Made To Stick

Simplicity
How do we find the essential core of our ideas?
Strip your idea back to the core and find what the simplest elements are. Prioritize the important parts of what you're trying to get across. It's not about being short, it's about being remembered.

Unexpectedness
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across?
In this day of "everything has been done before" we need to look at new ways of communicating what people may have heard a hundred times before. Break with people's expectations and get their attention. Use surprise to grab the attention, but then to keep it you must generate interest and curiosity. Don't give too much away too quickly.

Concreteness
How do we make our ideas clear?
Explain your ideas in terms of human actions and sensory information. Don't be obscure or too abstract or you threaten to lose the interest of your audience or worse, have your message interpreted differently depending on who is reading.

Credibility
How do we make people believe our ideas?
We need to generate authority for our ideas. In most cases we don't have a well-known and trusted public figure handy to assure the audience that the message being projected is factual and honest. Sticky ideas need to have their own credentials to give people peace of mind that what they're reading is the truth.

Emotional
How do we get people to care about our ideas?
A sticky idea is one that gets people feeling something. To most people, the fact that cinema popcorn contains 37 grams of fat doesn't mean anything - but if you show that one serve of it has more fat than if you ate fast food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, people will take notice.

Stories
How do we get people to act on our ideas?
By telling a story to get your message out you reach people on an instinctive level. As a race, humans naturally share stories of their experiences, thereby multiplying those experiences. When we find ourselves in a situation that mirrors a story we've been told we feel more comfortable with it and less fearful of the unknown.

The very best and most memorable ideas in history manage to employ all 6 of these qualities, and the more you can get in your ideas the better. Not every idea needs to tick all the boxes - some ideas only lend themselves to certain sticky qualities - but every idea has the potential to be fully realized with the help of these six elements.

In a lot of cases you must, as Yoda might say, unlearn what you have learned in order to fully utilize the 6 elements needed to give your idea the stick it deserves. The elements are there as a guide and with each idea or article you put out there you should run it through the S.U.C.C.E.S wringer and see if it manages to come out sticky.

Writing content for a web page can be a tricky, tiring and time consuming ordeal. Every time I attempt to write a new sales page or blog to promote an affiliate product I find myself asking the same questions as I stare at my blank word document; "Where do I start?", "What is my focus?", "Who am I aiming this at?", "How can I write convincingly?", "How will I hold people's interest?"

For months I would churn out the same aimless content and wonder why I wasn't making any sales. I'd look to the so-called Internet Marketing gurus who seemed to have such a knack for good writing and wonder how they did it. I was beginning to believe that it was a talent I just didn't have and I should face it and hang up my Internet Marketing shoes for good. Yes, I even bought Internet Marketing shoes to try and help me! ;o)

Then one day I got an email from a successful Internet Marketer who I actually trust. His name is Ed Dale and he was talking about a book called "Made To Stick" by Chip & Dan Heath. Well, I hadn't heard of Chip and Dan before but I've been following the ways of Ed Dale long enough to know that he doesn't promote something unless it really grabs him, and I'd found that what grabbed him would grab me also, so I ordered a copy from Amazon.com to see what all the fuss was about.

Well, the "fuss" was that Chip and Dan had come up with a simple strategy for writing what is called "sticky" content; that is, content that stays with the reader long after they have read it. Content that engages the reader and entertains them. Most importantly, content that sells.

They produced a formula for writing sticky content that I must say, upon reading it, seemed more like a reaffirming of common-sense than actually being taught something new. Their formula appealed to my sense of what is right because it does make sense, and that in turn made it so much easier to retain. They had most definitely practiced what they preached and produced a "sticky" book of how to write "sticky" content.

No sooner had a got a few pages into the first chapter than my head started to fill with ideas of how to tackle my next writing assignment. The further I got through the book the more ideas that came out of their teaching. I found it not only inspired me to write better content, it actually made me look forward to writing. For a long time I'd seen writing as the chore of my internet marketing career - the job I had to do in order to sell my products to then make enough money to eventually hire someone else to write my content for me. With the S.U.C.C.E.S steps of Chip and Dan's book I managed to actually get enthused about writing, and even about writing on subjects I'd previously had little or no interest in. Each niche offered up a new challenge and I was able to branch away from just writing about topics that interested me in order to maintain my own interest in writing.

Now I look forward to investigating the next obscure niche and the challenge in discovering what "angle" I would use for the article.

I know it sounds cliched to say a book changed my life but in the case of "Made to Stick" it really did! By employing the common sense and easy to follow writing techniques laid out in the book I was able to improve on the yields from my internet marketing, which in time meant that I could quit my humdrum 9 to 5 day job and work exclusively when I wanted to, from home or wherever else I happened to be. It's meant that I now have much more time to spend with my family and the personal fulfillment at being in charge of what I do and being able to reap the benefits has improved my confidence and outlook on life.

Look, there are plenty of books out there that have the power to get people to change their lives, that "speak" to them on a level that motivates and inspires change. Perhaps you're lucky enough to have found one of those books already but if you haven't, and if you're looking for a way to improve the quality of work you're doing online, then you could do a lot worse than spending a few hours to see what Chip and Dan have to say.