Business Blog Writing By the Numbers for Both Men and Women

“To freshen up blog post content, start with one idea about your product or service, then. try putting a number to it” is one piece of blog content writing advice I’ve been sharing with business owners and professional practitioners ever since an O Magazine cover  three years ago drew my attention with the title “100 Things That Are Actually Getting Better.” 

The point of using numbered lists, I explained to blog content writers, is to demonstrate ways in which your product or service is different, and to provide valuable information that engages readers, helping them see you as a go-to guy or gal to solve their problem or fill their need. Truth is, that numbering technique had been a staple for women’s magazine covers for as long as I could remember, and in corporate blogging training sessions, it was easy for newbie bloggers to emulate the technique of using numbers to entice.

14 home remedies

17 room décor tips

 6 knottiest marital problems

 2 discipline problems to fix first…

Just name an issue, I posited –  some women’s magazine editor will be serving it up with a number attached! 
 

Just the other day, though, I found out we women aren’t the only ones onto the numbers game. Browsing the local CVS magazine rack (As a professional “ghost blogger”, I’m constantly on the hunt for content idea triggers), I focused this time on the MEN'S magazine section.  To my surprise, I found no fewer than seven magazine covers sporting list-based titles:

Robb Report:  50 Great Escapes

Men’s Health: 15 Foods That Fight Fat

Muscle Mag:    5 Reasons Your Arms Stopped Growing

Men’s Journal:  Eight New Discoveries

Golf Magazine: 6 Longest new Drivers

Sporting News: 300 Top Prospects

GQ: The 100 Sexiest Women of the 21st Century

“64% of sophisticated blog readers believe that using a number in a post title is so pathetically obvious that it couldn’t possibly still work,” says Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communication. Fact is, Simone explains, posts with numbers consistently bring in more traffic and more referrals than posts without.

Do you really need any more statistics than those to try business blog writing by the numbers?