You know that attention spans are quickly becoming even shorter. When people watch movies and television, go shopping, browse for books, and surf the web, they make up their minds in seconds—sometimes to their detriment, true, but that doesn’t matter in cyberspace. You can’t track down every person who visits your site, delivers the Blink Test, and decides that you’ve failed. All you can do is prevent it from happening.
The Blink Test refers to the approximately 0.02 seconds it takes for a person to decide if something interests them enough. It applies to books, shows, movies, and especially to websites, blogs, online shops, articles, and even social media sites. Some marketers claim that you have a larger window of 3-5 seconds to impress; researchers maintain that, at other times, you have only 445ms, mere milliseconds to make a first impression. As a host, a business, a writer, a blogger, or a web designer, you have to make those seconds work for you. Your first impression has to dazzle.
You have 0.02 seconds. After that, you have an extra 2.6 seconds to really draw in your visitors and make them stay. How do you make the most of your first impression? In person, you rarely get a second shot. Online, the margin is even tighter. While you might get the chance to make someone reassess their opinion of you in the real world, the Internet is a big place; turned-off visitors may not return.
Everything plays a part in your success: your visual appeal, your logo, your content, the entire design of your website or blog. Discount nothing and try to use every tool you have to make your site stand out in an engaging, positive way.
With these tricks, you’ll ace your Blink Test, increase your viewership, and rule your niche.
