The purpose of your business is in finding and leveraging the attention and focus of your audience.

You may think you know that you are in the insurance business, or the sales business, or the teaching business.

All wrong. Here's why:

The Economy of Attention

A recent study revealed that on a daily basis, there are 2 million new blog posts.

Over 300 billion emails sent and received.

More than 800,000 hours of video content created.

The numbers get even more staggering when you take social media posts and instant messages into account. We will estimate these to be in the billions.

This means there is huge competition for your target market’s attention. As a marketer (and make no mistake, we’re all marketers), it is our job to figure out how to get and keep the attention of our target market. Otherwise, we become the proverbial tree that falls in the forest for no one to hear.

Here’s how you can be an attention-getter:

The trick with using a headline to grab a reader’s attention is to make it appealing or interesting enough without it being a clickbait. That’s a fine line that needs to be mastered by writers and marketers. The headline is a one-time event or interaction between you and your reader.

If you can grab the attention of your reader for a minute or two just by your headline, you have successfully defined the economy of attention.

Action step: spend half the total writing time on the content. The other half is spent on crafting the title.

Remember the most important word in marketing: context

Vying for the attention of your reader via a catchy headline is one thing, but making the connection matter is another thing altogether.

Context is the most important word in content marketing.

Another way to state this is: be relevant.This requires that you know your target audience better than they do. Provide solutions to their problems before they even know it is a problem. Tell them why this is something that needs to be addressed.

Action step: for the next week, write down every question you get from your customers. Use this as the basis for your content creation efforts.

Thanks for reading.

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