Categories are how we organize information in our minds. Know your category and you’ll know where readers “fit” you into their own minds. - Nicolas Cole

When people read online, they don’t actually “read.” What they do is skim. Browse. Scroll. They let their eyes gloss over the words, and if something compelling catches their eye in the first two, five, maybe ten seconds (a word, a subhead, a phrase), then they’ll stop skimming and start reading. But you better believe as soon as momentum in the writing starts to slow, they’re gone. They’ll swipe back to their social media feed and be neck deep in Memeville in a millisecond.

Here’s an example of the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure from my article, “8 Soft Skills You Need To Work At A High-Growth Startup.” It takes a certain type of personality to want to work at a startup — and the crucial qualities of startup employees you decide to hire. When I was 26 years old, one of my closest friends and I decided we were going to start a company. He was still in the process of finishing his MBA. I had recently taken the leap from my job as a copywriter working in advertising. And every few weeks he would fly to Chicago (where I was based), or I would fly to Atlanta (where he was based), and we’d trade off sleeping on each other’s couches while brainstorming what our first step was going to be. We called it Digital Press. I’ll never forget the day we decided to make our first hire. He was a freelance writer recommended to me by a friend — and we were in the market to start hiring writers and editors (to replace the jobs my co-founder, Drew, and I were performing ourselves). We asked him to meet us at Soho House in Chicago, ordered a bottle of red wine to share, and “interviewed” him by the pool on the roof. He was a fiction writer with a passion for fantasy and sci-fi (not business writing, which was what we needed), and we were young and inexperienced just hoping someone would trust us enough to follow our vision. We hired him — and fired him two months later. The last thing I want to point out here is that you can actually make the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure move even faster by combining the last sentence of the first section, and the first sentence of the second section, into one singular subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument. This fifth sentence is both your conclusion and the first sentence of your second section. And this s

am better off “niching down” until I find one (or a few) categories I can dominate. For example: “Marketing” is broad. “Content Marketing” is more specific. “Content Marketing” is still too broad. “Content Marketing For High-Growth Businesses” is more specific. “Content Marketing For High-Growth Businesses” is still too broad. “Content Marketing For Founders And Executives Of High-Growth Businesses” is more specific.