Fact: Goldfish have a longer attention span than the average person.
A goldfish can focus attention on one thing for up to eight seconds, and the average person, wow I did not know that about bananas. Sorry. The average person can focus for seven seconds.
Your content needs to be precise
The average person doesn’t even have a long enough attention span to watch someone win a bull riding contest. To win a bull riding contest, riders must remain mounted on the animal for a full eight seconds. I’m telling you this so you won’t get distracted and stop reading this blog post to look it up on Wikipedia or something, because what I have to say next is really important.
You need to draw your audience in and hook them as quickly as you can.
You need to make your important content stand out. Get to your point and make those points easy to scan by:
- Breaking content up into short sections
- Putting important keywords in headings
- Embracing the line break
- Being concise
- Applying bold fonts strategically
- Using numbered lists
- Using bulleted lists
Got it? Good. Now let’s go explore the next thing.
Marty says
July 1, 2014 at 9:41 amThis is brilliant Shannon – I never knew that humans had a shorter attention span than goldfish, that’s quite incredible and just goes to show how incredibly important that first impression is.