The Myth of the Short Attention Span

There is a dangerous and persistent myth around online copywriting that you should keep your copy short.

Doing so will cost you sales and leads.

The argument goes that any potential customer has a short attention span and is constantly skimming and scanning copy rather than reading it.

Well, what are they scanning and skimming for? Relevant information, that's what. And if you give it to them, they will read it. The more they read it, the more likely you are to get a higher conversion rate.

This flies in the face of conventional advice which usually tells us that most people these days have attention spans shorter than a goldfish.

However, if that is really the case why are book sales booming? Why have they been booming for most of the past decade?

Reading Bigger Than Listening to Music Downloads?

According a to an article on the ABC earlier this year "the book business is now bigger than the music industry and on equal footing with film.

According to University of Melbourne researchers, annual book sales are worth about $1.7 billion. ... it means Australians are buying almost ten books a year."

If we have short attention spans what are we doing with all these billions of dollars of books? (Oh, and did I forget to mention Amazon?)

These facts highlight the dangers of taking colloquial wisdom as gospel. Always check.

Australians Love to Read

Take advantage of this fact with your copy.

How does this benefit online copywriting?

Firstly, the longer you can keep a customer on your page and site, the more engaged they are in the site;

• the more likely they are to explore it further,
• come back in the future and
• subscribe to your blog and
• share via social media,
• and ultimately become a customer.

But, and this is a big but, if you are going to use long copy, please, please, please use a good copy writer and a good designer.

This is a crucial key.

Any content needs to be interesting and engaging in order for the potential customer to keep reading.

And good writers and designers know how to make words and pages do this. A huge block of text isn't really going to cut it.

How to Make Your Words More Engaging

As an example take a look at how Tom Peters does it in his recent book series "Trends".

The text and layout is constantly changing in order to keep the reader stimulated and engaged with the content. Try it on your website.

As is his style, Tom likes to get radical, but then people keep reading him.

Get it?