So you dedicated countless hours to your most recent blog post, and nobody bothered even to tweet it or share it on Facebook.
Or you recently pieced together over a dozen articles, and your feedback is nowhere to be found.
The average person’s attention span has decreased consistently for so long that it is now harder than ever to capture a person’s attention.
The following tips will help you immediately grab the average person’s attention.
1. Completely erase the memories of writing essays in your honors English class and write as people speak. This might present some difficulty at first but read it out loud. It should be relatively direct and concise as opposed to odd or ambiguous.
2. Break up your writing. You have at one point or another read a simple message that managed to engulf an entire page even though it was only 5 or 6 sentences. You certainly could see it, and that is probably what inspired you to read it.
Don’t forget to hit the enter key often to make what you write more readable.
3. Use subheadings. The typical person will scan what they are reading, and subheadings are usually the quick hook that encourages them to stop scanning and actually read the article. This is why you must include them in both your blog posts and articles.
Unsure what a subheading is?
It is essentially a mini headline that sits inside your article and gives the reader insight into the finer points of your article or blog post.
4. Make your important points bold. The darker color will immediately stick out to the eyes of the reader and lead to them reading the entire sentence or in some instances the entire paragraph.
5.Use photos. They say “a picture is worth a thousand words,” however the average person will shy away from a couple of consecutive sentences, which is why photos are so familiar in today’s articles. You can take it one step further by including a face in a picture. Individuals are more likely to analyze a face for longer periods of time.
6. Caption your photos. You may find it hard to believe, but the photo caption is the second most-read copy on a page. It is a good idea to use more than just a word or two simply because gathering a person’s interest within a nutshell is perhaps one of the hardest things to do when it comes to writing. Feel free to use two or three lines.
7. Incorporate numbered lists and bullets. Eventually, everyone found out that the bullet points included in a typical sales letter were being read more than the actual content of the letter, which is why bullet points are now a requisite in virtually all sales letters.
8. Use links. Make sure to link to other articles you have published on your website (internal links) and link to the research that you utilized for that particular article (external links). The internal links will keep your readers on your site for longer periods of time, while the external links will show your readers that you are knowledgeable about the topic you are writing about.
