How Goldfish Readers are Hurting your Business

And what you can do about it

Elna Cain
5 min readMay 29, 2020
Photo by fotografierende from Pexels

Our digital world has made us unable to filter. And now we are goldfish readers.

Is this you.

You get on social media and see a post you like. You click, scan, and move on to another posting.

You call yourself the multi-tasking whiz, but really, switching attention like this isn’t productive.

People’s attention spans online is like the attention span of a goldfish — around 8 seconds.

Our digital world has made readers unable to filter. That Game of Thrones Facebook test made you switch focus, and now you’re wondering which character you resonate with. Or, you grabbed your phone to write your to-do list, only to end up checking Instagram for any cool giveaways.

Now imagine, you’re the business owner and are trying to grab people’s attention for more than 8 seconds.

Maybe you’re the stay-at-home mom that decided to start a craft business.

Or, you decided to offer a freelance writing service.

Whatever the case is, you want people to land on your website, read your content, and stay on your site.

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Elna Cain

SaaS freelance writer & mom with real-world marketing experience. Mentors writers on her blog https://elnacain.com. Need a writer? elna@elnacain.com