How to Earn Money using the Attention Currency - Thrifty Hustler (2024)

“The currency of the New Economy won’t be money, but attention – A radical theory of value.” – Michale H. Goldhaber Wired January 12, 1997.

It might have baffled people when Michael H. Goldhaber wrote this on Wired in the late ’90s that attention will be the currency of the future. Fast forward to today, this has evidently become true, especially with the progress and the reach of the internet around the world.

Everyone who has both offline and online businesses knows this well.

We need to have customers to make money!

The products and services alone will not convert to money unless someone buys them from you. Small, medium, and big businesses alike spend a lot of money and effort in marketing and advertising just to grab people’s attention and to convert that attention to money.

What is attention currency?

“Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.” – Michael Crawford Introduction, Attention as a Cultural Problem

Rare things are valuable! And our attention is a very limited resource. We only have a limited amount to give on any given day.

We only have 24 hours in a day. On a typical workday, most of us usually spend at least 8 hours at work. We spend approximately an hour or two preparing and commuting back and forth to our jobs.

A lot of us spend 8 hours at sleep. And that leaves us with usually 6 hours on a weekday that we could spend on any other activities that we choose.

In the 18 waking hours that we usually have in a day, we are constantly bombarded with information that is made to influence our future purchases.

The information that we’re getting may come from our computer and mobile screens, billboards that we see on the streets, the clothes that people are wearing, our conversation with other people, the window displays of various shops that we see on our way to work, etc.

All of these mediums are screaming at our faces and storing themselves in our subconscious hoping that they get our attention.

They’re hoping that the next time you go to a mall or the next time you log on to an online shopping site, you remember their brand. Instead of buying Brand X, you’ll buy them instead – Brand Z.

How to earn money using the attention currency?

Save and Conserve Your Attention Currency

Since you know that your attention is a finite resource that you can only use sparingly in a day, think of it as your money.

We save money that we earn in a day in order to buy the things that we need and want in our lives.

This goes the same for your attention, do not spend all your attention currency on one thing and save most of it for things that matter more to you.

Grow and Invest Your Attention Currency

Instead of using your entire attention in consuming entertainment media that provides instant gratification to you, why not invest it in things that could help you grow and prosper as an individual?

Just like investing in stocks or other high-yielding investments to help grow your money, why not think of ways to properly invest your attention?

Some of the things that you could invest it in include:

• Quality time for yourself
• Bonding time with your family and friends
• Self-development
• Mindfulness
• Growing sources of income
• Activities that enrich life experiences such as travel.

Capture Your Audience or Target Market’s Attention

Once you’re able to master how to properly utilize your own attention, then you can move on to earning money from other people’s attention. It can be done in a variety of ways:

In Employment

In order to succeed in our employment, we need to capture the attention of our employers or their representatives such as our immediate superiors.

In order to do so, we should be able to consistently show them the value of our contributions toward achieving the company’s goals.

Job promotions and salary increases are also based on this idea. Those who are responsible for our annual assessments should know our performance at work.

If you’re not capturing the attention of the decision-makers in your workplace in a positive way, then chances are, your competition will always get ahead of you.

In Offline Businesses and Side hustles

We use advertising and marketing in order to capture the market’s attention. In my case as an online seller, I do this by making sure that all my product listings have clear and beautiful pictures.

All of my listings should have adequate information that accurately describes the products.

I also do cross-posting to ensure that I could reach a wider audience thus increasing my chances of landing a sale. My online shop has a presence on various online selling platforms and social media accounts.

I also price my products along the median and often lower than my competitors.

In my years of experience in selling online, I find that products with high qualityand low prices always attract the attention of buyers.

I also make sure that I retain my target market’s attention by making sure that I provide the best customer service that I can offer. On any given day, I make sure that I’m responsive to all their queries and fulfill their requests.

In Online Businesses such as Blogging

We all know that blogs and other online businesses need traffic in order to earn an income. For those who are not familiar with the term, online traffic means the number of people who visit a website.

For most blogs that do not sell anything, we earn money through advertisem*nts. The more people who visit a website, the higher the income is through page impressions or ad clicks.

Blogs that are selling their own products, also need a substantial amount of traffic in order to convert the readers into buyers.

Capturing the attention of readers is actually a business in itself due to its complexity (that’s why there are tons of articles online about blogging).

The best-known way to drive attention to a blog is via SEO or optimizing your content for the search engine.

Most people do not know your blog or your website. But, they do know the biggest search engine in the world – Google. Billions of people use Google to search for almost anything under the sun.

And your website appears in Google searches because of two major things. First, the relevance of your content to what people are searching on Google. Second, SEO.

How to build a long-term profitable business by retaining your audience’s attention?

Capturing markets is a very challenging thing to do but retaining your customers is a much harder feat, especially in the ever-changing world of business. The competition is getting tighter as the years go by.

Most businesses retain the attention of their customers by offering value-added service and excellent customer service.

And this also applies to blogging and other online businesses. If you’re a blogger like me you can do this by doing the following:

Improve Customer Experience

Think of your readers as your customers. Make everything easy for them as much as possible. You can start improving your customers’ experience by ensuring that your page loads easily.

Google’s best practice is to achieve a page-load of under 1.3 seconds for desktops and slightly longer for mobile.

I’ll be writing a separate post on how to improve page load time in the future. But some of the things that affect the page load time include the content of your blog such as pictures, graphics, widgets, etc.

You can also improve your customers’ experience by improving the aesthetic of your blog.

Use color palettes that work well together. High contrast can be painful to the eye and might result in a high bounce rate.

Improve Engagement

Take time to respond to your readers’ comments on your blog or on your social media accounts.

This is a great thing to watch out for because when someone engages with you, it means that they’re really interested in your content. They might have found your content to be extremely valuable.

It’s hard to be available on various social media especially if you’re a one-man team but there are a lot of ways on how you could make yourself available if you want to.

Improve your Content

In the business of blogging, your content is your main product.

Readers found you on search engines Google, Yahoo, or Bing included your content in their search pages because they think your content provides value to their customers.

Your content should be the core of your business. Regardless of your niche, your content should provide value to whoever reads it.

Make your content easily digestible as well to ensure that readers continuously visit your blog.

You can do this by breaking blocks of text by adding important graphics or related pictures that help tell the story better.

Fulfill your Promise

This is the best and the only way to retain anyone’s attention.

Fulfill your promise!

If your blog is about budget travel then consistently write about ways on how to travel the world frugally.

Be cautious in straying off the path of your brand because it might confuse your audience and you might end up losing your readers.

If your blog is about dividend investing then write about dividend investing. If your blog is about making money then write about things that could help your readers make money. And so on and so forth. You get the drift.

Sometimes, we tend to post off-brand articles because of various reasons.

Stick to your brand and you’ll attract the right audience for your blog.

If you have the attention of the right audience for your brand then conversion to sales will be easier.

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Do you have any other suggestions and tips on how to earn money using the attention currency? Feel free to share your tips and suggestions in the comment section below.