The Labor Illusion Effect: How To Hook and Convert More Readers!

Today we're talking about The Labor Illusion Effect.

I love this psychological bias not just for hooking readers, but also for converting them into subscribers...and customers!

We'll be taking a look at how some of the top creators use this cognitive bias in their own hooks, and even one of my favorite examples of using it to convert on a landing page.

This one is super simple to implement, so at the end of the examples I will also take you through a couple ways for you to think about how you can use it in your own content, without having to go out of your way to do tons of hours of research.

Without further ado, The Labor Illusion Effect:

The Labor Illusion Effect is a cognitive bias where people tend to give a higher value to things that require more effort to do/create.

We actually took a look at this in my case study of The Psychology of Mr. Beast, so that's where we're going to start.

 Mr. Beast Labor Illusion -> Costly Signaling

When Mr. Beast first started out he utilized the labor illusion effect a lot in his video creation and hooks (as you can see above, dating back 6 years ago for each video).

Now he actually tends to use costly signaling more than labor illusion, but the two do have similar psychological principles.

Costly Signaling is a concept in behavior economics that states that the costliness serves as an indicator of quality, making it seem more credible and informative to others.

In this case an example would be a college degree holding more value than a Udemy course, as opposed to what we see in the images I shared above that are specific to the amount of effort that went into them.

Labor Illusion on the other hand would be the effect of a handwritten letter being more meaningful than a text.

In the examples we see above we have two videos:

1. Saying Logan Paul 100,000 Times = 23 Million Views
2. Reading The Longest English Word (190,000 Characters) = 35 Million Views

The reason I wanted to start with Mr. Beast as the first example is not only because I wanted to share the connection to costly signaling, but also because I wanted to show how this works with even such a mundane task.

The rest of the examples we will be analyzing play into research and how you can save people time while providing them with value, but Mr. Beast is a different example entirely.

Mr. Beast uses his labor illusion effect by doing things no one else would want to do.

Another bonus example of Mr. Beast using labor illusion effect in an early video: "CUTTING TABLE IN HALF WITH PLASTIC KNIVES"...

This took him DAYS. 

And 3.6 million people watched this video...

 Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole

These next two examples are really fun because there a handful of notes that aren't specific to the labor illusion effect, but still things we can analyze from Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole here.

Right off the bat, here are two notes:

1. These were posted the same exact day.
2. They both used the "500+" value as the illusion.

I'm not sure if that tells us that "500" is a good value to go with whenever possible, but it does lead me to the next point here.

The Labor Illusion Effect is more powerful when it is believable.

It's not meant to just be a hook for clickbait.

Here's an example:

1. Over the last 5 years I read 250 business books. Here are lessons:
2. Over the last 6 months I read 10,000 business books. Here are lessons:

The second one you'll be like..."What did you just skim them as fast as you can while you were at a random library one day!?"

We have to really believe that you put in the effort.

The next big point I want to make is the fact that these are tasks that Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush would have been doing anyway.

They didn't specifically go out of their way to do these things so that they could use them in the hook (which is what Mr. Beast did in his content).

They each had two things that they did to improve themselves, and knew that the lessons they took from doing those things could help other people, so they shared them as frameworks/lessons using this effect to grab reader's attention.

 Austin Belcak Positioned As An Authority

Here's one last example of a labor illusion hook that a top creator is using from something he would have already been doing.

In this tweet we see Austin Belcak explain that he has reviewed over a thousand LinkedIn profiles over 5 years.

He then takes that and teaches 9 tips that HE is giving us to make our LinkedIn profile better for getting jobs.

The main thing I want to point out is the difference between how Austin Belcak is building authority vs. how Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush are borrowing authority.

Let's break it down:

1. Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole: In their posts they are borrowing authority while building their own because they are teaching frameworks/lessons from other authorities. This still builds on their own, because they are teaching the lessons THEY were able to pull from that experience, but they are not framing themselves as the expert as much as Austin here.
2. Austin Belcak: In this case Austin is framing and positioning himself as the expert because not only is it a task he completed, but the lessons are also coming directly from his own personal tips and takeaways.

Even if you are not an authority, you can borrow authority like Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush did to continue building your own.

They are both authorities in their niche, but they know the power of leveraging other authorities to teach lessons and continue building their own.

 Chenell Basilio Growth In Reverse

I recently highlighted Chenell Basilio in our case study on Niching Down VS. Niching Broad.

Chenell also uses the labor illusion effect incredibly well to not only hook readers, but also convert them into subscribers.

Each week she spends 20+ hours researching a specific creator and how they grew their newsletter to 50K+ subscribers.

So, naturally, the labor illusion effect is going to be easier for her to utilize, and one she is brilliant enough to continuously take advantage of.

In the image on the left you can see that she is using this in a hook, combining up all the hours she spent researching individual creators and turning them into 5 specific takeaways.

This post, as you can imagine, did REALLY well.

She also uses the labor illusion effect in her sub-tweets and CTAs on Twitter and LinkedIn the same way we see her using it in her sub-headers on her landing page (shown above).

Instead of using it as a hook, Chenell actually turns it around to say you can save 40+ hours of research (implying she has done the research, of course), which is extremely powerful.

So the big takeaway here is that the labor illusion effect doesn't have to just be for your hook, it can also be for your CTA and for conversions as well.

 How To Use The Labor Illusion Effect

There are tons of examples of the labor illusion effect, and I find that it's extremely easy for almost any creator to begin implementing it. 

It all comes down to how you think about it, and frame it.

Let's discuss this...

We already looked at the examples of Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole and how they use it for things they already have done (not specifically for the research of the post, but for their own growth), and then pull specific lessons from those things.

So let's start there.

1. Think of something you do often.
2. Is there a podcast you listen to every time it comes out?
3. Are there lessons you can pull from it that would be useful for people?

Boom. You can have yourself a labor illusion hook right there:

"I spent X hours listening to Y. Here are Z lessons from it."

The next thing I want to discuss is the way you frame your labor illusion and think about it as a whole.

We obviously discussed wanting to make it believable, but we also want to make sure we're making it seem like there was a lot of effort that can save people a lot of time.

Take a look at my hook for the post I shared above.

This was the post that was a CTA teaser post for this case study.

• Have I actually researched hooks for 40 hours? Yes.
• Does this post specifically talk about ONLY hooks. No.

But, I did that research, triggered the labor illusion effect, and tied the thing I was teaching back to the "labor" I was referring to.

Takeaway: Your labor illusion hook doesn't have to be EXACTLY what you're teaching, but it needs to be believable and related in a way that you can at least tie back to the lesson(s) or story you're teaching/telling.

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