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How to Get Your Prospects to Do Exactly What You Want by
Tormenting Their Brains
Have you ever watched a television drama that drew you deeply in
and then ended suddenly with a cliffhanger?
How did you feel? Was your adrenaline pumping? Could you wait to
find out what happened next? Did you feel discomfort? If you
answered “yes” to any of these questions, the drama had
successfully created a "zeigarnik effect" within you.
Wait a minute…what’s a "zeigarnik effect"?
In 1927, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik pointed out that
people tend to better remember a task that was not completed
because of an interruption, than a task that was completed.
According to her, an uncompleted task creates a mental tension
that persists until the task is completed. This “mental tension”
causes retention of that task in your memory.
If you've been in this internet marketing world for awhile, then
you know how difficult it is to grab people's attention for your
commercial message. The reason for this is because the internet
has many wonderful things that pull people's attention to
various directions. And all they need is one click to move from
one thing to another.
In this case, zeigarnik effect can be a powerful device you can
use to interrupt people's surfing preoccupation and make them
pay attention to whatever message you want to convey to them.
You can also use zeigarnik effect to influence people to click
on a link or to buy your product. In a nutshell, zeigarnik
effect can be used to get your most wanted response from your
traffic or prospects.
In commercial messages, zeigarnik effect is usually employed by
using incomplete information to create curiosity and thus a
feeling of discomfort and tension in the reader’s mind. If you
want to see an example of zeigarnik effect in commercial
message, you can see it in a viral report titled "The 2 Things
Porn Sites are Doing to Make Billions Annually, and How You Can
Too" that you can download at http://www.w
ebtrafficideas.com/pornviport.exe.
As you can see, the "teaser page" of the report (the content
that shows up first when you open the file) gives hints on what
is behind the success of the internet porn industry, i.e., two
tactics that have nothing to do with exploiting sexuality or
traditional marketing and which are easy to apply to any
business. But it doesn't provide the complete answer. It only
teases you to get you to send email to 3 of your friends and the
complete answer will only be revealed after you get the job done.
Off course, zeigarnik effect is not a Jedi mind trick. Its
effectiveness is relative to various factors. For example, if
you're using the aforementioned viral report to people who are
looking for baby items, it might not work, because you're saying
it to the wrong people. Besides that, to get the most out of
zeigarnik effect, you still need to combine it with other
copywriting techniques.
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