Grab and hold you website visitors attention

                                     Grab and hold you website visitors attention 
 

There are tons of articles and videos out there on how to get loads of visitors to your website.

Not so many on how to get them to do what you want once they're there.

Time for a remedy

We live in a world of short attention spans.

Attention span is the amount of time that a person can concentrate on a task without becoming distracted.

Since that task can be learning about your product, figuring out if your service is right for them – it’s *kind of* important.

So you need to learn how to grab and hold website visitor’s attention

You want your prospects to browse your site and follow the flow towards an action (signup, purchase).

The more you can sustain the visitor’s attention, the higher the chances they will convert.

Sometimes i get a lot of calls about the contents on my site are too long.

The truth is the more than you spend going through my content the higher the chance of you converting.

Once you've figured out a few efficient ways to drive targeted traffic to your website, you will want to design your website and the content published on it in a way that will influence people to perform actions the website was built to facilitate.

Well the answer is: it’s the same way that you get anyone to do what you want normally and that is to show them that knowing what you want... gets them what they want.

So how do you apply this to your website?

Here’s how to grab and hold attention, and how to design your websites for short attention spans.

1. Originality keeps you going

Our minds seems to move towards originality.

Not only does a novel experience seem to capture our attention, it appears to be an essential need of the mind.

Novel means unknown, and what is unknown demands attention of our brain.

Once the new thing is known and understood, then we look to find another unknown to master.

In order to keep your website visitor’s attention sustained, you need to present novelty every second.

Small changes in background color, text positioning and added images make the whole thing more interesting to go through, resulting in increase in sustained attention.

Our brain pays close attention to patterns, and quickly learns to ignore anything that is routine, repetitive, predictable, or just plain boring.

2. Demonstrate Contrast

The brain pays more attention to things that are in contrast to other things in the environment or to things that are in contrast to what came before.

This is another evolutionary trait in humans.

The old brain – the part of the brain that decides – seeks clear contrast in order to make instant decisions and avoid confusion that results in delayed decisions

The old brain is wired to pay attention to disruptions or changes” such as before/after, risky/safe, with/without, and fast/slow.

Therefore, to get the old brain’s attention, create contrast and avoid things like neutral statements that dull contrast.

Try to come up with a way you could use contrast to prove your product promise.

If you do, attention follows.

3. Inspire emotion

Create emotions in people and you’ve got their attention.

Shock is one of oldest tricks in the advertisers’ playbook.

When you get people to feel something (anything), they not only pay attention to your message (or visual), but also remember it.

You can reinforce most messages with an emotional image, and an emotional copy to go with it.

4. Present information in a logical, sequential pattern.

The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially one at a time.

How you structure the content on your pages matters.

Start with a clear introduction to explain what it’s all about (value proposition promise), followed with the body of your presentation (sales copy) and finish with a conclusion, direct your audience to what’s next (call to action).

The sequential flow makes it much easier for your audience to follow and keep their attention. 

When the text is unclear, too complex or disjointed your audience has to work hard to make sense of it.

This is when they start to switch off.

All in all people are unable to focus on something for more than 10 minutes at a time.

You need to close the sale before that (or do something emotionally relevant at each 10-minute mark to regain attention).

 5. There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only quality of what you are viewing. 

People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.

People are generally capable of a longer attention span when they are doing something that they find enjoyable or motivating.

Relevancy is everything.

The interests and/or needs of the prospect need to match your offering, your content.

Your presentation style needs to be entertaining and fun enough to sustain the attention.

Everything else is secondary.

 6. People don’t read but scan... plan accordingly.

We know that people don’t read everything on our website.

There’s no way of making them either.

What you can do is enable them to scan better, so they’d be able to grab the most important parts quickly.

How? F-patterns.

Research has show that users often read website content in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

Go through the content of this mail or our previous mails.

You'll notice how our contents are structured.

 7. Show examples

The phrase “let me show you what I mean” is one of the best ways to get your point across when trying to explain something.

It grabs attention in expectation of visual relevance, something the brain appreciates very much.

When evaluating a product or a service, people’s brain is working to understand and make conclusions, come to a decision.

Images are a superb way to demonstrate something and to provide answers to the questions your brain is asking.

The decision making part of our brain is the “old brain“. 

The old brain prefers visual stimuli which are processed faster than words and concepts.

This is why you should provide visual examples to what you explain in words.

 8. Website speed matters

Make your site fast. Period.

Even a few seconds’ delay is enough to create an unpleasant user experience. 

Instead of focusing on your content, they’re consciously annoyed by having to wait for your site to load.

Overtime, I have learnt how to make websites better at influencing people to do what I want them to do.

I learned to minimize the amount of fields people needed to fill out to subscribe to an email list, request a quote, or purchase a product; this enhancement would make a potential customer feel less anxious and more likely to fill out a form and leave his contact information.

I was able to understand that offering an incentive such as a free relevant content or eBook in exchange for having people subscribe to an email list, or purchase an item is a good practice.

I learned how to perform split testing by having a website load multiple versions of a web page; using a tool like Google Analytics Content Experiment. 

These tests allowed me to easily identify which version of a web page was more effective at influencing people to subscribe to a newsletter or blog, purchase a product or download an eBook.

To your success, 

Emiola Wasiu Folorunsho

Founder (W3FEnterprises,Lagos,Nigeria)

Questions? Call me directly:08079791052