Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Although the “top 10″ list may have been developed by David Letterman many years ago, the concept has been embraced on the web in recent years to become an important marketing tool for many sites. Just look at some of the most popular articles on digg.com (itself, a sort of top 10 list): The Best 10 All Purpose Laptops, The 7 Greatest Home Shopping Network Screw-ups of All Time, etc. The Internet is a vast and complex information resource and as humans we need a way to categorize and rank the most important (or most bizarre, most ridiculous, most expensive, etc.) to make sense of it all.

We’ve certainly seen the power of top 10 lists on Review App sites and have benefited from the associated search traffic those lists have generated. On TripleBlaze.com, our outdoor information site, by far the most popular page on the site is the “Top 100 Campgrounds in the US.” Of course the list is automatically ranked based mostly on the number and quality of campground reviews but our users take the list pretty seriously. Just today I received an email from one reader who felt like the list was somehow biased and unfair but the truth is the algorithm decides which campgrounds make the cut, not the webmaster Oftentimes controversy can be even more beneficial to generating online traffic.

On Fresh Bible we have a list of the most popular verses in the Bible; on singletracks we have lists to see who has ridden the most mountain bike trails and which trails are most popular. Of course we’re also seeing the power of top 10 lists on sites like Facebook where it seems like every other application is some type of competition to see who (or what) is #1. It’s all in good fun but a dynamic list that changes often keeps users coming back to see what is on top.

Most internet searchers want to find the best of what they’re looking for and adding a top 10 list to your site can give them exactly what they’re looking for!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 8:21 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.