Today we are proud to welcome Nicolas D’Alleva of www.SpecialtyAnsweringService.net, a call center service company for large and small businesses alike. Without further ado, I give you his tips for capturing the attention of your target audience.
In online writing, everything comes down to the hook. You have mere seconds to attract the attention of the reader and only a few more to get your message across.
Capturing the attention of a fleeting audience may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. By utilizing a few tried and true strategies, you can increase the views and reader retention rate of your blog. Here’s how:
Make Your Reader Feel Something
Any behavioral psychologist will tell you that if you want someone to learn something and remember it, you need to cause them to have an emotional reaction. That emotion can by anything: fear, anger, happiness, excitement; but it needs to hit them in a way that makes what you’re saying relevant.
Practically, there are a few ways to attain this sort of reaction. One of the most frequently used methods is story-telling. Whether it’s a short anecdote or joke, or a hypothetical scenario that readers can empathize with, telling stories is a sure-fire way to pique someone’s interest.
Keep Your Information Bite-Sized
The attention span of the online audience is undeniably short. I scroll and skim through virtually every article that I read. If the relevant information in that article is not easily identifiable and easily processed, I won’t bother to look again. Think about it: how many times have you read through an article in someone’s blog more than once? How many times have you read every word in an online article?
The details of an article need to be easily digestible and manageable for a crowd that spends somewhere between thirty seconds and two minutes reading it.
Stimulate the Brain
Experts in education have determined that there are a variety of different learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. Assume that your reader is some hybrid of all of these styles and use the tools at your disposal accordingly.
Pepper your article with visuals, link to sound bites, make the text react when the reader scrolls over it. When you activate different centers of the brain, you aren’t just catering to a diverse audience, you are making what you’re saying interesting. Stimulus of any sort will help to steady the wandering eye of your internet reader
When it comes down to it, the online audience is a cursory one. You don’t have much time to get your point across, so be concise, be memorable, and be powerful.