7 Actionable Ways To Grab And Hold Your Audience Attention

Here’s the truth: You need nothing but a connection to the Internet and a gadget to make money online.

Growing revenue in the digital era is getting easier and the Internet has become a competitive environment as there are over 966 Mn websites that want to attract online users.

While the number of people who set foot in online publishing is growing, it’s highly important to learn how to grab and hold the attention of your audience on the web.

The number of visitors directly correlates to higher revenue, so it’s your primary task to increase traffic. There might be different reasons why users leave your blog, or, “bounce…”

Hold on, let’s find out what bounce rate is.

Bounce rate is the percentage of your website users who ‘exit’ it without any interaction. Unfortunately, for publishers this means trouble. The more people leave your site, the lesser your income.

You need to reduce bounce rate if you want to increase conversions and, therefore, your sales.

While there are many ways to increase your audience attention, you’d better start with one simple secret:

Understand Your Visitors Need

No matter what your niche is, you might have a target audience. There is no better way to understand what your visitors want than do an audience analysis.

To begin with, collect data to analyse general info about your audience, their demographics, knowledge, experience, and expectations. To find this information, you can use any of the web analytics tools. Plus, ask yourself several questions about your audience to understand them better, and it can become an important key to creating an effective communication strategy.

Once you know your audience, you can start working on the ways to grab and hold their attention.

You Are What You Publish

Publishing fresh, up-to-date, evergreen, and useful content is a must. Obviously, if you share boring content, it will have a negative effect on your profitability as your visitors won’t engage and leave your site fast.

Engaging content that helps solve the problems and challenges of your audience keeps them interested. Although there is nothing new under the sun, you can write on the same topics from a different angle. For instance, organize round-up series, include your examples, follow recent trends, or keep track on news.

Content is king, and you need to be picky about what you publish. Even if they say you need to publish regularly, never put quantity over the quality.

Get The Experts

Have you ever thought about collaborating with top-notch gurus in your niche?

Collaboration with opinion leaders helps you expand your audience. All opinion leaders have an already-established audience that values them and listens to their advice. Once you give them columns on your website, you attract their readers to become your readers.

To be honest, if you can do a good job of this, you get a lot of benefits, including fresh and unique content and a bigger audience.

Visuals Are Key

Studies show that people remember 80% of what they see. It’s easier for humans to perceive visual information, so visualisation is the key to success when it comes to improving your site’s recall.

Original and handy visual content has always been valued, and even if you’re on a tight budget, there are some ways to get these images without hiring expensive designers. It’s easy to find photos with creative commons rights, sign up for MOOCs that teach UX design, or use tools like Canva to create your images.

The main idea is to share original and useful visuals on the web.

Deal Of The Day

Would you like to be a member of a top-secret community that gives you something special? I know you do. People love being a part of something special and unique, so you can use this psychological trick to grab your audience’s attention.

The secret is to offer something attractive for your visitors — a discount, a promo-code, or a small present.

You can also run a contest to increase average session duration. For example, ask your visitors to find some information on your website in order to take part in an online competition. Be creative while posting deals of the day, and you would be able to hold your visitors’ attention for a long period.

Speed It Up

Although you might have heard a lot about SEO, most people don’t know that it starts with the inner optimisation of the website.

Your task is to make it user-friendly so that your visitors would love to browse it. It means creating a positive user experience. Thus, pay attention to your website design, add contact info to make it easier to contact you, enhance readability, learn more about ad optimisation, and, of course, boost website speed.

Who would like to stay on a slow-loading website?

Be Entertaining

To increase average session duration, you need to be creative. For example, you can offer different entertainments options on your site: Add quizzes, tests, or games. However, you need to add relevant add-ons in order not to hurt your brand reputation – no annoying ads or pop-ups.

The golden rule is to combine brand, useful, and entertaining content, so don’t forget to offer something interesting to your audience.

Notify Your Audience Of Website Changes

If you have some spare time, you can come back to the website you like just to check whether they have published something interesting to read. However, most people are busy with their own work, so it’s better to have notifications and announcements about new features/articles/offers on your site.

Collect personal data to send monthly newsletters and let your visitors know more about new things on your site.

The Sum Up

Put your visitors first, and they will never forget it.

All your visitors come to your website as they crave useful content, so give it to them, and your income will start to grow. To make money online, it’s not enough to just have a website; you need to find your target audience, capture their interest, and hold it as long as you can.

Once you have a steady traffic of new and returning customers, your business will start growing.

After all, what can be better for a publisher than increasing revenue while turning readers into fans?

[This post by Lale Byquist, a media communications student and founder of Presentationskills.me, first appeared on Ad Pushup and has been reproduced with permission.]