By now you should know that writing excellent content for your website is the first step towards expanding your audience and earning more sales, but writing great content is easier said than done, and even quality content that is presented poorly can ultimately fail to live up to your performance expectations. Fortunately, there are a handful of common and easy ways to distribute your content that will work with virtually any subject and can be used again and again for great effect. One of the most popular and successful ways to do so includes website tip lists.
Tip lists are succinctly written ordered lists, often with five or ten elements, with each point containing a useful and unique tip or trick. They range from “ten tips for writing excellent content” to “seven ways to wash your dog without getting wet”, and can be seen spread across every corner of the internet today, used by anyone who has a content-driven website.
What can tip lists do for you?
Tip lists are a fantastic way to grab a reader’s attention and to zero in on your message in only a matter of seconds. One major barrier facing text based content is that it’s harder to engage your readers and attract new audiences. Most website visitors spend only a few seconds glancing over the body of your text before leaving, a problem even more severe for people who are only just now discovering your content.
Many web developers have turned to multimedia content, including infographics and videos, in order to help retain as much traffic as possible, and breaking away from endless walls of text is an excellent design decision for almost any site. For ideas and messages that can only be or are best communicated in text, creating a tip list allows you to break your content into something more readable and easier for the consumer to digest.
Chunks of content
When writing any type of content, you should break that content into simple chunks of information to best facilitate those who try and scan over your work. Scanning text is much more difficult when content has not been broken into small pieces and short paragraphs. Fortunately, tip lists by their very nature are broken into chunks, making one of the most fundamental features of great content design a major part of their construction.
Keywords are the key to great content
Breaking your content into readable chunks doesn’t do much unless your reader happens to scan phrases or keywords that will keep them reading. Using instructive headings and bold words is a crucial part to getting your audience to engage in your content and give it their full attention, if only for a minute. Content that begins with anchor points such as bulleted lists, roman numerals, or headers like “Keywords are the key” can help hook your audience into reading what you have to say.
The bottom line
In short, tip lists provide an excellent read for your audience because their format follows textbook rules for developing excellent readable web content. Better yet, tip sheets aren’t just an excellent delivery system for your content; they’re also a powerful way to convey relevant information for virtually any type of topic. Giving your visitor a list can help them grasp the benefits of products and services that you may offer that enables you to make sales-driven content while still providing useful information rather than a sales pitch.
Good tips. Great content is also necessary if you want to convert those visitors to clients/buyers once they get to your website!