How to Write a Blog Series

MindBlog has a good post on Writing a Series of Blog posts which outlines the process that Eric goes through when putting together a series of posts over at his blog.

The method of stringing related posts together in a series has been a central part of ProBlogger over the past year (I always seem to have one on the go) so Eric’s post got me thinking about my own workflow in writing them.

As a result I thought it’d make a good series to write how I do it!

Don’t worry – it’s just going to be a 2 part series. In this post I’ll talk a little about WHY writing series of posts from time to time can be helpful and in the next (and last) post in this mini-series I’ll outline my 10 step process for writing a successful series.

Writing a series of posts is an excellent strategy for bloggers for a number of reasons.

• Instead of ending up with one longer post on your blog on a topic you end up with multiple highly targeted posts which is good for your blog’s Search Engine presence
• Series of posts can often help bloggers to go deeper and examine a wide topic in a more comprehensive way
• They help build momentum on a blog over time in terms of your writing flow – I also find that they are good for helping me keep my motivation to write up on my blogs
• They encourage repeat readers (people come back each day for more)
• If you put them together smartly they are interlinked which is good for building page views per reader, creating stickiness and ranking well in Search Engines

A Word of Warning – I do suspect that some bloggers take the idea of the blog series too far in a couple of ways.

For starters if you have too many of them you can end up leaving your readers feeling quite confused and overwhelmed by them all. To be honest I think I’ve probably been guilty of this from time to time with some of you.

Secondly I see some bloggers who seem to use the humble blog series for the sake of it and extend out ideas over multiple posts that could (and perhaps should) be contained in one post. As we’ll explore in Part II – there is a need for balance in deciding which topics warrant a series and which don’t.

For example – I could quite easily have written this mini series as a single post (and in fact started out doing so) – but as I look at what I have to say in Part II it would end up being much too long. On the other hand I could have broken Part II down into 10 small parts and stretch this series out for 2 weeks – but I think that doing so would be overkill considering both the amount of content that each post would be but also the nature of the topic (while there are 10 distinct points to come – they all relate and are more powerful when presented together).

Read more at Part II – an examination the 10 steps I use to go about creating a blog series.