10 reasons your list post sucks

Does your article lack an intro and a conclusion? Are you omitting visuals? Is it not easily scanned or tweeted? These are just some of the flaws that are causing readers to flee.

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Have you noticed that everyone is writing list posts? Why? Because after infographics, list posts get the most social media shares.

They are so popular there are blogs devoted to list posts exclusively.


Writing a list post doesn’t ensure that you’ll generate social shares or traffic. Why? Because chances are good your list post sucks.

How do you write a great one? Avoid the following 10 reasons for failed list posts:

1. You’re not using the right number of items.

How many items should you have in your list post? The number is 10.

Ok Dork and Buzzsumo analyzed 100 million articles. They found the most popular posts featured the following number of items: 10, 23, 16, and 24 (in this order).

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