Know - Trust - Love is the philosophy that runs through all content work. Readers pass through three states in order: they know, then they trust, then they love. Each piece of content you make serves exactly one state. This philosophy applies to every method of making content. The Know - Trust - Love content funnel is just one of those methods. These docs are for you if you write content to sell a product.
The three states of a reader
- Know is discovery. The reader has just understood one new thing and sees their problem named.
- Trust is action. The reader does something on their own and gets a result. They don’t believe what you say. They only believe what they can do.
- Love is direction. The reader sees a big solution to the pain that won’t go away, and comes to your product.
Knowing alone is not enough: people understand, but they still have doubts. So the three states follow one straight line, and each state leads to the next.
Six ground rules
Every piece of content has a place
Each piece of content serves one state and leads to one next step. Content with no place does not need to be made. You don’t work from inspiration, keywords or trends. You work from a plan.
People first, AI second
AI helps: it sorts ideas, makes images and keeps a record of your work. AI can’t replace the core part. AI can make smoother content, but people still look for the views of a human being. In the Know state, you beat AI by understanding your customers and having your own angle, as in the Know post.
Real work first, guides second
You stay one step ahead of your customers: you do it yourself, get a result, and only then write it up as a guide. This is also the fastest way to learn for anyone who makes content. Details are in the Trust post.
The edge is you
A product sells because it stands out in a few ways, and those ways come from the strengths of the person who made it. Competitors can copy your product, but they can’t copy you. See the Love post.
Trust comes before the product
A product needs a history and a record of real contact with customers. That way, when the product launches, readers already trust it, and you can start even while the product is still on paper. Making content this way also gets you early feedback: you learn what customers hate, and you learn their own words.
You control the path, not the way in
You don’t know at which stage a reader walks in. Thanks to search engines and AI, they can come in from the side, straight into a Trust post or a Love post, without reading a Know post. What you can control is the path. At the end of each post, you point to the next step. In the body, you place natural links to related posts. So wherever readers come in, they still move smoothly toward the product, and algorithms can tell that your posts belong to one brand.
Methods that apply the philosophy
The philosophy says what you need to reach in your readers. A method says how to do it. Every method can answer three questions: what new thing has the reader just understood, what can they do on their own and have they gotten a result yet, and what direction do they see.
The first method in these docs is the Know - Trust - Love content funnel: it lines up every post in one straight line, Know, Trust, Love, so you write less and sell more.
Boundaries
- This philosophy is not a set of style rules. How to write each kind of content is on that kind’s page.
- This philosophy is not a method. It doesn’t tell you what to do step by step. Methods do that.
- This philosophy is not for pressing a button to have AI make content in bulk.