We’ve all seen them. “5 ways to cut your toenails”, “10 things that will bore you silly”. What are they? List posts, link bait style.
Here’s the concept. You take a subject or topic. Devise several tips or points on sed subject, then hit <ol>. But you need to stop right now! These things are beginning to grate on me, and many other users. Twitter is becoming overrun with these low quality, rhythmical posts. I figured the best way to convince you would be with another link-bait post. A bit of irony should prove my point.
1. Every topic is covered 5 times now
Such has become the popularity and laziness of bloggers, you’ll often find that every new blog post they write is a list post. And because of the large amount of blogs / bloggers most topics have been covered at-least 2 or 3 times. Ever heard of saturation? Take the subject “Free wordpress designs”. From memory there must be 100′s of these posts around the web, and only a handful are half-decent.
2. They never really live up to expectation
The most enticing thing about a list post is usually the title. But then that’s it. The rest of the posts contain little meaty content, just lots of poor quality content. Ok, granted, some content, such as designs and perhaps link round-ups might work well with list style posts, but founding your blog based upon lists is a bad idea. A user could feel short changed, and never return. Not good!
3. They stop been interesting or effective
Because there’s sooo many, they are getting old quick. And often this means that they become dis-interesting, and actually turn away customers. So if your going to use them, then do it sparingly. Very sparingly.
4. They don’t encourage positive comments
Its been my experience that list posts often encourage, even if by accident negative comments. People disagree often with something that isn’t explained as well as it could if it had its very own article. Plus, because your writing a huge list, you don’t focus on every point as well as possible, and so possibly you may even be wrong. Make sure what your saying is correct!
5. Little to no long term value
If you write a list post, you’ll probably notice that initial buzz quickly wears off. A proper, interesting article, well written with insightful content will gain much more recognition and value as a ‘genuinely’ useful post.
I hope this post has dissuaded you from using so many list posts! Yes, ok I admit, writing a more traditional blog post requires a little more effort, it needs to flow better and you need to keep yourself much more in line as you write to stop wandering off topic, but a well written post will be equally if not more readable than a list post. So stop, and just write normally! Please, I beg you, because I cant take any more meaningless content.
