How To Keep Readers Glued To Your Content (With The Power Of Infotainment)
Hook them on your every word using these three ideas
Hook them on your every word using these three ideas
We all know readers online, and offline can click away or close a book in an instant. To keep them hooked, we have to find a way to stand out from the noise. We can’t give them a chance to get bored. How do we do this? I show you three strategies below.
The golden mole is blind. Yet, it catches nearly 100% of its prey.
It lives in the Sahara desert and hunts at night. It often travels under the sand and appears as a lump weaving a long and winding trail. Once the bulge nears an insect, the mole’s little mouth and claws burst through the sand and nab it. And if you keep watching, it will grab one insect after another until just before the sun rises.
Why is this blind animal so effective at hunting tiny insects?
Golden moles find their meals through sound
They hunt by listening to the nearly imperceptible footsteps of small bugs tiptoeing on the sand. When you watch one of these moles, you can see that it is so engaged with the process of hunting that it ignores everything else. It finds one insect, then another, then another, never becoming distracted by other things.
When we create books, courses, or articles, we want a similar level of engagement from our audience. We want them to choose our information even when they have access to other sources of stimulation. How do we do this? We use the power of the infotainment principle.
What is the infotainment principle?
It is informing people and entertaining them at the same time. It is realizing that to make an impact, you need to excite a person’s imagination and not just add information to an already full cup. You need to expand the size of the cup by making readers want to know more.
How do you include infotainment in a book or course?
You do it in three ways:
The seduction of mystery
The power of one
Unexpected elements
1) The seduction of mystery
Back in the days before I cut cable, I would flip through the channels and sometimes see the first minute of Law and Order. The story would begin by following one person through his or her ordinary routine but paired with suspenseful music. In the next scene, that person was dead, but you never saw who the assailant was.
The rest of the episode was about finding the identity of the killer. I never intended to sit down and watch Law and Order’s entire 60 minutes, but I did many times. I couldn’t leave the question of whodunit unanswered. I needed to see the crime solved every time.
That need to get to the end is what we create when we tell a story with a bit of mystery
When I started the tale at the beginning of this article, I could have told you that there’s this animal called the golden mole that scoots around under the sand and eats termites, but that wouldn’t have been very interesting. Instead, I slowly pulled you into the unknown. I exposed the identity of this under-sand hunter by revealing one curious detail after another.
When you create a story for a book, course, or article, you want to do the same. Allow a little mystery. Tell just enough to keep someone curious until you reveal your main point.
2) The power of one
The story of the golden mole could teach us several ideas — it can show us the power of engagement as the mole was undistracted as it hunted termites. It can show the power of stealth. It can also show how senses such as sight become less important when an animal no longer relies on it to survive.
But how many points did I choose to make with this story?
Five? Three? Two? No. Just one. One point. When you tell a story, make sure it leads to only one idea … at least initially. If you revisit the story later, you can use it as an example to support other points. However, at first, always have it lead to a single thought. The focus on just one idea allows your lesson to hit home with greater force.
3) Unexpected elements
If you read most articles, books, and courses, they tend to focus on only the most obvious examples. A book on marketing might talk about ad campaigns for dish soap. A course on lake fishing will give examples of times when the author caught a fish or the time a fish got away. An article about parenting might talk about the time the kids refused to brush their teeth.
These kinds of stories are often useful as examples, but we need to sprinkle a bit of the unusual on occasion to keep our reader’s attention
People are more curious when you tell a story that doesn’t, at first, seem to have any relationship at all to what you’re teaching. Then comes the moment when you relate two disconnected elements, and they go, “Ah, now I see.”
To do this, you must find a broader concept than the one you are writing about to use as a bridge. For example, I wrote an article about dealing with impostor syndrome. I had to ask, “What’s the broader concept here?” The concept was overcoming obstacles with experimentation.
That idea helped me select Keith Jarrett’s story. He was a jazz pianist who discovered the piano he was to play was broken just hours before a concert. He did this by trying new ways to play the piano. His experiments allowed him to create a fantastic performance that became the best-selling solo piano recording of all time. This story became an analogy for what we all need to do to overcome impostor syndrome — do small experiments.
When you think about stress, what comes to mind
Many people think about being in rush-hour traffic. Dealing with kids’ tantrums. A conflict with the boss. And these situations are stressful. But how often do you relate stepping in poo to stress? Probably not often.
In a presentation on a positive and fun approach to dealing with stress, I connected stress to the broader concept of problems. As a result, I was able to find less common examples I could relate to stress, such as stepping in feces.
As a result of using this and other less-than-usual examples, the audience was attentive, focused, and had a few laughs too. This is the power of the unexpected. It keeps your audience from drifting away to la-la land.
Summary
To create engaging books, articles, and courses use the power of infotainment. To do that, tell compelling stories by seducing your audience with mystery, exploiting the power of one, and deploying unexpected elements. If you do that, your readers will remain as focused as a golden mole looking for its next meal.
Want to create a course that delights as well as informs?
The Atomic Course Blueprint shows three ways to engage customers with your teaching and keep them engaged. That way, they apply what you teach them.
See for yourself.