Your website’s visitors and Google both want content – probably much more content than you are providing right now. Some organisations labour under the misapprehension that they don’t have content worth publishing. That’s wrong, unless you have no expertise, no opinions and no advice in which case you have bigger problems than finding web content.
One trick of copywriters that started with lifestyle sections of newspapers and magazine that has spread like syphilis to the online world is the list story.
List stories offer quick bitey, news nugetts.
The list story is just that – a list devoted to a topic. Brett used to churn some of these out when writing for The Melbourne and Sydney Weeklies. You know the sort of thing: 7 ways to beat the heat this Summer, The four hottest acts of the comedy festival, Three ways to land that big promotion, Six ways to add thousands to the value of your home. And on and on…
The TMW / TSW editorial team would devise a list story when deadlines were tight. It got the job done and no one got hurt.
List stories are everywhere, nowhere more so than online.
Free yourself by using the list format on a regular basis. Sit down, preferably with some smart colleagues and tally up a collection of possible list stories – that’s right a list of lists.
Five ways to reduce your chance of an asthma attack today.
Four ways to talk to your kids about your illness.
Six places you can contact for help if you lose your job this year.
You have the knowledge in your organisation; so use it.
Now in a post-modern twist we have a list-based story from BlogSpot that gives advice on – you guessed it – list-based stories. And no, we won’t now list three reasons to read it. Just read it and if you oike it, share it with the buttons below.