I’ve learned something very interesting from some of my “List” Articles over the past few weeks. As rule I usually use list to showcase the work of others in the online Creative Community, and to generate great conversations and build new relationships, as well as attract new viewers and increase the traffic to your blog. However there are some very unique pros and cons to these types of blog post.

#1 People Don’t Read the Content That Comes Before the List

This became obvious with one of my more recent post where I tried to make if fairly obvious that it was a post that had multiple pages. The article 60 Fantastic Pieces of Digital Artwork was a multi-page list (3 Pages) and placed navigation links in an obvious and blantent way toward the top of the article and I received comments and emails from people who could not find the rest of images and were wondering where they were.

As a result the number of views to the 2nd page was nearly half of the views to the 1st, and the 3rd page had half of the views of the 2nd. Which is a shame because of the great artwork on those pages not getting their due, which means I will have to re-include them in a later list and take flack for being repetitive. But I will take that flack because I want those artist work to get the exposure and credit they deserve and its my own fault for not realizing people are too lazy to read instructions. ^_^

#2 Don’t Break List Post Up Across Multiple Pages

I addressed this to some degree in #1 but I found that as healthy as breaking up the post sounds it doesn’t work. People who have been around children know that you can tell them where something in the fridge is and they still won’t find it. Well with people reading blogs its apparently much the same.

The reasoning behind breaking up the blog post is to reduce the load time (and your bounce rate), especially with post that feature plenty of images, the problem is that more often than not, people don’t want to click through to a second or third page, or they can’t figure out where they are supposed to do that, no matter how obvious it may seem to you, if your users can’t figure it out, your weren’t obvious or clever enough, the load time is going to be the lesser of two evils in this case. I learned this lesson  from the post 30 Fresh Examples of Typography Design.

#3 If You’re Going to Link Anything, Open in New Window/Tab

This is important if you are worried about your stats in Google Analytics. If you are concerned with getting your bounce rate, and time on site down then this becomes very important. Its great to have links to other sites especially if you are showcasing the work of others, giving them a link is a wonderful gesture. However I found that you can shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t handle it correctly.

If you don’t have the links open in a new tab or window and the person is constantly pushing the back button to get to your site (or worse if they are just leaving your site and not coming back) you are really killing your metrics for time on site and for bounce rate and lowering the value of that traffic you built through good content.

#4 If You’re Going to Break Up A Post, 2 Pages is the Max

I have mixed feelings about this because there is a point where you really do just need to break up a blog post that has a certain number of images (anything more than 30 or so) because the load time will be completely unreasonable and will distract many viewers. That being the case the best thing to do is to obey the 2 Page Limit. The less clicks people have to do to get to content the better.

On the other hand as a website owner you want to encourage more click-throughs and a great post with at least two pages is certainly a way to accomplish that, as long as people actually follow through to the next page. This also shows you how many people remained interested enough to do show and may give you more insight into how people interact with your site. I applied this in the article 40 Stunning Digital Paintings.

#5 List Work Best When You Do Them For the Right Reasons

When you do list that really have value and are fairly original (meaning that they are either a new topic, or an old topic with different content) , and you take the time to do them well, people will respond to them. Not to mention they won’t ignore them the next time around. Once you are known for posting interesting and useful content your readership will not only increase, but so will your creditability. I can’t stress enough how important maintaining a good online reputation is. Oh and avoid ripping content at all cost, it has a negative effect on your SEO, makes you look bad in the online community and can have legal repreccussions.

#6 Don’t Go Overboard On Generating List Post

Unless you’re committing to a particular “post format” that justifies it (i.e. #musicmonday #typographytuesday, #webcomicwednesday, #followfriday) avoid posting list too often. You’ll become in effective, inefficient, and it will take up a lot of your time and energy to produce something less than spectacular.

When making a list post you should consider: who is this list valuable to? what benefits does it offer the reader? where is a good place to circulate this post for its audience? why is this post tweet-worthy or digg-worthy?