SteveX Compiled

Reading Digg and Slashdot, both of which are aggregators of popular content, it’s amazing how many of the articles that get posted are numbered lists.

6 Places You Must Use Ajax, for example.  10 things you should do to prepare a new Linux installation.  Top 10 System Administrator Truths.  Leonardo Da Vinci’s 10 Best Ideas.  24 Ways to Impress Your Friends with AJAX.  Top 10 Custom JavaScript Functions of All Time.  Top 11 Internet Myths. Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. And so on.  For some reason, we like lists.

So why not jump on the bandwagon?  In the spirit of giving readers what they want, here’s my own list of the Top 1 Ways to Get People to Link to You:

• Write Your Posts as Numbered Lists.  Writing a review of a videogame?  Theme it as “5 Things I Like about Pong”.  Blogging about your cat?  Don’t just list cute things Fluffy’s done, number them!  “Fluffy’s 7 Cutest Moments” is a way bigger draw than “Cute Fluffy Moments”.

  Any old “how to” article can be turned into a numbered list of steps to follow.  This isn’t quite as good as a list of discrete items.  One of the great things about the discrete lists is that attention-starved web surfers can just skip any item they find boring and jump to the next one.

Follow these simple tips, and you’re sure to see your traffic skyrocket!

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 4:02 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.