One Easy Way To Make Your Blog Better

Everyone’s always going on about how to make a blog better and get more traffic. Write lists. Say something useful. Be outrageous. Be original. Be someone famous.

Well, here’s one tip I have yet to see on any blog, but which I’m pretty sure will improve your readership:

Don’t post absolutely huge lists

Every day, I see half a dozen posts with names like  “157 different things to do with a blog” or “432 Twitter apps to help your networking” or “257,901 creative blog entry titles that will attract traffic”.

Quite simply, they’re too big. There’s no way anyone’s going to trawl through over 400 Twitter apps, for example, unless you’ve done some serious categorisation and rating. No one’s going to read over 100 different people to follow on Twitter, titles for blogs, ways to improve your sex life or anything else – again unless they’re extremely short entries and you’ve done some serious prep work. Even pictures become painful after the list reaches 20 or so entries.

Make decisions. Trim the list. Give an opinion. Present a useful, helpful, digestable collection of interesting things, rather than just emptying your bookmarks onto the page. If there really are that many, split the list into separate posts or categorise heavily.

Ron Jeremy may disagree, but take my word for it: bigger is not always better.