How to tap into your blog visitors need for new information

Recent research shows that our brains hard-wire us to love Twitter, Facebook, Google and the search for new information. It makes us curious, it makes us gather data, look up facts and click on different links. It is important to be aware of this brain behaviour as a blogger, as it has some disadvantages but also advantages.

Restless, bored, short attention span

This behaviour makes us restless, this makes us easily bored, we don’t give attention to longer articles, and it just drives us to discover and explore the next tweet and the next blog post.

Possibility and the anticipation of finding something new and unexpected is much more stimulating to our brain than actually finding it. So we keep clicking, keep chasing and keep consuming content without really meeting our real needs.

Know your goals and what needs to be done to reach them

Do you recognize this situation? You sit down at your computer just to quickly check your email, but then you check the comments on your blog, then your Twitter stream, there you find a link or two, and then you realize that your “quick” email check has wasted you an hour or two.

Keep this in mind to restrain yourself from wasting time:

• Beware of this behaviour when you start chasing the next click
• Make sure you know what your real needs / goals are
• Make sure you know what you need to do in order to realize the needs / goals
• Don’t be afraid to disconnect

In my case my goal is to grow How To Make My Blog. In order to grow the blog I must publish quality content regularly, spread the word and connect with new people in my target group. I would not have much time to do that if I wasted it by following my brain’s need to look for new information.

This means I must be more productive and optimize my time for blog work. Or as a minimum, if I do read a new article, I should comment on it. This helps realize my goal as by commenting I spread my name to new people and connect with the bloggers.

Tapping into the need for new information

This brain behaviour can also be used to your advantage, and suck visitors into your blog content and your products. Here are some ways to do it:

• Regularly publish new content / products / offers
• Write for the web with short articles, paragraphs, pictures
• Internal linking within posts
• Linking to best posts in the sidebar
• Related posts at the end of the article
• Regular tweets about your content old and new on Twitter
• Regular emails if you have a mailing list

Basically you should always be reminding people that you and your products exist, and you should allow them to spend time with the content and the value that you create.

What do you think? Ever found yourself in a mindless chase for new information?

Image by Sir Mervs.