Welcome back ladies and germs, let us dive right into the 7A's with our first entry:

Attention

What is the single most important resource you will ever own? If the heavy lead-in didn't give it away, it is this: your attention.

As the ancient Buddhists and stoic philosophers knew better than anyone, it is your attention that governs the quality of your life. This applies in ways large, small, fundamental, and infinite. Attention is the key that unlocks possibility.

If you're trying to make something happen, you can get nowhere without first recruiting the attention in service of your goal. In your own personal goals, you only need to get a grip on your own personal attention. When you're trying to influence the thought or behavior of another, however, you'll need to clear the extra hurdle of capturing their attention.

Attention is the #1 A of Content Marketing. You will not get anywhere without it.

How do you capture the attention?

• Begin with an effective headline. There are tomes of writing and knowledge on this waiting for you to dig into. Do it. Two of the first books I ever read as a young buck at an ad agency were Cashvertising and Words That Sell. I was too foolish to make much of them at the time, but as I've fleshed out my understanding, they have served me well in the art of capturing attention.

• Employ effective imagery to capture the eye. Words are great, but pop off a page they do not. The right image is like a candy bar for the eye - sweet, undeniable, crave-inducing. The right image will attract eyes to your content. There are, of course, libraries of data on this. But to be frank, most of the best learning I've done here has simply been keeping my eyes open to the imagery all around me - on the web, in magazines, on signs, and everywhere in between. When you're paying attention, you can start to osmose what works and what doesn't. For the purists looking to go deeper, I'd recommend How Pictures Work. This incredibly enlightening book gave me the structure I never had, enabling me to pull the right strings to evoke whatever hidden meaning I wanted to out of images.

If you don't capture the attention, you've already lost. All your wonderful work goes to waste. Capture the attention. Start there.

Coming up: Now you've got my attention. Will I give you more than that?