The Key to Online Success: Hitting Emotions

With continued learning in lifestyle design / personal development, I’m picking up a lot of information that I’ve found can be relevantly applied to the internet marketing niche, one being emotional spikes.

At the route level, emotions can cover all activity online i.e. playing games for fun or watching videos to be entertained but I want to strike this post on a different level than that. I want to look at how you can start to ’spike emotions’ with people who visit your website.

Let’s take talking to a random stranger as an example, one that I’ve heard before and think is excellent. Say you are walking down the street and a beggar asks you for change, more than likely you will say no and keep on walking…simply because they want to take from you without giving.

On the other hand, if that beggar were to tell you a joke that makes you laugh, then asks if you have a few spare coins, you are more likely to give him money because he hit an emotion within you and you lose the ‘go away’ shield that you would have had originally. A few other examples of this:

• People make millions selling products and eBooks that fills a need (weight loss, increase wealth etc) - this need can often be referred too as greed
• Fear is also a big one - people will buy something if they feel they need it and are fearful of missing out if they don’t get it

That last one is used a lot, think of all the eBook pitch pages you’ve seen with “Offer only available for the next 24 hours”, people want to push for the sale for fear of missing out on this quality information. So, how can you hit emotions on your own website?

Creating Emotional Spark

Recently, Copyblogger had a great article titled ‘13 Emotion-Based Headlines that Work‘, here’s an example of what was there:

When’s the Last Time a Cute Girl Checked You Out?
Emotional benefit: feeling attractive and sexy

Learn How to Stand Up to Your Boss (and Force Him to See What You’re Really Worth)
Emotional benefit: feeling assertive and confident

Your Grandkids Will Be Struggling to Keep Up with You
Emotional benefit: feeling vital and energetic

Titles in blog posts and articles can be the best way to create an emotion in someone to want to continue reading, if there is an emotional benefit in your content people are going to be much more drawn to it. For example, everybody wants to know the key to online success. My headline hits an emotion that promises the reader knowledge and power in their online projects.

If you are offering emotional benefits and creating emotional spikes with your website visitors they are going to be more likely to listen to what you have to say or buy what you have to offer.

1. Be Personal - When I write a blog post I try and include some personal emotion in it so that readers can connect better with me and the angle that I’m coming from. I did this when talking about having a website in a book, why you should do what you are passionate about (like me) and especially when I wrote the hardest blog post of my life.

This is the reason a lot of bloggers are so successful, they give away enough personal information so that people can connect to them on a personal level. People are also more likely to buy a weight loss book from someone who has before and after pictures of when they lost weight, rather than someone with no picture and no evidence to back-up what they can achieve.

2. Really Offer Benefits - Offering benefits may not actually be as easy at this sounds. Many bloggers for example, give out information that has been repeated 20 times before them on other sites and they bring nothing new to the table. Unless you relate content to yourself, or share your story / experience with a certain tactic or knowledge piece then what makes you different?

The celebrity gossip niche is crowded with blogs all writing about the same information, so why are some more successful than others? Look at The Superficial as a good case study, although the information is generally the same as other sites, a lot of comedy is added to the posts which spikes the readers humour emotions.

3. Make it Clear - Now that you understand more about hitting emotions with your site visitors, you have to make it clear. On eBook sales pages this will usually be in the heading or the bullet-points not far after. On blog posts the title or graphics used within the entry should connect with readers.

In terms of selling products on an ecommerce site you can offer clear pictures, detailed information and even a video to keep people interested and help make the sale. If the emotional benefits are not clear then what is going to keep someone interested?

1. Quickly
2. Easily
3. Safely
4. Confidently

These are four words that spark emotions with whoever is reading what you have to say, they are benefiting from what you have to offer or at least think they will if they keep reading or make a purchase. The next step after hitting emotions is to provide something that hits with the logic of your readers, whether that is helping share your information because it was so good or offering an affordable product they feel like they should purchase.

Are you sparking emotion with your website visitors?