How to Get Your Prospects to Do Exactly What You Want by Tormenting Their Brains

How to Get Your Prospects to Do Exactly What You Want by

Tormenting Their Brains



by Mohamad Zaki Hussein



Have you ever watched a television drama that drew you

deeply in and then ended suddenly with a cliffhanger?



How did you feel? Was your adrenaline pumping? Could you

wait to find out what happened next? Did you feel

discomfort? If you answered "yes" to any of these

questions, the drama had successfully created a "zeigarnik

effect" within you.



Wait a minute…what's a "zeigarnik effect"?



In 1927, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik pointed out

that people tend to better remember a task that was not

completed because of an interruption, than a task that was

completed. According to her, an uncompleted task creates a

mental tension that persists until the task is completed.

This "mental tension" causes retention of that task in your

memory.



If you've been in this internet marketing world for awhile,

then you know how difficult it is to grab people's attention

for your commercial message. The reason for this is because

the internet has many wonderful things that pull people's

attention to various directions. And all they need is one

click to move from one thing to another.



In this case, zeigarnik effect can be a powerful device you

can use to interrupt people's surfing preoccupation and make

them pay attention to whatever message you want to convey to

them. You can also use zeigarnik effect to influence people

to click on a link or to buy your product. In a nutshell,

zeigarnik effect can be used to get your most wanted

response from your traffic or prospects.



In commercial messages, zeigarnik effect is usually employed

by using incomplete information to create curiosity and thus

a feeling of discomfort and tension in the reader's mind. If

you want to see an example of zeigarnik effect in commercial

message, you can see it in a viral report titled "The 2

Things Porn Sites are Doing to Make Billions Annually, and

How You Can Too" that you can download at

http://www.webtrafficideas.com/pornviport.exe.



As you can see, the "teaser page" of the report (the content

that shows up first when you open the file) gives hints on

what is behind the success of the internet porn industry,

i.e., two tactics that have nothing to do with exploiting

sexuality or traditional marketing and which are easy to

apply to any business. But it doesn't provide the complete

answer. It only teases you to get you to send email to 3 of

your friends and the complete answer will only be revealed

after you get the job done.



Off course, zeigarnik effect is not a Jedi mind trick. Its

effectiveness is relative to various factors. For example,

if you're using the aforementioned viral report to people

who are looking for baby items, it might not work, because

you're saying it to the wrong people. Besides that, to get

the most out of zeigarnik effect, you still need to combine

it with other copywriting techniques.



About the Author:



Mohamad Zaki Hussein is the webmaster of

http://www.webtrafficideas.com. To learn how to build a

perpetual traffic engine by combining Viral Marketing with

RSS and Blog, grab the FREE "Instant Traffic Formula" report

at http://www.webtrafficideas.com/getviral.