It seems like these days when I go check out my feed reader to do some reading from my favorite news sources and blogs – there are a lot of posts you can spot that were written just for the sake of trying to bait the social bookmarking and ranking sites for popularity’s sake.

I am not sure this is the best writing practice. Why? Well after you get success with it once, you try it again and again. After a while, all you have left are a lot of wasted hours that you could have spent doing something more creative.

Sure it seems like a lot of these links that you see on digg, delicious, and others seem to come with a pre-packaged and sure fire way to make it to the top. There is a lot to be said for creativity as well though. Just because you wrote one “top 50 Firefox extensions you can use under water” post does not mean that every top 50 post you write will be just as popular.

You also need to worry about offending your current audience as well. New readers are grand, but if you can’t keep them they might start to look elsewhere. Take for example Mashable.com.

I used to really love reading Pete’s web site but the last few weeks it has been nothing but top ten, twenty and thirty lists. I am sure he’s gotten a lot of incoming links from the social bookmarking places but as a reader – I am bored, and I am sure I am not alone.

So don’t write to become popular – become popular because of what you write.