Many women today are balancing jobs, children, home and even additional courses to enhance their skills. You are probably one of these women, right?

Saving time is essential but sacrificing quality isn’t! The bottom line is if you want to have perfect online content when you are putting together your next blog post, webinar, online training or PowerPoint slides then I want you to keep reading.

I have just four easy steps to share with you about capturing your reader’s attention and creating an exciting visual stimulus to captivate your co-workers (or students!).

4 Steps to Perfect Online Content

I’m a bit of a geek in that I love to use brain science and learning research to discover how adults read and learn. Our attention spans are getting shorter. It used to be that an 8-minute training video was considered the optimal time to be consumed without the viewer losing interest. Now, that amount of time has been reduced to between 2 and 3 minutes. Hmmm.

I want you to be able to create effective and interesting online content for your business with ease. Now about that perfect content: right away, you can capture your reader with curiosity. Have you seen the image above? Are you thinking maybe the resolution is too poor for your screen? Guess again. I just used the first step.

#1. Curiosity

Are you still with me? Good. I hope I appealed to your natural curiosity. Here’s the same picture again focused:

#2. Conflict

Another attention grabber is to use a phrase or photograph that is really out of context. This makes the learner have to pay attention because what they see is not what they hear! Just like this stop sign below. It grabs your attention, doesn’t it?

#3: Engage

You can also engage your online readers with something like this photo of the children being active using hands-on activity (like getting them to email you something: a comment, information, or an answer to your questions right away). The more active they are – the more the chances are of them completing the content that you worked so hard to create. Using Google Docs for training is great because comments and collaboration can be done in real-time.

 

#4: Variety

And of course: #4. Variety is the spice of life. There are a lot of free resources available to you if your office doesn’t provide them. For instance, to help edit images I love Canva. I also love the picture tools in PowerPoint. It has a lot of great options that are easy to use. I used the artistic effects tool to blur the image above.

Another tip is to not use page after page of text. Add some variety with shorter chunks of text, bullet points, or text boxes to highlight important details. Always use more than written materials. Find out how to add images, video or other multimedia to your online content.

One last point (and this is especially true for adults), you always want to provide ideas to make your material immediately applicable to them. Add in some practical (or visual) tips as I have done here. Your participants will immediately start thinking of ways to use what you shared with them and they will want to learn more.

By the way, do you want to know what the little Balinese dancer was looking at?

If you are curious about this information you can find more about the ARCS Model of Motivation online.

I’d love to find out how you plan to use these steps in your work. Comment below!

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