The 6-15-7 Rule Behind Sticky Blog Posts
By: Thomas Smith
Tags: Journalism, Writing, Attention, Blogging, Marketing

6 Words

Again, the average reader spends only enough time to read about 6 words of a headline. That’s really no time at all — enough to spend about 2 seconds (literally — that’s not a figure of speech) processing what you’ve written.

The science also shows that if you write a longer headline, people skip the middle bit and only read about the first 3 and last 3 words. No matter how long your headline is, people are going to read 6 words of it.

What this is really saying is that people process headlines on an emotional level, not a rational one. I’m a trained neuroscientist with a degree from Johns Hopkins, and I can tell you that 2 seconds is way too short a time to get much higher level cognition involved in processing anything (I’ll write a separate article diving into this in more detail).

So really, readers are responding to your headlines emotionally. If you want them to stick around, you have to grab them at an emotional level.

As I’ve shared before, I’ve found that one way to do this is to include more emotion in your headline — specifically, a little taste of concern or anxiety.

This is often enough to get a reader to pause and consider your article in more detail. People are very loss-averse — especially when processing things at an emotional level — and pinging them with a little fear causes the brain to stop and look at the stimulus in more detail.

This, of course, is the concept behind clickbait. Which you want to avoid! So keep it subtle and reasonable. Clickbait is like emotional heroin, an insanely powerful and destructive stimulant. You want something more at the level of a nice cup of coffee — potent enough to have an effect, but not enough to trick or damage.

Headlines that identify a problem, a challenge, a struggle are likely to hit on the emotional triggers that cause people to stop and click through. Stronger emotional words or clickbait concepts like “STOP and read this or you might die!” also hit on the same things, but go too far.

Beyond anxiety, other concepts trigger the brain to stop, too. This can be as simple as structuring your headline to quickly show readers that your article is similar to other articles they’ve read before.

It sounds cliche, but headlines that read like “How I Used _______ to ________” do really well on the Internet. So something like “How I Used Twitter to Grow My Freelancing Business”.

Why? When people see a headline in this format, they already know essentially the kind of article they’re going to get; a how-to, sharing someone’s personal experiences.

And people like these kinds of articles! If your headline follows a standard format — as soul-crushing as these can be to write — your headline immediately tells readers what they’re getting, and they’re more likely to click through.

The same goes for listicles — people immediately know what they’re getting with a headline that reads “The 5 Things to Do if You Want To ________.”

And they also get a sense of how much time they’ll need to invest in your article — enough to read about 5 things, not 14! This makes them more likely to give it a click. It’s part of why listicles do so well on the Internet, even if, again, they’re not the most innovative format.

People respond emotionally to numbers, too. How many times have you clicked through on a headline that gave a specific (often monetary) number? One of my trending articles right now has the headline “The Anatomy of a $650 Medium Post.” Including a specific number — especially one dealing with money — makes the headline much stickier.

Finally, people respond to other kinds of trigger words. Marketers have long known this — words like Free, New, and a person’s own name trigger immediate responses. Unless you’re doing an email campaign, you can’t customize a headline for each user with their own name. But you can refer to them by category, which has much the same effect.

“Marketers Should Always Follow These 5 Guidelines” or “Coders, Stop Doing _____” quickly grabs people who are members of these groups. It’s personalization, but general enough to capture a whole group rather than a specific person.