Lots of people like the list kind blog posts that usually start with “Top 10” or “The Best 100”, I can deny it’s a great way to get attention to your post, specially when it has tons of useful links that someone can bookmark to get back to it latter. But before you do your coming log list post make sure to read my opinion about long list posts because I actually don’t like it, and I will not publish a long list again on any of my blogs.
Advantages of list post
Just to let you know, I am not against list posts, I am only tired of long ones, so let me first talk a little about the advantage of list posts. You probably post a long list post thinking people will like it, and actually they do like it, and it gets high number of “Thank you for the awesome links” comments, specially if your list includes links to your fellow bloggers blogs and some really useful posts, this is why list posts gets much more retweets and extra amount of votes on social bookmarking websites, it’s a very good promotional technique.
What could happen latter to LONG list posts?
One of the most mistakes that bloggers do while creating a long list post is to care more for number and forget the quality of links, I will now tell you why I hate long list posts because this happen to me more than once, do you remember my very long list of 100 blogs using CommentLuv? I will take it as an example to make you understand why I hate posting a long list post on my blogs, and why I will not do it again.
I spend more than 3 months to finish this post, I was collecting CommentLuv enabled blogs to list them in one long list post, and I got more than 200 comments between thank you and plz add my blog to your list! I got a high rank for this post because so many people share it and link to it. I have edited this post more than 100 times!
Oh my God.. I have Broken Links!
At the end and after a few months passed, I discovered lots of broken links on my list of 100 blogs using CommentLuv post, and now I have to do extra work to remove those links, and if you are wondering why Broken Links? The answer simply because those blogs I am linking to has their hosting expired, or their owners are no longer blogging on them, or changed the URL of their blogs, so lots of links in my list post are linking to no where in the space of the internet.
This made me rethink again and changed my mind about long list posts and prefer a little short list when I do promotion posts or list posts, so I am always trying to reduce the number of external links on my weekly rounds posts as well.
No long link list posts anymore
I decided not to do long list posts anymore and reduce number of external links in my posts, maybe 10 up to 30 is not harmful and painful as a 100 list post. I believe you know now the disadvantages of long list posting.
Another thought is to post more often, why I will do a very long list post while I can post two or three posts and each one has less number of links, it’s better to handle, don’t you think so?