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

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 yesto any of these
questions, the drama had successfully created a "zeigarnik
effect" within you.

Wait a minute&whats 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 tensioncauses 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 readers 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.