If you mention lists in internet marketing, most people think of email lists.
And, yes, email lists are important as they’re usually the best way to keep in touch with people.
But there’s another type of list that’s often ignored…
It’s a numbered list.
We’re used to these in all sorts of areas of life.
Sports use them to show you how good (or bad) teams are.
Amazon uses them all the time to remind us of the best sellers.
Back when there were physical products. record and CD and DVD sales were stored in lists called charts. There still are charts for these but they’re more often reflective of downloads or views than actual products.
So how can you use numbered lists to your advantage?
Well, despite the fact that this article doesn’t use them – and maybe I should have done a Top 5 post or similar – they can be a great advantage.
You’ve almost certainly seen review sites where people produce a Top 5 or Top 10 or whatever other number fits with the recommendations they’re giving.
Usually these are a countdown style list, so the lowest score product is highest on the page and as you get further into the page you get higher rated products.
I’ve done that one several of my sites and the most successful one has earned me $746.40 in commissions in the first two months of the year.
That’s from just one page on one site (the whole site gets less than 1,000 page views per month).
So you can see the power of lists.
They work – it’s that simple.
You don’t have to train people how to use a list, they know.
They expect it.
They encounter lists in books – all those 101 things to do before something or other.
Sites like Buzzfeed thrive on lists.
Magazines often have references to lists on their covers – when I just looked, there were lists such as 15 must have gadgets, 49 healthy and fast recipes. You get the idea.
And if you run short of ideas, use magazines in your niche for inspiration.
Or just use Google.
Type in 101 uses and see what comes up.
Or any other number – the list will often vary according to the number you type in to your search query.
It’s yet another bottomless pit of keyword and content ideas.
With the added bonus that you get heavy hints as to what content you could be including.
You shouldn’t plaigiarise other people’s lists but there’s nothing to stop you reading three or four of the pages that show up in the results and then creating your own list.
Chances are that more ideas will spring to mind as you do this or that some of the ideas can be split into several points.
Once you try it for yourself, you’ll find just how easy it is to use numbered lists to create content.
Numbered lists are useful content for your website
Numbering creates order and we generally like things to have order rather than be chaotic.
Numbering also gives things a priority or something we can check off (ask any train spotter!)
It helps instill order into things that would otherwise be seemingly random and would be more difficult to make sense of.
Or things you never knew you needed to know – like the suggestions of 10 things you never knew about Frozen or 49 things you never knew about Game of Thrones that were just two of the suggestions that came up when I typed in that phrase.
You don’t have to restrict yourself to written content – videos work nicely for this as well.
Such as 120 facts you might not know about Minecraft. Which has well over 7 million views at the time of writing.
You can expand on lists – often you could create a complete video or a full page of content for each and every item on a list.
That might seem over the top but it’s perfectly do-able.
And it gives you an excuse to build relevant internal links on your site or you could link various YouTube videos together using annotations. You could also turn the individual list videos into a playlist.
Bullet points work as well
If you haven’t got enough items to make a complete list page, you can use numbered bullet point list instead:
- Video lists
- Written lists
- Shopping-style lists where you write down the things people will need much like a recipe or shopping list but it could be kit you need for an activity or anything else
- Highlighting some items in your list can be helpful although it’s not as easy to do in the regular WordPress editor as it should be – I had to put the code in using the “text” option in the editor.
Bolding alternate points makes bullet points more interesting.
Either the complete point if it’s short or a few words (like I’ve done in point three) if the bullet point would look visually odd if you bolded the entire point.
If you’ve got any comments about using lists in videos or written content (or even emails!) then please use the box below this article.
And if you’ve found this post useful, I’d appreciate it if you’d spread the word using whichever social media link you’re most comfortable with. Thanks in advance if you do that!