One way to get traffic to your blog is to make a great big list of people and declare that they’re important.  Influencers, People You Need to Know, Up-and-Comers.  The only thing people love more than a list is being on a list. And the only thing people love more than being on a list is telling other people that they’re on a list. This is the link bait list.

I’ve been on a number of link bait lists. But with few exceptions my only real qualification was the fact that I was on one of the long lists that came before. Once important, always important.

The most successful link bait lists are long, of course, because that increases the visit time on the site as everyone in the free world scrolls desperately to see that they’ve been listed.  And the more folks listed, the more followers leveraged to drive Twitter birds back home to the proverbial content farm.  We like to reward the list creator for selflessly thinking of us.

Human nature is predictable and amplified with social media.  Everybody loves a list, especially when they’re on it.

And yes, I make lists. But I work to make them practical, credible, thought through and written with the intent of delivering original information, not traffic.

To learn more about great curation and how to do it, check out the 33 charts Curation Archives.