Most of you have probably answered that question already, so I’ll go ahead and answer down here so as to give you my insights on the topic.

Plain and simple, it’s emotions that hold attention better, and they’re not connected.

Look, we’ve all seen advertising and blog posts that are just long skeins of facts building up to one central conclusion or theme.  They’re great and well reasoned and everything, but for crying out loud, they just don’t hold water when it comes to attention.

But when you go after people’s emotions–you tell a story, you make them laugh, you make them cry–suddenly you’ve captured a whole new high ground that defies every convention you might expect.

Remember yesterday when we talked about Pennzoil?  They took an intellectual appeal route, and it collapsed under them.  Meanwhile, when I talked about that Snickers bar the other day, people took that ball and ran with it.  You taste the Snickers bar, you remember how good you felt when you ate it–you didn’t consider the caloric value of the components or how valuable nutrients are found in peanuts.  You went the emotional route.

So remember that when you write a blog post–grabbing attention is at the emotional level.

Yesterday I introduced you all to the Broca’s Area portion of the brain, a section that’s almost directly connected to the motor cortex and loves verbs.

Today, we’re going to talk about hitting Broca with your writing, and it actually comes back to a point we’ve already touched on, the brick.

Remember how we said that the brick is effective because no one sees it coming and it hits hard?  Well, a chunk of that hit goes right through Broca.

If you start out your blog with something like “On June 22nd, 2015, the sun will go out.”, you’ve smacked someone in the face.  You’ve also scored a hit with Broca thanks to that phrase, “the sun will go out”.  See, Broca isn’t just about verbs–Broca is also one of the big VISUAL centers of the brain.

When you start picturing a Snickers bar, that sweet, chocolate, peanut goodness that fights you just a little bit at first until you break through the caramel and plunge down into the feathery soft layer of nougat, you’re routing your brain’s electrical energy through Broca.

Now, tell me–who didn’t get a little hungry for a Snickers bar after that description?  I sure did.

Once you make a connection with Broca’s Area, you’ve gained a toehold into the entirety of the brain.  And from there, well, anything’s possible.  So how do you make that connection?  Be descriptive.  Visual images are great for tapping Broca,   Make people see, taste, and feel what you want, first with words, and then you’ll boost the chance of getting action.

Folks, this is a little something I learned from my days back in advertising.  It relates to several critical concepts we’ve been dealing with out here for months, and it’s going to tie everything up nicely.

What you want to do is appeal to a section of the brain known as Broca’s Area.

I know, you didn’t come here for gooshy lectures about portions of the brain.  No sir, you came here to learn how to get people’s attention, and I tell you, you get people’s attention by appealing to Broca.

Appealing to Broca requires one very simple thing: verbs, and plenty of them.  From Roy Williams’ The Wizard of Ads:

“At the other end of auditory association lies Broca’s Area, a powerful extension of auditory association into the motor association cortex….The objective of advertising is to influence the prefrontal cortex, the seat of emotion, planning, and judgment, located just across the motor association cortex, right behind your forehead.  And the shortest leap to it is from Broca’s Area.”

Lot of words there, but basically, what that means is verbs make movement.  The more verbs there are in your writing, the more fast-cutting, big music, loud, explosive things you can bring to the fore, the more likely you are to stick in someone’s mental craw, right at the motor association cortex.

This is just an introduction, so stick around–we’ll talk more about exploiting brain chemistry to make people buy stuff tomorrow.

Caught your eye, didn’t it?  Well, guess what, folks?  That’s not just a rhetorical question–that’s a question so vital that you can’t afford NOT to do it.

When you’re on the internet, you have a whopping SIX SECONDS to get your reader’s attention.

That’s it.  If you don’t have them committing to read your article in the first six seconds of them clicking on your post, you don’t have them.

So what can you do?  You’ve got to catch the eye in just six seconds, so how do you grab that attention?  Simple–with your headline.

We’ve gone over how to make an eye catching headline before that also appeas to the search engines.  Don’t forget the keywords, but some of the best things you can do are to use the brick approach, in which you say something so outlandish it refocuses the attention, or ask a question, because it has the tendency to make the reader wonder what the answer is.

The point is, no matter what your post says, you’ve only got six seconds to say it.  So make that first six seconds count.  Time it if you have to, but make it count.

Okay, sit down.  You’re going to want to be sitting.  In fact, you should probably brace yourself, too.  I just finished reading this article and it’s made perfectly clear to me exactly what the headline says above–the greatest blog secret of all.  Strangely, in retrospect, it’s the most OBVIOUS secret of all too.  And you get to see it right here.

Man, aren’t YOU glad you read this blog?

All right, here we go.  The greatest (and most obvious) blog secret of all:

Blogging is supposed to be fun.

It’s not something we think about a lot in the frenzy of keywords and Google rank and Technorati and trackbacks and pingbacks…but we are the forerunners of an entirely new media.  From the biggest movie blog to the smallest blog about somebody’s cat, we’re here to disseminate information and deliver brilliant commentary and we’re here to do it on a daily basis.  But sometimes, we all get a little too caught up in the business of blogging to remember that we’re a whole new generation of media and journalism.

Newspapers are crashing and burning.  Kindle is the new bookstore.  And today’s blog is tomorrow’s Time.

So remember…have some fun with it.  Be snarky, be witty, be yourself.  Have some fun with this huge new opportunity.  Your readers will thank you too.