If you want to promote yourself and be heard online, then you need to understand what it is that drives audiences and that generates sales and clicks.

The answer to that is nearly always emotion.

If you’re trying to sell to someone by reasoning with them, then you are fighting an uphill battle. Likewise, if you try and get someone to click your link by using data, then you’ll be falling on deaf ears.

Instead, you need to make sure that you are thinking about the emotion behind your message and that you are appealing to something deeper with your audience. Nearly all decisions to click or by are impulsive and that means they’re driven by emotion. Don’t give them time to look away and think about it later!

What is a Value Proposition?

Perhaps no concept demonstrates this better than the value proposition. A value proposition is basically the most fundamental way in which your product is going to be supplying value. The old saying goes that you don’t sell hats – you sell warm heads. What this means is that people aren’t buying a hat for the sake of the material, they’re buying it for what it can do for them.

Likewise then, if you have a website that talks about fitness, what is it that you’re really selling? Why do people come to your site?

Chances are that the driving forces are the desire to feel more confident, to be more attractive to the opposite sex and to be able to get out of bed each morning with tons of energy.

These are things that people can really relate to and that will really motivate your audience to sit up and take notice. So that’s what you need to promote.

Using Instagram

To demonstrate how you might do this, take Instagram for instance. If you look at what’s successful on Instagram, then you’ll see that a lot of it is seemingly narcissistic and is to do with living vicariously. We enjoy photos of attractive people looking great in their clothes, of wealthy people standing in front of nice cars and of beautiful sunsets.

This might seem vein and shallow but really it is aspirational. It is promoting a lifestyle. And that gets an emotional response.

If you can do this with your own brand – if you can find the lifestyle and the emotional drive behind it –then you can build some dedicated and passionate fans and get a LOT more exposure.