“Get More Clicks Using These 3 Emotional Hot Buttons” plus 1 more

Get More Clicks Using These 3 Emotional Hot Buttons

Posted: 11 Aug 2012 01:09 PM PDT

This guest post is by Glen Andrews of GlenAndrews.com.

Here’s what the top internet marketers know that most people don’t…

It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to get traffic from social media sites, article directories, or through Google’s organic search. The three most effective ways to get someone to click on your links is to invoke one of these three emotional hot-buttons:

pain
pleasure
curiosity.

Let’s take a look at each of these three emotions and how they can get you more traffic and more clicks.

1. Pain

Most people will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure. Marketing firms all around the world have know this for decades. Advertisers have placed fear statements into ads in order to get us to take action. And guess what? It works! Advertising firms have made trillions of dollars using fear as a motivator to get us to take action.

The “mayhem” Allstate commercials on US TV are all fear-based. Most political campaigns are fear-based. Heck, the next time you watch TV, pay attention to the commercials and see which of the three emotional hot buttons they’re using to motivate their audiences.

So how can you use fear (pain) to get more traffic?

Most of what we do online is driven by headlines. Our tweets are short headlines. Our blog posts and pages are effectively links with headlines. Our videos, Facebook pages, and articles are all propelled by headlines. We all decide which links to click based on the text, and our own personal desires.

Examples of fear- and pain-based headlines

The Top 3 Reasons Most Entrepreneurs Fail Online
6 Things To Avoid if You’re Going To Be Successful
Here’s Why Most Blogs Fail Within 24 months

If you can target your headlines (that is, links) so that they'll speak to the emotions (pain, pleasure, curiosity) of your audience, you’ll not only attract better prospects, but you’ll quadruple your clickthrough rate.

2. Pleasure

Everyone wants to know “What’s in it for me? Why should I pay attention to you?” So you’ll get more clicks and traffic if you can tell your readers what benefits they’ll get by clicking your links. Let your readers visualize the pleasure they’ll receive from taking action.

Examples of pleasure- and benefit-based headlines

Top 3 Ways To Boost Productivity and Profits
Double Your Subscribers Within 14 Days
Earn a 6 Figure Income Part Time

3. Curiosity

This is by far my favorite. We are all born with a sense of curiosity. From infants to old age, we all have an incredible appetite for the unknown.

You’ve seen or heard TV and radio personalities use curiosity to keep us from changing the channel. Just before a commercial break, the radio or TV personality will spit out a headline that piques our curiosity, so we’ll stay tuned in for the answer.

They’ll say something like, “When we return, we’ll reveal how you can save hundreds on your property taxes.” or “When we come back, you’ll hear why President Obama doesn’t want you to see his birth certificate.”

These curiosity-provoking statements are also called “hooks.”

Some examples of curiosity headlines

Shrink Your Fat Zones
8 Lies About Sunscreen
The NO-Pill Pain Remedy
3 Things To A More Effective Blog
The 1 Thing All Bloggers Must Do To Make Money

Target your headlines

Again, your headlines should be targeted towards your readership. The more they speak directly to your audience, using these three emotions, the more clicks and traffic you’ll receive.

Note that it’s important to make sure your content is worthy of the headline. Nothing will turn people off more than a great headline, that “gets the click” but doesn’t deliver on the promise.

Everything we do on the internet revolves around headlines and links. If you get good at writing clickable headlines using these three emotions, you’ll easily get more traffic.

Glen Andrews has created niche sites, ebooks, and info products that produce a steady reliable income. Glen is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create and market a business online that makes them money.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Get More Clicks Using These 3 Emotional Hot Buttons

My Secret Strategy to Send Surges of Traffic to Your Blog

Posted: 11 Aug 2012 07:05 AM PDT

This guest post is by Diggy of Flawlessconfidence.com.

As a blogger or website owner you know how important traffic is—and how difficult it can be to obtain.

Traffic is especially difficult to obtain when you are a small fish in the pond, when your site is relatively new and not many people know about you. And waiting for one or two or three years to build your blog before you can get substantial traffic is something that I’m sure you’re way too impatient for. So how do you get more traffic to your website, fast? And without spending money on PPC or solo ads?

Besides SEO, blog commenting, guest posting, Youtube and social media, there is another way.

I recently launched a new blog about how to be confident and my traffic was hovering under 100 visitors per day. Then I implemented my secret strategy for a single post, and traffic surged to over 1000 visits in a matter of hours. It continued into the high hundreds of visits for the next day too!

I’m about to share with you my secret strategy to send surges of traffic to your website, pretty much whenever you want. It’s a strategy that I haven’t seen many people use, but I think that will start to change soon. The few people who I have shared this strategy with love it and have started implementing it already.

Content is king

You’ve probably read that phrase a million times. Bloggers always tell you that content is king, and to a large extent that is true. But in addition to having engaging, unique and fantastic content, you need to have people who are going to read your content and share it with others. If you have no traffic, you can have the best content on the web, but nobody is going to read it and share it, and it’s not going to bring you any benefit.

However, a big part of this secret strategy to send surges of traffic to your website is to create really killer content. Just one post will do, but it has to be something unique. Something that people really want to read. Like a super-long list post, or a very in-depth analysis, or a very heated debatable topic. Something that grabs people’s attention.

The post that I’m using as an example is titled 100 Ways How To Build Confidence. It’s about exactly what the title states: 100 different ways to build confidence. It’s a very long list post of just over 10,000 words and it took about eight hours to write, edit and format.

There are multiple reasons why an article like this is very effective is drawing mass traffic to your site. Not only is the title something that makes people want to click through to it, when the visitor reads the article he or she can see that it contains useful information and that someone took a long time to create it. That reader is much more likely to leave positive feedback and share the post with friends, which in turn creates even more traffic for your site.

I also used two other articles to test this strategy on separate occasions. The result was the same: mass traffic spikes to my blog within hours.

The other articles I used were Going out alone—here’s how to do it and
10 Things to say to girls.

The secret strategy

Here it is: the actual secret strategy I used to drive over 1000 visits to my blog within hours, with a single post, all while my blog was only averaging around 100 unique visits per day. And the strategy worked again and again on the two other posts I mentioned.

That strategy involves forums. A very simple promotion of a good article on a popular forum will send you boat-loads of traffic. The more related the forum is to the topic of your article, the more traffic you will get, and the better that traffic will convert.

Every day, there are hundreds of thousands of people all around the world who are super-bored and have no desire to work, and who spend hours on their favorite forums. These people are all eager to be entertained, learn something, or to discover something new. They are ready to click on new links to new sites, and spend a lot of time if they like what they see.

To go back to the importance of a catchy title and unique, useful content, you can see why this is so important for this secret strategy. The catchier your title, the more people will view and click your thread and through to your link. If your article is unique, members will leave feedback in the forum. This feedback does two things:

In most forums, when a user comments on a thread, that thread is “bumped” to the top of the forum thread topics. This means that everybody logging on to the forum at that point will see your thread first and click on it.
In forums, people love to look at popular threads that have lots of views or comments or high star-ratings. This is because it is assumed that when a thread in a forum has many views, comments, or ratings, that thread is valuable and needs to be clicked on.

So, with a catchy title and useful content, you’ll get people to click through to your site, leave feedback, bump the thread, and allow more users to do the same.

If you’re wondering what kind of message you need to post in your forum thread to get the ball rolling, it’s very simple. All I posted was this:

Finding popular forums

Now that you know the secret strategy, you’ll want to know how to find popular forums worth posting on. Fortunately this is very easy because all you really need to do is head over to Google and type in “[YOUR NICHE] forum”. You’ll end up with many results for forums in your niche.

A quick way to tell if a forum is popular is to check the amount of registered users and the amount of users currently online. This is usually displayed on the home page of any forum, towards the bottom of the page. The screenshot below is an example of what a popular forum’s membership would be—this is one worth promoting your post on!

Secret no more!

Let me just sum up the secret strategy in a few simple-to-follow points:

Create a high quality post with a catchy title.
Find forums related to your niche.
Make a simple thread with a catchy title and link to your post.

Note that there is such a thing as forum etiquette or proper conduct. You may need to post regularly in certain forums and build up a bit of a reputation before you are allowed to post links or start threads or begin self-promoting. Even then, don’t do it too often, or you’ll risk being banned.

Be sure to reply and respond to any comments or feedback that you receive in your threads, and participate in the forum generally—after all, if it’s a focal point for your niche, it’ll be a great place to engage with potential readers, build authority, make new connections, and more.

Diggy is a confident, successful young man who is his own boss, travels the world and has fantastic friends and relationships. He enjoys teaching people how to be confident and even has a section with confidence tips for women. If you want to become more confident,happier or successful, it’s highly recommended to subscribe to Diggy’s Flawless Confidence newsletter.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

My Secret Strategy to Send Surges of Traffic to Your Blog