When you’re stuck on what type of a blog to write, try writing a list. Lists are always a winner among readers because they’re simple to digest, informative and get to the point. It’s for precisely these reasons that posts with lists always get higher click-through rates than traditional paragraphed posts. They also get shared more often and have a higher likelihood of going viral.
The founders at List.ly have made it easier to create, curate and share lists. Lists can also be crowdsourced, added onto and allowed to have a shelf life far beyond the original blog post.
To apply a marketing eye, consider that lists have to be either useful or funny in order to catch on. For marketing needs and considering the continued life List.ly gives lists, it might be best to focus on information or original ideas. Consider creating a conversation with your list, or start an informative resource-based list. How about offering a list of solutions? Either way, your list should ignite conversations and stimulate ideas, and be based on your industry or consumer group. Existing lists on your blogs can also be shared back on List.ly, along with relevant tags. All lists can be embedded on WordPress blogs and shared across social sites.
Why Bloggers Love List.ly
Lists aren’t just about the lists themselves, lists are now also about the list makers. Coming together to collaborate on content forms strong community bonds among list makers. It’s become another branch of relevant social networking. Increased community interaction also deepens the list maker and collaborator’s own stream of knowledge, allowing them to be exposed to new resources and channels they may not have been aware of.
The new role of crowdsourced community groups also offers the publisher more in return. The fact that users can engage with your content means more comments and feedback within your post, as opposed to a page that just gets consumed and abandoned. Dynamic alterable lists mean movement will continue on in the future, making your destination page continually relevant in the digital sphere. This also makes the blog post a popular favorite among Google bots, which keep crawling the web for keywords, engagement and updates.
Bloggers also love the chance to showcase their own expertise while reinforcing their brand on content that continues to thrive. It’s important to note that List.ly also showcases yet another trend in crowdsourcing. More is better than one, and the same rule applies for content creation, idea generation and social learning.
Getting Started with List.ly
A simple signup with Twitter or Facebook grants a user instant access. Intelligent and convenient, upon signup your List.ly home page links all your relevant sites, including your LinkedIn account. Underneath, users are offered stats including lists made, items added, reactions and total points. Across, you’ve got a sub-dashboard laying out lists, activity, followed lists and the user profile.
Creating a list is an instant process, requiring just a title and description. Advanced options (recommended for marketers) allow for a headline image, tags, credits, default sort categorization, custom voting options and finally the option to allow for comments and moderation. Users can also add their own existing links to created lists.
On the other side of things, the wealth of data List.ly offers is anything but simple. The volume of returns on the slightest search suggests it’s clearly a valuable resource for research, information gathering, data mining and more. List.ly came out a year ago, and it’s a wonder how it’s remained so relatively unknown till this point. It’s definitely a strong forum with an evolved platform and social model that should be storming through social rankings and leveling up to about one of the top 5 social channels after Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
