10 Tips for Writing Tips

If the advent of social media and digital marketing has shown us anything, it clearly demonstrated that the human race had been living in a near-fatal existence, barren of tips on how to do things. Thank the heavens for blogs and their inbred little cousin, microblogs, for remedying that sad situation. I mean, who wants to live in a world where someone's not trying to tell me how to do something better by expressing it in tip-form?

To further our tip-happy world, I've compiled a list of tips ... on creating a list of tips. I don't consider myself a "tip guru," but hopefully these tip tips will help you go forth to spread your own tips to the tip-less masses.

*Note: please don't confuse "tips" with their nasty counterparts: guides, tricks, and -- perish the thought -- policies.

1. Always number your tips. Nothing says, "I can sum up a topic in single-digit chronology," like Top 5 tips for Neurosurgery.
2. Always -- and this is important -- inadvertently list the same tip twice and just reword it a bit.
3. Note in your summary or conclusion that you're not an expert on the subject matter while deftly pontificating on the subject matter as if you're some sort of expert.
4. Your final tip has to be a real let-down, as if you were wracking your brain for that tenth tip merely to satisfy the title of your article, "10 Reasons Not to Buy a Hooker Chrysanthemums." A good tip for your #10 tip is to use something quippy yet mundane, like "Blog away!" or "Happy Facebooking."
5. Try to keep the number of your tips to 10 or under. For one reason, nobody cares if there are 418 tips for spackling dry wall. Second, any subject matter in the world's history can be summed up with ten or fewer statements.
6. Always remember, your tips shouldn't be helpful -- they should be self-promotional.
7. Make sure your seventh tip is a real hum-dinger. There's something mystical about the number 7 that still fascinates people. Consider it the "initial descent" of your tip-listing flight.
8. Once you've completed your list, don't bother getting anyone else's opinion on the matter. Tweet about it immediately, even if some of the information is factually incorrect. In fact, only 17.3% of the tips in the blogosphere are true.
9. Try to remember to accidentally list the same tip twice. Just rephrase it the second time you list it.
10. Get a tipping!