Lessons learned from 7 years of blogging Purple Cows & Pink Elephants- This morning was
a big AHA moment for me as I looked back over blog posts and re-read several comments. The fast paced world we live in, all of the social media tools we have has shortened our attention span, and I am as guilty as the next person.
A few years ago I wrote a blog about a pet peeve of mine, when sending or responding to emails, do you read the whole email, it would appear by the responses from many that most people read the headline and a few sentences and then shoot off a response.
This is the same thing with blog posts, I scratch my head some times when I read a comment left by a passerby, but when I look a little deeper I realize the Shiny object that drew them in, the headline, may not have been the full message of the post, but they responded to that headline and maybe even the first couple lines or short paragraphs of the post that reflected the headline.
I have noticed with my writing I throw out a mind stream of content with a message that is clear in my head, but since I can not type as fast as I think the message turns out to be muddled or Lost in translation.
Regardless the AHA moment came when I realized that this is a micro look at the way clients and customers are also responding to my/our messages. They read the headline and if it is good enough to capture their attention for a brief few seconds you had better have the meat of your content, your primary message, in the next few sentences or you will either lose them or send out the wrong message.
Seth Godin has written many great books on marketing 
and getting the attention of the audience and Purple Cow was one of my favorites, the message is quick and concise and very easy to understand, that you must be different to stand out in the mass blitz of marketing that exists today.
Lessons learned:
- Capture the readers attention with a great or unique Headline
- Keep the readers interest for as long as possible
- Keep the message short and sweet, Damn Twitter!
- Pique their interest so they dig deeper
- Have something for them to dig deeper into
- Make your message crystal clear for the audience you want to attract
- Make it attractive to look at or at least easy to navigate
- If you have read this far, good for you, very few others did
- I am done for now, this is already too long, no one made it this far, if you did, just put I made it in the comment section
The point is to capture quickly the attention of the reader, to keep them engaged and then ask them to communicate with you
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