Tease Your Readers' Senses!

How do you entice folks to read your blogs? That's the million dollar question and recently someone asked me that. Hmmm.... I put the noodle to work on this...

Challenge your readers. The human brain's intrigued by challenges and puzzles. It thrives on what is out of the ordinary. So with this in mind here's some appeteasers...

Tip Ideas Upside Down Seth Godin's a maestro at this... Fire the Customer... Small is the New Big...

Poll or Survey Recently Valeria Maltoni polled readers about trends coexisting in our lives. She wanted to know which ones interested me and why. By including a poll you value reader's input and they feel like they count. You honor readers' input even more if you analyze and show results in a later post...

Or, you might enjoy seeing how addicted to blogging you are. Try Jeremiah Owyang's challenge to see if you are more of an addict than he...

Visualize Ideas for Readers An image is worth 1,000 words... Today's readers enjoy a quick snack and they're gone. The average reader stays but 17 seconds... Try finding just the right image to capture the essence of your post.

OK, what would put the icing on the cake? The challenge is here...

First here's Chef Mike Sansone's feast for your dining pleasure SCAMPER tactics...

SCAMPER can a creative thinking technique to jump-start your blog posting:

Substitute - Remember the Z-List? Sandy substituted text for images and extended its viral life.

Combine - Consider combining text and audio (sound bytes) in a post.
Adapt - I've written before about emulating an idea to make it your own. Recently, I was inspired by Adam's brilliant post to toy with this scene about RSS feeds.

Modify - Todd Andrlik modified the idea of the Z-List, created the Power 150 and recently partnered it with AdAge

Put to Other Use - One more example from the Z-List: Gavin gave it permanent life on the Z-List Wiki

Eliminate - Television. You'll find more time to blog.

Rearrange - Turning statements into questions could be one way, right?

Michael Michalko, author of Thinkertoys, stopped by to share two more SCAMPER tactics to play with...

Magnify Unique close focus

Reverse Start at the end and rewind... see where this takes you!

OK, your turn... Scratch your noodle... and add your tactics to Tease Your Readers' Senses...