The 6-15-7 Rule Behind Sticky Blog Posts

Grabbing and keeping attention is a matter of seconds, minutes, and words

On the internet, attention is blindingly difficult to come by. Here are some amazing stats, reported in Fast Company:

The average web visitor reads only 6 words of a headline

The average time spent reading a blog article is 15 seconds

If a reader sticks around past 15 seconds, they’ll likely stay for 7 minutes

Think about that for a minute.

At first, people’s attention is incredibly fickle. Six words! That’s not nearly long enough to really process what your headline says. It’s literally a glance — only enough time to quickly skim your article’s headline, process it with the emotional parts of the brain, and decide whether to stick around or move on.

If you do grab them enough to stick around, then you’re got about another 15 seconds to convince them it was worthwhile. Otherwise, they’ll still bail on your article and find something more compelling to read from a stickier author.

But here’s the funny part — once you’ve convinced them to “invest” in your article, the average reading time jumps to 7 minutes! They’re committed now, and they’re sticking around for the long haul.

Crossing this 15-second chasm is absolutely critical to bumping up your reading time, which means more attention for your brand or product — and if you’re a Medium author, more revenue!

I call this strange dynamic of web attention the 6–15–7 rule. 6 words, 15 seconds, 7 minutes. Let’s delve it into more, and see how you can apply it to your own Medium articles and blog posts, making them way stickier and more likely to draw readers in and keep them reading.

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.

15 Seconds

Once your headline draws a reader in, you have about 15 seconds to keep them engaged. They’re like a person who has walked into a car dealership — they’re in the door, which is a big first step, but now you need to close the deal and keep them from walking right back out again.

In journalism, there’s a concept of “burying the lead.” That’s when you have a really engaging piece of info, but you put it too late in your story. Maybe you start with a lot of backstory and people lose interest before they get to your “lead”. You’re buried it — and you’ve lost attention as a result!

With only 15 seconds of reading time to work with, it’s extremely easy to bury the lead on the internet — and crucial not to.

Ideally, your first sentence should quickly communicate the lead concept of your piece. This way, readers can immediately decide if they want to read more, or if they find the concept boring and would prefer to move on. Notice how the first sentence in this piece introduces the core concept of the piece — “attention on the internet is blindingly difficult to come by.”

That’s what we’ve been discussing for, oh, 4.5 minutes so far. If you’re still reading by now, you clearly found that concept appealing and followed me past the 15-second point.

The important thing is to use this first sentence or two to clearly and accurately communicate to the reader what your story is about. You have a sacred bond of trust with your readers — they’ve taken a chance on your article, spending their own precious time on it. It’s your responsibility to give them all the info they need to decide if the article is a good fit for them and if they want to keep reading.

This is where legit articles differ from clickbait. Clickbait writers don’t care at all if you stay and read their story. In fact, they’d much prefer if you didn’t stick around.

Clickbait’s business model is to lure you in with a compelling headline, and then bore or frustrate you enough that you click on an ad rather than continuing to read the piece. So clickbait tries to lose readers right after the start of an article by directing them to an ad — this is how clickbait companies get paid.

Begrudgingly, they’ll string you along through the article if you do choose to keep reading, showing you display ads the whole way. This earns them some money, but not as much as when you actually click on an ad and leave.

In contrast, a good article’s first 15 seconds shouldn’t be trying to lose readers. It should be showing them what the article will cover, so they can decide if they want to stay. You can’t really trick readers into staying — either they find your piece compelling or they don’t.

What you can do, but shouldn’t, is string them along for a while before they find out they don’t want to read your article. This will just cause them to never take a chance on another of your pieces again.

Or worse, you can string them along for so long that they get bored and click away when they actually would have loved your article, had you just told them what it was about more quickly. Again, this is burying the lead.

Use your first 15 seconds, or about 50 words, to accurately convey to your readers what your story is about. If you do this well, some people will quickly realize the story isn’t for them after all, and leave. That’s fine — they weren’t going to finish your piece anyway.

Others, though, will quickly get that the piece is for them. And they’re very likely to “convert", deciding that it’s worth spending the full time required to read what you’ve written.

7 Minutes

And that’s the amazing part of all this. Once you’ve grabbed a reader’s attention with a compelling headline (6 words) and shown them it’s worth sticking around with a clear intro the conveys the point of the piece (15 seconds), you now have their attention for a remarkably long time.

It’s not like read time jumps to 1.5 minutes instead of 15 seconds. No, it increases more than 2,800%, from 15 seconds to a full 7 minutes. This stat comes directly from Medium. They crunched a ton of reading time data on Medium posts and concluded that 7 minutes is the ideal post length, as it’s the amount of time a committed reader will devote to your piece.

On the Internet, 7 minutes is an eternity. You can do a lot in that time. And you should. Once you’ve converted a reader with your intro, you’ve earned the right to take them on a journey with you. Introduce backstory. Share complex data. Build in research and charts.

Once a reader has made the decision to stick around, you’re unlikely to scare them away. It’s as if by making the decision to read past your first 50 or so words, they’ve committed to seeing where you’re going with the piece, and trusting that you’ll take them somewhere interesting. That’s the beauty of longer-form pieces — while attention on the web is fickle, once it’s earned, web readers are likely to give you a surprisingly substantial amount on it.

Part of this may be due to the concept of sunk costs. People are irrationally tuned to want to finish things. Once they’ve invested time or money in something, they’re inclined to see it through to the end. This could mean something negative, like continuing to gamble in a vain attempt to get out of a hole. But it can be a positive force, too.

Once readers have “sunk" a certain amount of time into a piece, they’re likely to stick around and see it through to the end. This basic human brain quirk is a powerful antidote to the wandering attention of the Internet.

Even though attention is hard to come by, people are likely to devote time to something they’ve already spent some time on. So if you get them past the 15-second point where they can click away without feeling they’ve invested a lot of time, they’re likely to hunker down and keep on reading.

There are limits. Again, the average limit for post length is about 7 minutes. If you can say within this time frame, you’re hitting the sweet spot of a devoted reader’s attention span.

Of course, some stories just can’t be told in 7 minutes. For those, it helps to make sure you’ve shared something of value in the first 7 minutes.

I wrote a piece, for example, called A Solar Crypto Manifesto. At 22 minutes, it’s a hulking brute of a piece — almost tripe the ideal length for a Medium post.

I made sure, though, to share valuable info by the 7-minute mark. In that case, I shared some perspectives on the solar market, as well as my ideas for how crypto and solar could work together. That was the meat of my piece. The rest dealt with the specifics of scaling up my idea.

Readers who clicked away at 7 minutes would still learn a lot about solar and crypto. And those that stuck around longer had the chance to delve even deeper into the topic. The piece has received about a 30% read rate — lower than my average, but still not bad for something that takes the better part of half an hour to complete.

Go Forth, and Be Sticky

So there you have it: the 6-15-7 rule.

Use your headlines to grab a reader’s attention — either on an emotional level or by clearly framing what kind of piece they can expect. Ideally, do this in 6 words.

Next, use your intro to clearly communicate what your piece is about, so they can decide whether to “convert" and stay. Don’t bury the lead, and don’t wait too long to tell your reader what they’re committing to. Do it in about 50 words, or 15 seconds.

Once they’ve converted, use the 7 minutes you’ve earned to really delve into your topic. Don’t be afraid of scaring readers away — due to factors like sunk costs, they’re probably going to stick around and hear you out.

Feel free to write longer pieces, but make sure to share valuable info in the first 7 minutes, so if that’s all a reader stays for, they walk away feeling good about the piece.

Now, go forth, apply the 6–15–7 rule, and write sticky posts!