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 "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.

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.

Feel free to pass or publish this article electronically or in print as long as everything remains intact. And if you're a member of Listdotcom, you have my permission to replace my viral report download link with yours.