Most people who write online are trying to be heard by as many people as possible. If you sell something, that's the wrong goal. You want to be heard by the few people who would buy, and ideally by nobody else.
In politics, a dog whistle is something sinister: a coded message meant for one group only. In marketing it means nearly the same thing, minus the sinister part. A dog whistle is pitched so high that only dogs can hear it. Dog whistling is writing so specifically that only your ideal client hears you, and everyone else scrolls past.
I learned the idea from Jacob Pegs, who I worked under on conversion, and he learned it the hard way. By his own account, he once had 3 million views on LinkedIn, and all they got him was endless "pick your brain" coffee chats and zero paying clients.
When he went back through his numbers, he found that about 0.1% of his 43,000 followers accounted for all of his income. That's roughly 43 people. Everyone else was an audience, not a market.
So he stopped writing for everyone. His likes fell from about 500 a post to about 100. His income went from about 2K a month to 10K, then to 20 to 30K. Fewer people liked his posts, and more of them paid.
The trap is that more people feels like more leads. In the course he teaches inside Modern Maker, Jacob says it bluntly: people think they need more leads, when what they need is better ones. Whistling through a megaphone, he writes, is "great for getting famous. But terrible for getting rich." By his account he now has more active clients than average likes per post.
The people he stopped writing for have a name in his vocabulary: tryers. They try your stuff and like your stuff, but they never buy your stuff. Broad content is a megaphone, and a megaphone attracts tryers. A dog whistle reaches only the people you're calling, and it repels everyone else.
The strange part is how often people whistle broadly without noticing. One of Jacob's examples is the expert who says he doesn't want to attract newbies, then posts how to get your first client online, a list of his top ten prompts, and his whole DM playbook for free. Every one of those is a call to beginners. Which is why most people don't have a leads problem. They have a frequency problem.
Most of the work is word choice. Jacob's example is the phrase "get clients." How to get your first client whistles to beginners. How to get clients consistently whistles to people who already have some. How to get clients consistently without sales calls whistles to people further along still. Same topic, three different audiences. Whoever you didn't pick scrolls past, and that's the point.
But you can't pick the words until you've picked the people. Jacob writes down his ideal clients' pain points, aspirations, wants and fears, and writes only to those. A beginner wants a clear roadmap, a quick first win and proof that it works for people like them. Someone further along wants better systems, advice that fits them, and a way through a plateau without spending more time. Write to the first and the second scrolls past, and the reverse.
Then he checks the result against reality. Once he printed out his DMs, laid them on the floor and highlighted them: red for price objections, green for people ready to buy. The posts about helping everyone grow attracted red. The posts about specific insights attracted green. His summary was one line: "Broad content attracts viewers. Specific content attracts buyers."
It also means repelling people out loud. In one email he tells anyone who wants a mentor to repeat the same lessons for years, for the sake of consistency, that he's not their guy. That line costs him readers. It's supposed to.
The wrong words can repel the right people too. Jacob's examples are openers like "I help 7 figure founders" or "I help busy leaders." To the big clients those lines are aimed at, they signal that you're getting the wrong leads.
The reason all this works is that being specific makes people feel heard, and people trust whoever makes them feel heard. When a post describes your exact situation, you assume the writer understands you, because they clearly do. Jacob's readers started asking him whether he was in their head.
The hard part isn't technical. It's that writing broadly feels safer, because more people respond. But likes measure how many people you reached, not how many you helped or sold to. Every time you narrow the message you lose some of the crowd, and you have to accept that the crowd was never going to buy.
So before you write anything, decide who it's for. Then write at the frequency only your own tribe can hear.