Are You Engaging Their Subconscious Minds?

Tell me if this situation sounds familiar. Maybe you know someone (perhaps intimately) that went through a similar situation.

You walk into an electronics store to pickup a case for your iPhone and somehow end up gawking at the home theatre system that just happens to grab your attention. A sales guy makes his way over and attempts to sell you a home theatre set.

You tell him that you can’t afford it and that your current place is way too small for a home theatre and he spends the next 30 minutes chewing your ear off trying to prove to you that you can afford it and that it will fit in your new place if you use the store credit card and get one of the new flat-screen TV’s that you can mount on the wall. His logic is sound, but you walk away annoyed and home theatreless.

Then, the next time you’re at an electronics store the same scenario plays itself out, except this sales guy does something different. He asks you a few questions, and finds out that you can’t afford it. He turns to you and says “Yeah, that sucks…oh well, hey come check this out!” as he walks you over to the demo room. “I can’t afford this either, but can you imagine how cool it would be to have this in your home?” he says as he sits you down on a couch and cranks up the most amazing home theatre experience you have ever seen in your life. 30 minutes later you’re on the phone with your spouse explaining away the $5,000 purchase you just made.

Sound familiar? How about this scenario. You somehow find yourself on the Blog of an Internet marketer and he has a picture of a check from Google for a dollar amount that represents more money than you have ever made in a year, and the caption below says that he made that in a month. You have no idea how this person makes his money, but you can’t help but to read their RSS feed or visit their site to see what they’re up to.

Why does this happen?

See, we all live with the illusion that we make logical, reasonable decisions. That simply isn’t true. The human brain is bombarded with over 11,000,000 sensory inputs every second from our sensory organs. The conscious mind can only process 40 sensory inputs per second. That means that 99.999% of everything you sense in your life is processed by the subconscious mind.

Studies prove that the vast majority of the decisions we *think* we make in life are actually made for us by our subconscious minds. So what are you subconsciously communicating to your audience? How can you communicate better with them?

I’m not going to give away all the secrets, but I will offer some examples of what I mean.

One of my readers, Thomas from HappyFarming.com runs a Blog that focuses on the home gardening/farming niche. When I visit his Blog I see pictures of his garden with various vegetables being grown. I don’t even have to read the text and instantly my subconscious mind starts thinking “Thomas has a home garden. Thomas knows about gardening. Thomas grows his own food. Thomas knows how to grow radishes.” Etc.

He doesn’t have to say “I know how to grow radishes.” If he shows a picture of his garden and pictures of some radishes he grew, we automatically assume that he knows how to grow radishes. I know this sounds simple and elementary, but how often are you communicating online with words, trying to prove something logically when you could much more easily communicate the same message subconsciously.

This is why wealthy people wear a Rolex to a business meeting. They don’t have to say “I have money.” when they’re wearing a $30,000 watch. People subconsciously pick up on that and assume the person has money even though he may never mention it. When you first arrive on a Blog you’ve never been to and you see that the person has 28,000 RSS subscribers, what impression does that give you? What if they have 1 RSS reader?

If you’re a Blogger, take a look at your Blog or ask one of your friends to look at your Blog and see if they can tell you what is your Blog communicating to them in terms of first impressions. What kind of feeling do they get while looking at it?  What words do they use to describe it?  Tell them not to think, but to just say what pops into their heads.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you can do the same thing with your sites and landing pages. Print them out and show them to your friends and family and ask them “What do you think of this website?  What does it say to you? What’s it communicating?”

You might be surprised what you hear. If you hear “I don’t know, it looks like a site I wouldn’t trust for some reason.” from three different people, there might be something to that. Maybe the images you’re using are not the right ones. Maybe it’s the color scheme. The information on the site could be flawless, but the design / colors / images / layout could be communicating the wrong thing to people.

Are there pictures, logos, words, phrases, or design elements you could add which will change the subconscious reaction to your sites? What about the font you’re using?

Just out of curiosity, what’s the first answer that pops into your head when I ask this question: How many pets do I have? And how do you know?

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