More Is Not Always More
It is very tempting to clutter up our web sites with all sorts of things. You may start with a simple idea and then you end up spawning all sorts of additions, both internal and external to the original message that you are seeking to emphasize.
Even elaborating excessively about a single thing can have negative consequences. People think that the weight of the evidence that they provide for something is cumulative, but this has been clearly shown to not be the case at all.
No matter how distinct, a tree stands out much more in a meadow than in a forest.
I first read about this years ago, in a psychology class in college, and it was probably the most important thing I got out of that course. This is something we really don’t think about enough and certainly don’t appreciate enough when we are constructing our sales messages.
The idea here is that when you put a convincing reason with one or more less convincing reasons, we may think that the less convincing one or ones adds to the level of persuasion, but it has been shown that the opposite often occurs.
If I gave you 10 reasons to do something, from the most persuasive to the least, your level of persuasion may actually decline with each subsequent reason, as people tend to hold in their attention the most recent data they are presented with.
This just isn’t a matter of ordering the information so that you end up with the highest weighted stuff towards the end, although that is important as well. It also involves looking to not present too much information, because the impact of the more persuasive elements will be reduced as their proportion to the overall presentation is lessened, and therefore weakened.
We Can’t Be Complex Without A Valid Purpose
We don’t want to look to oversimplify things either, like for instance just putting on our home page something like this poker room has been proven to produce better results for all poker players, so click here to do better at online poker. That would be pretty powerful and I’d take something simple to even a silly degree over some of the cornucopia approaches you see with a lot of sites, as at least the message is getting through loud and clear, a single tree in a meadow instead of one buried in a forest.
However we often do need to elaborate, but when we do, we need to be careful to actually look to add to our message and not detract from it. Adding to it effectively is the challenge here, and it’s no challenge at all to detract from it, so we really need to take care in ensuring we are helping and not hurting ourselves.
So it really pays to be selective here. This is something that most presentations can benefit from, the best incorporate this very well, but many don’t, and we in particular as poker affiliates really abuse this. Even hiring so called professionals to craft our sites usually doesn’t help a lot, just look around and you will see over complexity in abundance at the most successful affiliate sites.
This Principle Applies Both Internally And Externally
What I mean by this is that we need to seek the ideal level of simplicity and complexity, the right balance between them we’ll say, in both our messages themselves, in other words internally, and also in our web pages as well, the external to the message part.
We in other words want to make sure our trees stand out enough and also make sure that we don’t plant too many so none of them stand out properly. This requires some real thought toward using our space economically.
There are also considerations of page and site optimization as well, but we tend to lean too hard on this and detract from our message too much in doing so. I think that this was once much more important than it is now, I remember the old days when the best optimized pages looked almost like spam, but we have moved away from that to a large degree and search engines no longer reward this stuff like they used to, so there’s no need to pump up your pages like you used to have to.
It’s more about strategic location now, and emphasis, which is exactly what we should be looking to do in seeking out a more simple and effective plan. Search engines now prefer simplicity to a higher degree really, as well is our readers, putting this more in alignment.
So at this point what I’d like you to do is think about the overall impact of your messages and your web pages by not only considering what else you can put there, but also what you could remove to try to make your messages more powerful. It’s all about seeking to influence and that really needs to be our focus.