Posted by 1: Violate the expectations of your target audience.
Curiosity is stimulated when common beliefs are challenged.
For example, “Improve Your Conversions with a Good Landing Page” doesn’t challenge anything the audience doesn’t already know.
Compare that headline with, “This Diabolically Simple Landing Page Tweak Increased Profits by 50% in 15 Minutes.” This headline contains information your readers do not expect, and thus provokes curiosity.
2: Entice them with the knowledge gap
Because curiosity is inconsistent from one person to another, you’ve also got to convince your readers that their knowledge doesn’t include what you have to offer. People think they know more than they do.
Thus, if your headline is, “5 Social Media Tips You Should Know,” a portion of your audience won’t feel a need to click the link because they’re confident they already have this knowledge.
But if your headline is, “5 Upside Down Backwards Social Media Tips from a Cranky Social Media Billionaire,” you’ll open up a knowledge gap. Upside Down? Cranky Social Media Billionaire? I’ve got to read this.
3: Know when to conclude
A reader’s or viewer’s curiosity doesn’t last forever. Have you ever been watching a sales video that promised some great secret you were dying to know, but 15 minutes later they still hadn’t told you what it was or given you an ounce of usable information? Odds are you closed out the video.
I know I closed it, and I wasn’t too pleased with the product seller, either.
You can let your reader know the answer they seek is coming, ‘but first you need to cover some other, related ground.’
As long as you keep it interesting and informative with each sentence enticing them to read the next, they’ll stick with you for a time. Just don’t wait forever to close the curiosity gap.
And as you get better at working with curiosity, you’ll learn to open a new curiosity gap the moment you close the previous one. Fiction authors use this tactic all the time to hold readers spellbound through hundreds of pages of storytelling.