Lists in a post or post around lists
Posted on July 1, 2008 by
Roy
Blogging, Online Branding
2 Comments
Why should you think about creating lists while writing a post?
Because it sells and it may fetch you a lot of one way links along with visitors. There is no doubt about that. Take a look at Smashing Magazine - you cannot ignore that, large and useful lists are one of the biggest reasons of their huge popularity. If you still have any doubt, take a look at their most popular posts - top 10 most popular posts are lists (you can find it in the ‘popular posts’ widget in the first side bar).
Wait, Smashing Magazine is not about lists alone. You must consider the quality of those lists. And you should also notice another important aspect of their content - almost all the posts are some sort of solutions or they have a visible application that is actually closing the sale (I mean links).
If your list is just the first few pages of Google SERP, it won’t sell much - if you don’t believe these words, try it yourself. Whenever you are creating a list, you are actually catering to a niche group of people who would bookmark the page for future use. Now, do you really think that, those people do not know about the elements of your lists already? They also use Google.
Another big reason of their success is the complete package - each of their posts are a complete package - glossy images, beautiful formatting and to the point. And they present you huge lists and cater mainly to the people who have some sort of web presence (going online for some information once in a while does not make someone webby); for example, designers, developers, bloggers etc. Do you have so many webby in your niche?
And there is a tendency - people like images - they like to bookmark images - they like to pass them to another friend. Now again, it all depends on your niche market and how you want to promote yourself. If you can hook your target audience with the content alone, like Matt Cutts or Seth Godin, there is nothing like it. But at the same time, you may also start thinking in terms of images.
What else! Smashing Magazine was not built in a day - and today, I do not need to give them a link to help you go there for further references. You already know their URL - that’s the power of brand and word of mouth promotion (they have got lots of them).
And Smashing Magazine is not the only player - there are hundreds of bloggers who think in the same line - successfully.
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I’ve just written a blog post about why numbered title works.
It is coincidence that I just subscribed to your RSS feed earlier today.
You have got a good post too :)
But why are you not allowing comments there?