I've just about given up on reading articles from the website of Inc. Magazine.
It's not just that they limit the number of articles I can read as a non-subscriber.
It's not even that pretty much every article that shows up in my Google News feed from Inc. deals with someone responding in a way that is “a masterclass in emotional intelligence” (though I do throw up in my mouth a bit just writing that).
The titles are clickbait, but curiosity drives traffic, so that's where we are. (It's probably what's gotten you this far.)
This thing isn't quite as bad as Think and Grow Rich, but it's close.
In a similar vein, Napoleon Hill's 1937 classic Think and Grow Rich illustrates a secret. Hill even states in the beginning of the book that the secret won't be spelled out, but that it will be evident in the examples and the principles that follow.
The reader is left to ponder, to contemplate, to follow the threads to see to what common point they lead.
The common thread wasn't particularly obvious to me when I read it, and I felt this sense of uncertainty that I was missing the whole point of this somewhat rambling book.
I'm left to do the same things with Inc. articles
For most of the Inc. articles I've read, it takes some hunting to get the point advertised in the headline.
Well … hunting maybe isn't the correct word. What's actually happening is a story is being told, and the context to the main point is built up over a few paragraphs.
If I read too quickly, I tend to miss it. It usually takes me a few tries to find the main point. It's there, but it's rarely in boldface or anything like that.
Which leads me to this piece by Matt Brady.
He wrote a three-minute piece called “How I Became a Better Writer Without Writing More.” The subtitle was: “It's only one thing, and you're probably already doing it.”
Before I read another word, I thought to myself, You read more. That's how you become a better writer without writing more.
Then I began to read.
He started out by recounting his old boss saying that he was a really good writer, right before he broke the news that his job wasn't going to be renewed.
Following that was a few paragraphs his job hunt, and escaping from reality. He listed three ways he escapes from reality: Video games, tv shows and movies, and reading.
(Reading was the last one.)
He then continues that reading is his favorite way to escape, and paints the word pictures for how he does this.
In the middle of the longest section of this article, he arrives at the point: “… one of the side effects of reading a lot of books is just being exposed to a ton of great writing.“
There it is. There's the point.
And I was indeed correct all along.
Matt finally showed his hand in the comment section
All of my struggling with Napoleon Hill's book, all of my frustration with Inc.'s articles, made sense with what just happened.
I'd been had.
I commented: “Tell me you're trying to get people to read for 30 seconds without telling me you're trying to get people to read for 30 seconds 🤣”
He responded: “Hey, if you’re gonna play the game you gotta play by the rules, right? 😎”
The way Medium pays its writers through its Partner Program is largely based on reads by members. And for a member's perusal of an article to count as a read, it has to be longer than 30 seconds.
By telling the story the way he did, and leaving the title question unanswered until more than halfway through the article, he was encouraging people to stay around for longer than 30 seconds.
Very, very savvy of him.
This re-emphasizes the importance of storytelling.
And including context that moves the story forward.
A somewhat gooey term for keeping readers engaged with your story or website is called stickiness. Higher stickiness is a good thing because it means that visitors are coming back and spending more time processing the material on the site.
Google calls this dwell time, which is the amount of time a user stays on a page before returning to the search results.
To some extent, if the answer is given too quickly, then that hurts the stickiness, or dwell time, in most cases. The reader gets the answer they need, possibly never to return.
Good stories that add to the user experience help this metric.
Keeping readers around isn't so much stated as it is experienced. You know the effort has been successful when you're engaged in a story and finish it.
Thanks for reading!
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Header photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash