My Two Year Old Has a Better Chance of Reading Your Content…

I was playing outside with my son Jacob this weekend, and made an interesting observation. He was running back and forth from the yard to the garage, pulling out a different toy each time. He'd take out the soccer net, and before I could get out the soccer ball he was on to the next toy. I'd come up with a game to play with the new toy, and he'd already be on to the next. It dawned upon me that the challenge of keeping his attention long enough to get into a game is the same challenge faced when trying to get website visitors to reach your targeted message.

Short Attention Spans
I say this knowing that I'm running the risk of over-generalizing the behaviors of website visitors; they are so determined to find the quickest, most easily identifiable answer to their question that the only thing that slows them down is the 2-dimensional equivalent of a slap to the face. Going out of your way to point out the obvious is sometimes not just a worthy methodology; it's dangerously close to being a necessity. If you've written a paragraph of text and the primary message is held in a conclusion written into the last sentence, you've already lost your reader, even if your conclusion was witty and ingenious.

Intriguing Dialogue
Once you've given the reader a good slap in the face and gotten their intention, it's time to hold onto it with every bit of strength you've got. If you've pieced together some dry, forgettable content that is reminiscent of the sludge that gets poured into high school text books, you're going to run into problems. No matter what the nature of your site is, humor (audience appropriate, of course), wit, and clever analogies are all great ways to ensure that you can hang onto a visitor's attention long enough to guide them into your primary message or call to action.

Measurable Outcomes
The strategies above really don't mean squat if you have no way of determining if your new approach to content has actually worked. Find a few pages of your site that you feel are underachieving, freshen them up with some new content and obvious signals to the visitor that this is something important to look at, and then wait. If you have analytics for your site, you should be able to track whether exits of the site from these pages has gone up or down, and whether or not the visitors are making it to your call to action (specific landing page, contact us page, or otherwise). Give it a shot!