WordPress has just given a great, new feature to the over 10 million blogs it hosts on WordPress.com. The new feature, called PuSH, short for Pubsubhubbub, is a protocol to speed up RSS feeds and new posts.

From now on, when new blog posts are published, they are “pushed” to RSS feedreaders like Feedburner, instead of waiting for the reader to “ping” the blog.

So I was reading up on some new utilities and that for bloggers, and I discovered that, get this, there’s actually a way to animate your blog headlines.

We’ve talked at length before about the importance of making your headlines stand out from the crowd and really get people’s attention, but before, we were largely limited to just using words.  Snappy wordplay, surprise sentences, bricks out of nowhere–that’s the kind of thing we were working with before.

But now, thanks to Google Feedburner, it’s actually possible to turn that chunk of text into an animated scrolling banner.  Here’s a quick treatise on how to use it:

Just paste a HTML code whereever you can. I can suggest popular forums but this banner may be used in email signatures too. To find Headline animator log in your Feedburner account, click on Publicize and than click on Headline animator. You will see many options here. Do not be afraid to change these settings because you may use default settings but I offer you to make your banner as catchy as possible.

So with that, you can turn your headlines from boring blocks of text (even the best ones are merely elevated to “blocks of text” instead of “boring blocks of text”) to a hugely attractive, eye catching display.

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.

Back in the deep dark depths of 1996, back before Titanic was destroying the box office and well before the death of Chris Farley would make sure the world would never be the same again, Pennzoil came out with a big ad campaign that had this for a tagline:

“Pennzoil is the only leading brand of motor oil to meet the 1996 SAE requirements two years early.”

How many of you know what that even MEANS?

And if you know, how many of you care?

Pennzoil shelled out millions of 1996 dollars–more by today’s standards–to tell us all something we neither understood nor cared about.  And as a result, Pennzoil lost a whole lot of money on an ad campaign that did absolutely nothing to sell its own product.

This all relates back to the main headline, who cares, or why no one reads your blog.  Are you telling people something they don’t care about, like Pennzoil did?  If you’re wondering why no one reads your stuff, ask yourself if they have any reason to.  And if you find that they don’t, start thinking about what you can do to MAKE them care.  If you do that you’ll find yourself greatly ahead of the game.

Admittedly, this is not a problem we have around here.

Our readers are so spectacularly awesome that they CONSTANTLY leave comments on our threads, and it’s not easy to keep up with them all!  Seriously, you guys are comment MACHINES, and we love you for it.

Seriously, we do.  Nothing makes blogging feel better than to know you’re doing some kind of good somewhere.  If your humor blog is making people laugh or your philosophy board is making them think or if your blog mechanics board is giving people new and useful ideas that they want to try themselves, the whole process just FEELS better.  You’re doing good in the world and that’s quite a reward.

But if your comments are falling off, what do you do?

You could try asking questions of your readers.  What would you like us to cover? is a great one.  What do YOU want to know?

Don’t tell anyone about this, but this approach serves two useful purposes.  One, it gets people engaged, and telling you what they want.  This in turn gives you a great excuse to PROVIDE it.  And when you provide what people want, you not only never have to find a blog idea again, you also make a whole lot of people very happy.

So next time you write a blog, be sure to ask your readers what they want.  It’ll give you ideas you never dreamed of.

And just to take my own advice–what do YOU guys want me to talk about?  Just hit the comments section and tell me what you want to see here!

We’ve been talking about Broca’s Area for the last couple days now, but we really can ‘t talk about Broca without talking about his direct counterpart–Wernicke.

Wernicke’s Area is a great little patch of gray matter that you use all the time and don’t even realize it.  You ever have one of those times when you can’t think of the name of something?  That big monument down the street or that certain pizza place or that car you were looking at?  Well, when you finally catch on, that little voice in your head that always seems to whisper “The Civil War Cannonman” or “Joe’s Hot and Tasty Original Pizza” or “Buick Road Deathmaster”–that’s Wernicke.

Wernicke’s Area is your noun repository.  Names of people, places and things goes routing through Wernicke’s Area.  While it’s not as close to the prefrontal cortex–the thing you want to hit–as Broca, you CAN make a pathway from Wernicke to Broca and THEN to the prefrontal cortex.  In fact, there’s some evidence that says things stick around a little longer in Wernicke.

So next time you go planning an appeal to Broca, make sure you spare a thought for Wernicke, because keeping both of them together is going to put a serious boost to your writings’ memory retention.

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.