--- type: "Love post" title: "The Know - Trust - Love content funnel: Write less, sell more" description: "The Know - Trust - Love content funnel is built on real-world practice and your own voice, so humans beat AI: posts that hit the right pain and lead customers to a buying decision." resource: "https://cuongthach.com/biet-tin-yeu/" tags: - "blog" - "en" - "Content" - "content funnel" - "know - trust - love" - "write to sell" status: stable generated: by: "process:cuongthach-okf-export" at: "2026-10-14T00:00:00Z" --- # The Know - Trust - Love content funnel: Write less, sell more **The Know - Trust - Love content funnel** is the heart of how I make content. Its goal fits in one sentence: **write less, sell more**. When you make content for a product without a funnel, you write a lot, but no post reaches the goal of selling. The Know - Trust - Love funnel fixes exactly that stuck point. It helps you write less and write right. Every post leads readers toward buying, and writing no longer wears you out. ## Why do you write so much and still not sell? **Because you write without a direction.** I know this well, because I have been through it. Since 2017, I wrote **about 300 blog posts**: building websites with WordPress, sending email with Mailgun and Amazon SES, signing up for the Stripe payment gateway, free email marketing software… Every post took effort. And every post was written around keywords, around what people were searching for. And the result? **Readers, but no sales.** Readers came, took the guide, and left. They did not understand what I was selling, which topic I was focused on, or whether I shared their pain. And the cost? When I rebuilt the site, out of about 300 posts, only **11 posts** that still had readers on Google were kept. **More than 96% of the posts had to go.** My energy was split into pieces, not enough to put fully into any one thing. And sitting down to write one decent post is very tiring work. If you love words, you can stand it and see deleting as a *lesson*. If you don't, it is truly *torture*. **The Know - Trust - Love funnel was born from that very lesson.** With a funnel, every post has a direction, a formula, and fits the order a learner follows. You write less, but every post leads to a sale. ## 3 layers of the Know - Trust - Love funnel The funnel runs in a straight line: **Know**, then **Trust**, then **Love**. The Love layer is the one that brings customers to buy your product, so it sits at the bottom of the funnel. Readers go from knowing you, to knowing your brand, to knowing your product. They see their own pain when you name it. From that Know, you make small guides and small tests to build trust. Once they trust you, you offer a bigger solution. That is the Love post. Each layer gives readers a different feeling: | Layer | What the reader feels | What they do | | ---- | ------------------ | --------- | | **Know** | "Aha, I learned one more thing today." | Learns about you because their pain was named | | **Trust** | "I did it!" | Follows a small guide and gets a result | | **Love** | "At last, I see a way forward." | Comes to your product | - **The Know layer is discovery.** After reading, customers feel: "Aha, I understand one more thing. Today I have new knowledge, and I like that." - **The Trust layer is action.** Knowing is not enough. People understand, but still doubt. A Trust post follows a Know post with small actions, hand in hand, so the reader sees: "Aha, I can do this." They want to try it. When they get a result, they trust. - **The Love layer is the light at the end of the tunnel.** It is a big solution to the reader's long-lasting pain, a pain that, once solved, changes the game. When they read a Love post, they see a new horizon. The feeling is close to tears: I have finally found a direction, a way to succeed. A Know post leads to a Trust post. A Trust post leads to a Love post. A Love post leads to the product. ## What is a KNOW post in a content funnel? Reading a Know post, the reader should feel: *"Aha, I just learned something new today!"* This is the first place they **discover you**, learn about your brand, and see **their own problem named right on target**. A Know post sparks curiosity, spreads easily, and is very easy to share on social networks to bring new people into the funnel. Know posts are the most numerous in the funnel, but they are also the **hardest posts to write**. They are hard because they are the first touch, and they force you to face AI head on, on its home ground: **information**. On plain information, AI is always faster and more complete than you. When people have a question about facts, they will ask AI. The only thing that keeps them reading you is **a human point of view**: the history you have lived through, the things you have really done. In Trust and Love posts, you have the edge of hands-on practice and your own strength. But in Know posts, if you lack *understanding of your customers*, *a view of your own* and *a creative way of speaking*, the post turns ordinary at once. And once it turns ordinary, you lose to AI. The funnel jams right at the entrance, because nobody wants to read the Trust post next. To find topics for Know posts, start from **the questions customers often ask** when you talk with them. In particular, in the reverse way of building a funnel, **Know posts are pulled out of the Trust post itself**. When you write a hands-on guide (a Trust post), you will run into many terms and basic questions: *"What is this?"*, *"Why do this step?"*, *"Why do this first and that second?"*. If you stuff every explanation into the Trust post, the post gets loose and gets in the way of the reader's action. The right way is to pull all the "what is" and "why" questions out into their own posts. **Those posts pulled out are the Know posts.** ## What is a TRUST post in a content funnel? **Knowing is not enough.** After reading a Know post, people may learn something new, but doubt still sits in their hearts. A Trust post is born to follow a Know post with **small actions, hand in hand**. The core rule: **customers never believe what you say. They only believe when they do it themselves.** So a Trust post works like **small tests**. When they read a Trust post, their feeling must move from curiosity to a push to act: *"That's so clear, I want to try it!"* A solid Trust post must have: - **A clear promise of a result:** follow these steps exactly, and you will surely reach this specific result. - **As little friction as possible:** the guide is not for show. Each step must be detailed and clear enough that the reader gets a result right away by following it, without getting stuck on any technical step. Behind every Trust post is **your own real hands-on experience**. You cannot ask AI to make up a Trust post, because you must be the one who **goes one step ahead of the customer**: you test it yourself, you pay the price yourself, you get a real result, and only then you pack it into a guide. That is also why writing Trust posts helps you learn deeper and faster than anyone. There are fewer Trust posts than Know posts, but they are the content with the **strongest power to keep readers**. Besides leading readers on from the Know post, a Trust post is also your *sharpest weapon* for sharing value and winning communities. Readers from groups or search can walk straight into a Trust post, make a result with their own hands, trust your expertise, and go straight on to the Love post. ## What is a LOVE post in a content funnel? A Love post is **the only post** in the whole funnel, and it is where you put **80% of your effort**. The reason is simple: it is the post that directly turns readers into buyers. If a Trust post is a guide for beating one small obstacle on the road, then a Love post is **the big map** that opens the light at the end of the tunnel. A painkiller only eases the symptoms for a while, but a Love post is *a full treatment that heals the whole long-lasting illness*. This is a **game-changing solution**. It cannot be solved in a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days. It needs a plan, practice, and patient repeating. The reader's feeling when they reach a Love post is close to tears: *"At last I have found a direction, a real road to succeed."* Because it is a full solution, **a Love post is very long**. It is written with all your inner strength, like **a heartfelt letter**: a true story, deep understanding, a path to follow, and a firm promise of a result. A Love post shows the reader the whole road, but it cannot give a result right away. And that is when **your product shows up**: the product is born to be a lever for the solution. It helps the reader save time, learn the method more easily, act faster, and walk the whole road without giving up halfway. Having reached the end of the Love post, the customer steps onto the sales page with only one mindset: **ready to buy.** ## Why must a Love post come from you? A product that sells well **never has to beat the others in every way**. Customers are not looking for a product that does everything. They only need a solution that solves their one painful problem. You also do not sell to the whole world. You sell to **one specific group** you want to serve. So where does the real edge of a product lie? **It lies in the person who makes it.** You do not need to dig through product features. The only thing you need to dig through is **yourself**. A product made by someone who works with books carries a very different soul from a product made by a pure marketer. The best points of a product are really a mirror of the points where you shine most: *your deep expertise, real experience and natural strengths*. The market out there is full of copies and look-alikes. But when you bring in **what is only yours**, the product at once stands out from the crowd. Rivals can copy product features, but **they can never copy you**. That is why a Love post must come from *your personal story, hard-earned expertise, and your own wishes and dreams*. You do not need dozens of strong features. A few differences that are only yours and tied to who you are, are enough to build a strong funnel. A Love post is **the founder's heartfelt letter**. You can never hand it to AI, because AI has no lived experience, no scars from a career, and cannot write that honesty for you. ## How to build a Know - Trust - Love content funnel **When you build the funnel, you go backward. When you lead customers, you go forward.** Instead of starting from loose posts on the outside, you build the funnel **from the core of the product outward** in 4 steps: 1. **Find your own edge:** you do not dig through product features, you dig through your own strengths and experience. Pick a few of the most core differences to be the root of the whole funnel. 2. **Write the Love post to draw the whole map:** from your edge, you write the Love post as a full solution that fully solves your customer's pain. This map shows the whole road the reader must walk to reach the result. 3. **Write Trust posts to pass the obstacles on each stretch:** look at the map in the Love post. Wherever there is a technical difficulty or something that blocks action, you write a Trust post that holds their hand, so they do it themselves and see the result right away. 4. **Pull the Know posts out of the Trust posts:** while writing a Trust post, you will run into many terms and basic questions: *"What is this?"*, *"Why do this step first and that step after?"*. Pull all the "what is" and "why" questions out into their own posts so the Trust post does not get loose. The posts pulled out are the Know posts. You build the funnel **from the inside out (Love → Trust → Know)**. But when readers walk in, they go forward, quite naturally: *learn something new* in the Know post, *make a result with their own hands* in the Trust post, and *get ready to decide to buy* when they reach the Love post. ## How to roll out the Know - Trust - Love funnel To avoid feeling swamped and worn out, you roll out the content funnel in **two clear stages**: ### Stage 1: Build the smallest frame You only need **one chain of 3 posts**: one Know post, one Trust post, and one Love post. The Love post leads straight to the product page. With just these 3 posts, you already own a complete selling machine that runs from start to end: the reader is shown a problem (Know), makes a result with their own hands (Trust), and sees the full solution to buy (Love). **You do not need to wait until you have written dozens of posts to start selling.** ### Stage 2: Grow and expand the funnel When the frame is running, you start to expand but keep the rule: **the Love post is the only one, you do not write a new one**. Everything you add just brings more readers to the Love post. - **Opening the funnel at first:** always write in pairs (1 Know post with 1 Trust post), so readers understand and have a hands-on guide right away. - **Cross-linking posts:** when you have enough Trust posts, you do not have to write new Trust posts. A new Know post can link across to the best fitting Trust post you already have. - **Growing the Know layer and riding trends:** now you just focus on writing many Know posts to add more touch points. You are free to use trending topics on social networks to pull new readers in, because the Trust layer below is strong enough to take them in and lead them on in a straight line. Once you have a funnel, you **stop completely** the habit of writing on a passing mood, chasing keywords, or rambling about yourself. The funnel is **a strict filter**: *a post with no place in the funnel does not need to be published.* ## An internal linking strategy for the posts in your funnel You **never control** which layer readers enter the funnel at. Thanks to search tools and AI, they can walk straight into the funnel from the side: type a technical question and land on a Trust post, or read one point of view and jump straight to the Love post. People who need a solution fast may buy right away. People who have not bought do not leave right away either. They are already on your website, so they will go back to the home page or read other posts to understand the whole story. You cannot control where readers come in, but you **fully control the paths** that lead them along as smoothly as possible, through two places to put links: - **Links at the end of a post to guide people:** at the foot of every post, always open up the next step. You are the writer, so you know what the reader will need next after learning this (in a Know post) or finishing this step (in a Trust post). From a Trust post, always lead to the one Love post. Because there is only one Love post, change your invitation and your angle in each Trust post, so the path always feels fresh, natural, and never copy-pasted. - **Links inside the post for the algorithm:** while you write the main content, weave in links to related posts in a natural way that fits the context. Writing by the Know - Trust - Love funnel gives **a huge SEO edge**: all your posts share one frame and link to each other naturally. Thanks to this tight web of links, search algorithms and AI models quickly understand the structure of your website, take in your expertise and the trust in your brand, and so *put your content first when they quote and recommend*. ## Why is a sales page in a content funnel always lean? When you have no funnel, you pour a lot of effort into **long, endless sales pages**, stuffing in every trick to persuade, because readers walk in on guard. But once the Know - Trust - Love funnel is running, your sales page becomes **surprisingly lean**. The reason is simple: **the hardest job of selling was fully done earlier.** Readers already tested your skill in the Trust post, and already reached the deepest feeling in the Love post. When they click the product link, their mindset has fully moved to *ready to buy*. Now the sales page does not need to talk at length to persuade or to praise the product to the sky. It only needs to do **two things** well: 1. Let readers see very quickly what the product includes and how they get it. 2. Give a handy, smooth payment button that removes every technical friction. A content funnel does not only help you write fewer posts. It also frees you from bending over to design complex landing pages. **Everything is cut down as far as possible** to save your effort and your customers' time. ## Why does the person who writes the funnel learn the most? **Writing a lot does not mean learning a lot.** Writing hundreds of scattered posts only splits your energy and lets what you know slip away. When you build the Know - Trust - Love funnel, you must dig down to the root, and **the one who learns the most is you**, not the reader. Each layer of the funnel is a different level of training: - **Writing Know posts teaches you to listen:** collecting the questions readers often ask forces you to step out of your own ego and look at the product through the eyes of a complete newcomer. You learn where they get stuck and what they really want. - **Writing Trust posts forces you to practice for real:** you cannot make up a guide or ask someone to write it for you. You must be the one who goes one step ahead of the customer: roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, pay for your own mistakes, and make a real result, and only then sum it up. *Real practice is the fastest and surest way to learn.* - **Writing Love posts lifts your systems thinking:** to write a Love post, you must string the whole process of practice and the scattered worries of customers into one big picture, one solution that fully changes the game. Most of all, writing by the funnel brings you back **the most honest feedback**. It breaks the illusions about your own work: the things you were sure were right and clever, but customers do not need or even hate. Through those rubs, you learn **your customers' own language**. You know what words they use and how they describe their pain, so you can speak their language and touch exactly where it hurts most, without any marketing tricks. ## Use the Know - Trust - Love funnel from the idea stage The Know - Trust - Love funnel **works fully even when your product has no shape yet**. As long as you can already picture it clearly in your mind, as if you were holding the product in your hand, it will surely be born. **The biggest mistake of product makers is waiting until everything is 100% done** and only then scrambling to find a way to write marketing posts. By then you do not understand the market and can only use flowery words to praise the product to the clouds. No customer believes empty praise. A product that is going to sell must have *a history and the marks of real contact with the market*. Building the funnel before the product launches is how you build that history: - **The time you listen to customers is when you collect the Know posts:** you talk, and collect each question and each worry of the market. That way you do not make a product out of fantasy. You make the thing that solves their real pain. - **The time you go one step ahead of customers is when you publish the Trust posts:** to finish the solution, you must dive into real practice yourself, test each technical piece, and solve the small problems. Every time you make a real result, you write it up as a Trust post to share value. - **The time you sum up the whole journey is when you write the Love post:** after many tests and hard lessons, you put it all together into one big picture, one complete road that opens the light at the end of the tunnel. When you walk the whole process, by the day the product launches, you do not have to work hard to persuade anyone. Customers have followed the whole road you walked, have tested your expertise through each post, and have seen the sweat and effort you put into the solution. **You sell because the product already has trust before it even appears.** ## Why does the Know - Trust - Love funnel help humans beat AI? This is **not a method for people who want to press a button and let AI make content in bulk**. If that is your plan, this funnel means nothing to you. The Know - Trust - Love funnel was born with one clear goal: **to help humans beat AI**. AI can be a capable assistant that helps you sort your ideas, suggest a structure, or make pictures. But the soul and the whole core value of the funnel is something AI can never replace: - **A Know post is where you beat AI at its own strength:** AI holds a total edge in speed and amount of data. But AI's answers are always dry, soulless, and cookie-cutter. If your Know post only sums up general information, you turn ordinary and lose at once. To beat AI at this touch point, you must use *a deep understanding of your customers, a view of your own that pushes back, and real experience* that a machine can never have. - **A Trust post is the land of real practice:** you must be the one who goes one step ahead of the customer, rolls up your own sleeves, pays your own price, and only then packs it into a guide. AI cannot step out into the real world and do it for you, so it can never make Trust posts that have been proven. - **A Love post is your formula and your heartfelt letter:** you can talk with AI to put your work history in order or polish your process, but the big solution and the core belief must always come from you. AI has no scars from a career and no personal dream, so it cannot write for you a heartfelt letter that touches the reader. These days, people can open AI and ask for any information for free. But what people truly long for and are ready to pay for is **the point of view of a real person of flesh and blood**: the history you have lived through, the things you have really done, and the understanding between one person and another. When you bring your full humanity and what is only yours into the Know - Trust - Love funnel, you not only protect your content from AI copying, you also build **a brand with lasting life** and far better sales. ## Start building your own machine The whole Know - Trust - Love funnel is **the frame** I hand over in [Write to Sell](https://cuongthach.com/write-to-sell/). Instead of wearing yourself out with hundreds of posts that bring no orders, you will work with me to pack your real experience into **an automatic selling machine made from words**. If you are ready to own a machine of your own, see you in the program.