We often submit articles to the usual design blog submission sites such as Design Bump and Design Float and receive a lot of traffic from these (thank you to the good people from these sites!). However, I have been reading a lot of blog articles lately about how to boost traffic to your blog. Many of them mention that Top 10 lists (or any number for that matter – top 20 website designs or 17 great photoshop tricks etc – you get the idea) are a great way to bring a huge amount of traffic to your design blog though social networking sites such as Digg.
I have to say that I was skeptical so you may have noticed that we have been doing some experimenting here on the eightyone design blog with the sort of posts we have been publishing lately. For those of you that haven’t read our last few blog articles, here are the last 5 titles:
5 reasons you should detach yourself from your digital world
Why does everyone think they are a graphic designer?
20 Stunning Music CD Cover Designs
8 Items a Graphic Designer Would Take Back to School
10 Inspiring Website Footer Designs
As you can see, most of the blog titles are based around lists and use lots of images, and I have to say, it works! We have enjoyed a huge growth in traffic to the blog with the above posts and have also seen a good improvement in the amount of comments we are receiving (thanks to all those that have joined in on some of the discussions).
I’m not sure why these lists prove to be so popular? Is it due to the fact that the title is so precise and you know what you are about to see? Is it because they tend to be showing you something inspirational, which is always popular? Or is it just because we all like top 10 lists?!
So what do you think about top 10 lists? Do these types of posts increase your views? Are you someone who scours the web world in search of such lists, if so why?