When you Write a list Article like a top 20 people in the industry list, you then have the opportunity to contact all 20 of those people and ask for something like a guest post or a mention in their Facebook or website.

In my case I wrote an article showing Example Photos of Body Fat Percentages on my new Sports Science website. This article showed 22 different people’s photos and linked to their websites. I sent those people a public message saying that they were featured in the article, and they are free to post it on their Facebook and do a guest post if they like.

Within 3 days I have had visitors coming from the links in the public messages, one person thanked me for including them, and one asked to do a guest post where he will write his before and after story. So by going to the additional effort of contacting those people, I got additional visitors to my website, and one new piece of free content and a contact. The guy who requested to do a guest post would be a good lead for contacting in the future if I was looking for additional authors to write on the website.

The article in question took 1-2 hours to write. It includes barely any words, but is instead a compilation of useful photos. Contacting the people mentioned in the article took 10 minutes, so it’s not a lot of extra work.

This example is not a huge success story, but for a new website, any success is a good one. A new website with no backlinks, and in turn no search engine traffic, needs as many mentions as it can get to get it started ranking in the search engines.