The 8-second attention span and its challenges

Photo: AntonioGuillem, BS

You just created your first eLearning course or started marketing an old one and the struggle started.

Lesser leads, lesser sells, lesser revenue. Uhh! Disappointing, right?

Well, are you sure you are doing everything right? Certain design flaws make the content lose its potency to hold the prospect.

And then we as humans have impatient minds which lose attention in 8 seconds. Goldfish-sized, right? We’ve heard that before.

The point is, it makes things challenging on the web. These challenges need to be dealt with wisely. In this article we try to do the same.

Here are a few challenges that you as an eLearning entrepreneur might have to face as you try to sell your eLearning courses.

The 8-second attention span and its challenges

While you try to keep your readers engaged with your content, their short lived attention span might turn out to be a bummer.

Here are some tips to ease out the pain there.

1. Your portal needs to load fast

A user might spend 8 seconds going through your content. When it comes to loading speed, nearly half of the web users leave a website that doesn’t load in 2 seconds.

This means that you have less than 2 seconds before your website loads and 8 seconds after it does. The world is moving quite fast, isn’t it?

Well, the best we can do is gel well with this fact and work on it.

Start with taking a website page speed test from Google Pagespeed Insights or GTMetrix and fix the issues which the test result shows.

Neglecting website speed is one of the SEO mistakes that newbie marketers might generally make. Working on it will help your site perform better in search engines as well.

2. You have a limited period of time

That’s what the 8-second attention span means, right?

To captivate a user with your content all the time that you have is worth 8 seconds.

That’s all. As the eighth second will approach, your reader will start losing interest and the attention to your content will decline unless your content really intrigues the readers.

Your go to?

Start creating content that is clear, concise and compelling.

Getting into details, a clear piece of content will be the one that doesn’t insinuate and speaks clearly to the users. Basically, clear with words and not making the users having to take hints and guesses.

The next thing is conciseness. It’s about how much useful information you can pass in lesser number of words.

Moving further, compelling content, as we know is the one which can persuade the readers and compel them to take the desired action on your content.

To excel online in your industry, you need to have a great content marketing strategy. Your business can’t do without it.

3. Don’t beat too much around the bush

While you try to create persuasive and engaging content or an online course for that matter, realize that being plain is better than trying too hard.

What I mean to say is it is good to be engaging and talkative in your content. This inspires a feeling of homeliness in the reader.

But if you keep talking like that and don’t actually address the problems and solutions, chances are you’ll lose the reader.

So, what you need to do is maintain a balance. 8 second span is for real. Not being able to prove your worth in those 8 seconds will simply mean that you lost audience, clients, money and a chance to build better online reputation.

So, work it up and move past the small talk. Get to the point and win more users.

Last thing to be said is that if you handle everything on your own, then furnish your skills. And if you have a team, then plan adequate training sessions and help them learn how they can make things easier for your readers and for you as well.

eLearning is a great way of doing that. If you go through a decent LMS software selection process and pick the right software for your business needs, you can turn all your employees into champs who’ll win you deals.

The best recruitment agencies in Australia always keep that in mind.

Final words

While the idea of captivating the users within 8 seconds might seem far fetched, turns out it isn’t that hard.

You just need to be useful and let the users know about your usefulness before the first 8 seconds pass.  And as you try to do that, the tips above will ease it out.

Got any doubts? Try discussing it with your marketing friends. It’ll help.

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