It's a real shame when you put a lot of time and effort into creating valuable content and no one ends up reading it. Or what about a sales page that you spent hours crafting, but that's generating no sales?
In today's video, you'll discover the only 3 ways in which visitors interact with your content. Fail to optimize for these 3 visitor types and all your content creating efforts are wasted...​
More...
Victory in 3 Steps
There are three steps to getting the most use out of the principles discussed in the video.
The first is to simply understand these 3 types of readers that you'll get and keep them in mind for every piece of content you create. From your longest, most epic blog post to something as simple as an opt-in box.​
The second is to format your content for maximum reader engagement, while keeping it "skim-friendly" and adding many opportunities for turning skimmers into A-Z readers. Check out this post for our exact content formatting method.​
For sales pages, a shortcut is to use our tutorialized sales page templates in Thrive Landing Pages. All of these templates are built with the 3 visitor types in mind.​
The third step is to always review your content from the perspective of skimming and extreme skimming. By default, we tend to only review content using the A-Z reading approach. This is great for finding mistakes and typos, improving structure and so on. But it also makes you easily forget that most of your visitors will not, in fact, read the content from A-Z.
Over to You
Here's my challenge to you: pick one of your most-visited pieces of content and try to better optimize it for the 3 visitor types. Try to see your own content with fresh eyes (fresh eyes of a very impatient visitor, ideally).
If you have any questions or feedback about this post, let me know by leaving a comment!​
Another brilliant post. Never thought of it the way you have explained. Wow. For those doing SEO they probably have to think about the content from the perspective of the engines too. So, not just real humans but those pesky algorithms. Keep em coming… Shane Sith Lord!
Thank you, Vishal! Glad this post gave you a new perspective.
Hey Shane, nice information.
How about the video in a blog post (the way you do), Do you think most people will not read the content because is easier just to watch the video ?
PS. I also prefer to be a Sith, because there is no limit in their potential growth 🙂
It depends on how the content is presented. The problem with video is that it’s not “scannable” like text is. It requires a different approach to get people to keep watching a video.
It’s definitely a lot better to have a video + some content than just a video by itself. The text content is scannable and might convince some visitors to start or resume watching the video.
Best random question ever. Jedis had fool all of us with their dirty mind tricks, lucky for us, some one can show us the truth.
Boom. That’s a great point. Damn Jedi and their creepy mind tricks. 😀
Thank you very much Shane for this information. In my case it arrives just in time. I am planning to build a few websites over the long weekend and I will definitely use it. Do you have any advise in regards to schema optimization. What would be your approach if you are planning to build a brand new site.
Thank you very much and Happy holidays to you and your Family!
Best regards,
Oleg.
Hello Oleg,
I can’t tell you much about schema in general. It’s highly context dependent. If you’re building something where schema makes sense, use it. If not, don’t. 🙂
I’d need more details to be able to give a meaningful answer.
Hey Shane!
Thanks (!!) for another great post with eye opening content, maybe you can add a feature in the builder preview to see if the content is “skim-friendly”.. 🙂
Thanks for your comment, Nir!
Not sure how that could be automated. Although there are tools that score texts on how readable they are, at least based on things like the kinds of words used, sentence lengths and so on.
Thank you for this video sharing your insights! I will try to put them into action. The only problem I have with my Thrive Opt In Forms is that I find it so difficult to edit the button texts and put in German texts…
Hello Martina,
You can edit the button text by clicking on the opt-in form and then going to “edit components”. You can also ask in our support forum to get more detailed help.
I have just rebuilt my site using TCB and your tips. My home page is about half the length it was and has very little text but lots of click options and relevant info. I think it works in the way you suggest here. I will check the other pages again after watching this. I love your simple, actionable tips Shane. Cheers! and keep ’em coming.
Thank you for your comment, Joan! Great to see that you went straight ahead to putting this into practice. 🙂
Fantastic video and advise. I’m so glad I can use your products for my own benefit. Thank you.
“Did you know that some people make it to this page, but then don’t continue? That means they decided to get the guide and then changed their minds within 5 seconds. That’s weird.”
What if these people never received the confirmation email? – Not even in their spam folder?
I can see it now: Darth Melaugh 🙂 Great content, as always.