Using bullet points may be one of the most important tools of quality content writing. A well thought-out bullet point can make your customers buy, increase your SEO and entice your readers to read more. Bullet points:
- Are psychologically appealing to both men and women and that = money.
- Are great places for adding links and increasing organic SEO.
- Save space and create room for creative and visually stimulating material.
- Are fabulous sales tools; they explain just enough.
- Are platform agnostic; they love to travel.
If you don’t currently use bullet points in your text and design, you might want to consider it. In the previous bullets, I have just quickly outlined the rest of this blog. The bullet points have organized not only my overly verbose, scattered brain but also your expectations as my reader.
The psychological power of bullet points is different for men and women. Men are visually wired, and many men are addicted to visual stimulation. If you want money from a man, you better keep it moving, baby, and bullets let you do that. Imbed links into your bullet points or waterfall selection lists and—bingo!—you get a new screen: Flip, flip, flip, Switch. Click. Pay.
Play turns into pay remarkably quickly if you visually stimulate men. ESPN knows this and Playboy has used it for years. Visual technical advances outpace audio advancements 10-1. Why? Visual movement sells and entrances men, and most engineers and customers in Best Buy are men. As a writer, marketer or designer you want to use this power.
Onto the fairer sex. Bullet points are attractive to women because they save time. U.S. women turn to the Internet for quick information and products. Bullet points are little black lifesavers for a woman who has exactly ten minutes between leaving work and Zumba to choose and buy a new washing machine online. Give a busy woman a quick list of bullet points that tells her exactly what she needs to know about a product and it’s sold. Conversely, if your website if difficult to navigate, lacks quality content, or loads slowly, you will suffer! Women make 85% of the purchases in the United States.
Bullet points by design form a list and are the perfect place for both internal and external links that will increase your organic SEO. In addition, use high quality content and keywords in your linked bullet points and this will increase your SEO. A live bulleted link is just about perfect to increase click-through. Bullets also have an uncanny way of sitting in the middle of the page making your entire document visually appealing and readable.
Using bullet points also gives you room on your page for advertising, links and interesting graphics. Use bullets, small paragraphs and a little “more” link if you just must say more.
Bullet points are your Dragon editor. They will force you to write just enough and not drone on about all the rest. For example:
- Cherry Red Alpha Romeo Sports Car Needs New Home—Cheap
Forced to keep to one line I can’t mention the rest; for the Hollywood junkies out there, this is your Logline.
Many people think that the iPad was designed for gamers—maybe it was designed because Steve Jobs could no longer read his iPhone. Bullet points are fabulously phone-friendly, and customers are able to click through them easily on smart phones. Without bullet points there is the potential of losing those mobile eyeballs.
Any other fans of the little black dot out there? Share your wisdom!
Lisanne P. is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch.
