manliness\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"http:\/\/facebook.com\/artofmanliness\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-03-04T17:14:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-09-07T01:24:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/971.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1280\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"720\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Brett &amp; Kate McKay\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@artofmanliness\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@artofmanliness\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Brett &amp; Kate McKay\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/beta.artofmanliness.com\\\/finance\\\/career\\\/podcast-971-the-5-factors-for-crafting-simple-read-effective-messages\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/beta.artofmanliness.com\\\/finance\\\/career\\\/podcast-971-the-5-factors-for-crafting-simple-read-effective-messages\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Brett &amp; Kate McKay\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.artofmanliness.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/e4ed6cc1b40b6de48739267a953ef2b3\"},\"headline\":\"Podcast #971: The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read: Effective!) 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