Finding success on the internet is no accident—it all comes down to attention.
And if you know the rules of attention, you’ll enjoy a strategic advantage over your competition.
First rule of attention: Right place, right time
The attention game is played in places where people congregate. If you want to win, the first step is to show up and be present in the public square!
But what is the public square? A long time ago, it was blogs. Then it was blogs + email lists. And now it’s social media channels (which includes videos and podcasts) + email lists.
Easy enough. But what about timing? (After all, “timing is everything.”)
I prefer to think of this as the moment.
If you spend enough time on a platform, you get a real sense of the Zeitgeist and energy of the place. And if you’re an active participant, you’ll experience the moment—a period of time when you receive a lot of attention—at least once.
(If you’re really good, you can even manufacture your own moments. But that comes later, after you’ve already established yourself as a force.)
The moment is your time to strike. But you have to be ready, and this means you have to prepare if you want to take advantage of your moment.
Right place, right time… because you planned for this 👍
Second rule of attention: Be different!
If you want to win the attention game, you’ve gotta stand out.
When people consume their social media feeds, they’re mostly on autopilot. Obvious items of interest will catch their attention—golfers will stop and look at golf content, for example—but pretty much everything else will go whizzing by without a second glance.
It’s just a big game of patterns. And your job is to interrupt those patterns so people will stop and pay attention!
Easiest way to do this? Be different! Here are 4 irresistible ways to stand out from the crowd:
- Design: Use eye-catching details to arrest attention
- Prestige: Be famous or go mega-viral on video
- Storytelling: Take people on compelling journeys
- Collaboration: Partner with people who have large audiences
At a glance, design is the low-hanging fruit; high-attention environments demand differentiation on this basis alone.
But we’re not talking about web design—we’re talking about videos (and thumbnails), articles, images, emails, and even social media posts.
Bottom line? If you want to stand out, you’ve gotta be different.
Third rule of attention: Deliver value
We mostly think of attention as other people looking at or watching us. But attention is really a transaction between you and your audience.
If you want to take advantage of all the attention you generate, you must understand the nature of this transaction.
Ok, great—you got a bunch of eyeballs on something you did. Now what? All these people came here to see you (or what you did). What do you have for them?
If you’re not ready to answer this question, you’re not ready for the moment.
Fortunately, delivering value becomes much easier when you understand the transaction that’s happening when you generate attention. Your audience came to you, and now it’s time to serve them:
- Entertain: Everybody loves a good time
- Educate: Teach a man to fish…
- Inspire: “I’d run through a brick wall for that man!”
- Elevate: You can use [this thing] to be better than everybody else
The more of these you bring to the table, the more effective you’ll be. But only one is necessary to validate the attention transaction.
And finally, after lining up your value, you’ll be ready for the moment.
That’s how you win the attention game,
— Chris Pearson (@pearsonified)
While I’ve got your attention:
A current passion of mine is helping people with their design aesthetics so they can win the attention game.
In doing this, I’ve built a tool that makes it easy to have cool and fun text formatting in your emails—and you can use it to make your emails stand out from the crowd!