A good blog post series has a domino effect for your blog!
[This is part of the Developing Great Blog Content Series. Check out the other posts!]
Creating great blog content can sometimes seem like a mystery to even the most experienced bloggers out there – what exactly attracts readers so that they subscribe and keep coming back for more? What style of writing, tone, voice, and perspective are needed to create that “killer” blog with that “killer” content?
Although I do have some thoughts about those aforementioned ideas I really want to spend a bit more time on the practical side of creating amazing blog content – in other words, strategies and techniques that can work regardless of how good of a writer you are and how “seasoned” you are as a blogger.
The first is the fine art and science of a “Blog Series”:
Why Create Blog Post Series?
There is honestly not much to it – and you probably know already how to create a blog series. But for those that need a more “official” definition a Blog Series is most simply a number of organized blog posts that cover a particular area of content or idea.
You can see some very typical examples in the number of series that I’ve created for you here at TentBlogger.
Explosion of content!
Why would you want to create a blog series? Here are some reasons why having one (or more) series is a good idea:
- It helps you further organize your thoughts around an idea. This is especially helpful for me since I can struggle with focusing on one particular area at a time!
- Incredible SEO value as it helps you establish deep keyword association between your blog and those particular keywords in the content. This is a must-have!
- It helps you establish your authority as you expand and execute on areas of your expertise and passion. The more you can share about a particular subject (and in an organized fashion) the better!
- It strategically gives you an opportunity to write more posts. This is always a good thing as sometimes us bloggers have struggles coming up with stuff to write! I know I do!
- These posts might become your most attractive posts and resources that your blog provides to your readers. This sustainable mechanism can also turn into profit long-term as you seek to monetize your blog!
- It strategically ties content together that can provide additional resources and keyword links to your content, brand, and blog.
- Provides expectation and excitement for your readers as they wait eagerly for the next post. They might just subscribe to your blog because if it!
- Provides a significant increase of pageviews and clicks as someone who’s knew to your blog might just click through your entire series of posts the first time they visit your blog! This has definitely happened (I’ve tracked it via analytics) on this post series here that has nearly 50 posts (and counting)! I don’t mind one visitor clicking 50+ times per visit!
And more. They are, without question, some of your most important posts for your blog as you establish yourself within the blogosphere.
Just think – most people just blog about whatever comes into their head when they wake up each morning. By providing this additional level of structure and strategy you literally put yourself ahead of hundreds of thousands of un-organized bloggers.
I love that. I think about that all the time.
How to Create an Effective Blog Post Series
Again, the science behind creating an effective series isn’t too hard. You probably already know a lot intrinsically by just reading a few yourself, but here are a few things that you’ll probably want to consider as you work through your own:
- An Outline – Sure, you can work through your proposed series on-the-fly (as I do at times) but it’s generally suggested to have at least an outline of what you want to write about.
- Table of Contents – Generally you’ll want some sort of “Table of Contents” which can either be a post or a actual page. I personally like to use a blog post for this since I can gather feedback from my community on posts they’d like to see or any other types of feedback that they might have throughout the series. You’ll post your proposed outline here.
- A Timeline – It’s generally a good strategy to have, at least internally, a timeline of when you’ll be posting so that you can stay on track and on schedule as well as providing your readers some sort of expectation of when they will see the new blog posts. You can share this publicly and explicitly or if your community trusts your control and release of the content you can simply have an internal schedule to write towards.
- Strategic Links, Navigation – You will want links in your post that link back to your Table of Contents or perhaps to the “Next” and “Previous” posts in the series as you desire. This will help your readers to walk through your series with ease and get them back to more content. I have chosen for many of my series not to have the “Next” and “Previous” since I have not created a robust outline for my posts but you might find this advantageous for your community and your style of writing.
- Template, Consistency – Generally you’ll want to provide some sort of understandable consistency between the posts in your series so as to ease the consumption of the content and to provide a cadence to your blog posts. Perhaps you’ve created a template for your series posts which you’ll use consistently throughout. Or, perhaps you haven’t.
These above five are merely suggestions and you have a lot of creative freedom to create your own series as you wish but hopefully it’ll help you get your series off the ground and to be a bit more successful at it!
Love to hear your thoughts as well as your proposed series posts that you’ve got coming up! Plan to do at least one this year (and more if you can)!
[This is part of the Developing Great Blog Content Series. Check out the other posts!]
Early on I noticed here at Tentblogger that series were a key way to help visitors to a blog stay longer and read more posts. As a result I created my first series ‘The Art of Christianity’ which has proven to be a really great help for my blog. The points you’ve listed are true and really seem to work. Thanks for sharing them!!
that is awesome! great job on it!
John,
Great stuff, as always. Just wanted to chime in with this comment.
I do a lot of written contract work and the time that I spend outlining my project has really helped me to be more productive.
The greatest benefit to outlining is that it effectively cuts my writing time almost in half. The other benefit is that as I write against my outline, I find that – because of too much content – I can actually take some of the points out and dedicate those points to a totally different project!
Anyways, thanks for another great post.
you are absolutely right.
I was just thinking that if you do a great job streamlining your categories, keeping the number of categories small, it can be a great starter for a series in each. I suppose you can stagger the series around each category, though I wouldn’t think having 6 post series’ going on at once is great idea. But having 1 or 2 going is good
. Just an thought.
good point. i try to stick to one or two at the most.
This is great! I definitely needed this for next month! Thanks John!
what will it be?
Thinking about a Social Media Personal Branding series…
awe… sweet! we’ll have to compare notes! i’ve got a series on personal branding i’d love to do… but you’d probably be able to get to it much sooner! can’t wait to read yours!
Been contemplating doing a series but wasn’t really sure where to start… this helps a lot John… Thanks!
what series will you create?
Very cool! I will try to create a series… Right now, I just blog on things related to my site’s purpose, but I have never really done a specific “series”.
I think you could kick out some awesome series, Brandon. You’ve got a lot of interests that you could teach us about!
Thanks! I think I might do a weekly review of the C40X (New Testiment 40 reading plan…). How does that sound?
It sounds GREAT! as long as you let people know where to find the plan – http://dustn.us/blog/this-is-c40x/
winner!
Of course Dustin…of course! haha!
haha!
btw… you’re mentioned in my post today… should be published in the next couple minutes!
where is it?
agreed!
Great stuff, Jon.
I love the idea of doing a series, and I have a few in my head that I am interested in pursuing. One the issues I have had is time. I barely have time to write my posts, more so plan out a series.
Even so, I have been able to do a series or two but most of these are on the fly or because I wanted to say more than I thought was appropriate for one blog.
I really like your points, though. I think you have given me the push I need to take the extra time to plan out and execute some series!
as you can see though i do my series over a period of time… no pressure!
I did an Easter series on the Resurrection (14 posts in 7 days), and saw my traffic nearly triple (from 250 to nearly 700).
It is now settling back down, but I am already putting together another series.
whoa!
Really good post John. I have done a couple series in the past as well as a couple of month long events. I had already gone back and made my social justice series from last summer flow better after reading your stuff a couple months back. The continuity of clicking from one to the next is nice.
Currently I have more of a segment than a series. Mondays are for the Life & Times of Gen X, and I am using that for a lot of guest posters. Same thing with my Friday Flick Faceoffs (FFF).
lots of guest posters? that’s awesome! haven’t had any here yet.
Great post John. I think a series definitely keeps me on target and motivated when I’m drawing blanks. Definitely will be putting this into practice!
what will be your first?
I’ve done a few blog series in the past, but I’ve found that unless I write the entire series in one sitting (or during a short period of time), I start to lose interest before the series is done. I’ve learned to keep my series “short” (no more than 8-10 posts) in order to keep the ideas fresh in my own mind. I do need to put together a “table of contents” page, though. That is definitely something that is missing within my series…
ah. series fatigue…!
i run series all the time, and love doing them. and some of the best search engine traffic that it get is related to series that i’ve ran…
and on my blog, i run the featured content rotator, and that’s where I feature the ‘headline post’ that links to all of the others…
great advice dude!
featured content rotator…!
not a fan, but they work for some blogs.
I find I have so many ideas for series, I do a post intending to write several more, then get sidetracked chasing posts that feel more “timely”.
Example – I need to finish a series on “Barriers to Worship” (the follow-ups are started but not finished).
I will also do a series on “biblical foundations of worship” but I want to call it something more interesting than that.
love it!
I frequently write with a series in mind, but rarely let my blog readers know that the post they are reading is in a series.
Now I am arranging them with a helpful blog series post, AND I put up a little sidebar “advertisement” about them. We’ll see how it goes.
ah. time to be a bit more explicit!
It was actually your ‘Ultimate Guide to launching a WordPress-powered blog’ that gave me the idea for a ‘flagship series’ on my blog, a big series on a subject that would attract a lot of visitors. So I started a series on ‘Preaching for youth’ and three of this posts are already in the top-10 posts. I can also see they generate a lot of direct search traffic…I am still thinking about how to promote this series better, but I’ll work on that.
wow… great job!
John,
What I would love to see from Tentblogger is a really super-duper “series posts” plugin.
The only plugin that I have found that I’ve been using for awhile is Organize Series. It works well enough and I’m not knocking it in the least.
That said, I know you could create one as well that would be well-coded and as “light” as possible.
Another suggestion would be to create a “table of contents” plugin. No one has one that works well and is updated. The one I was using was AZIndex but I believe it hammers the MySQL DB way too much.
Anyway, just my $0.02 worth.
joe. i’ve taken a look at this. … i will consider it!
John,
I finally ditched the aforementioned plugin. I got tired of it breaking and doing weird things, especially when WP would do core upgrades.
I’m following your process here and so far it’s working nicely.
I created a “Page” to house all the series I’ve done and then linked out to the first post in each.
My question to you is, it appears you created a single “Post” for each series that is a table of contents for each single post in that series. Is this correct?
If so, how can I do that now without having all these new table of contents “posts” at the front of my blog? Can I date these so they won’t show up in front necessarily? Or am I over-thinking this or missing something?
i mean, i used the table of contents post a an announcement post as well. it’ll just be pushed down in time.
i think you’re overthinking it……
This is great info. I’ve been on a mission to change my life over the past couple of months, and a big part of that has been weight loss. Originally I was going to write as I progressed. But I decided to write after the whole process was done at the end of May.
This kind of gives me some insight on how I an break up a few areas to help readers and give a content format.
sweet! that sounds like a great idea mike.
When you do a blog series do you post all of the articles in a row, or do you put the post intermittently throughout your sites regular content.
For example do you put 10 SEO posts in a row? or do you build them over a longer period of time?
i’ve got them drafted and i release them per my internal schedule that i’ve created.
John,
Is there a plug-in you use specifically for series? How do you create the initial series page – then table of contents?
http://tentblogger.com/blog-series/
John,
Great post! My issue is how to work the framework. How do have a series page on the main site that when you hover on it, the next page doesn’t show up in drop down style? Click the blog series page (main menu), which will cleanly goes to a page listing my series, which when the series are clicked will lead to a toc page, etc. How do you set that up with standard theme? I like how your series pages are set up, how does a novice do this?
greg,
i’m a bit confused on your question here… sorry. must be early for me..?
John,
Mainly, in your nav menu you have Blog Series, as do I. However hovering over mine brings a drop down menu, yours doesn’t, wish mine didn’t too. How did you take away the drop down menu, and create a clean landing page?
do you have a sub-page? are you using wordpress 3.0 menu system?
John,
Yes I have a sub-page, and am using the standard theme menus.
ok. how about use wordpress 3.0 menus?
John,
I tried that and the menu’s disappeared totally. Just a blank nav bar. Am I supposed to set it up?
John-I finally got past duh and figured it out- thanks for the help bro.
I’ve begun my first series, ‘Recovery Is NOT For Quitters…’ here: http://glorioustrauma.com/not-for-quitters/ I am still diddling with actual look and feel of the series, but I would appreciate any constructive criticism from anyone before I get too far along
I am already outlining another series unrelated to the first!
John? I’m concerned. Just what is this sinister power your have to make so much work so much fun? It’s eerie…
sorry.
This may seem an odd question but is there a way to publish a post and NOT have it show up as new?
Here’s why I ask. I am reproducing a short book, with permission of course, and would like to use the “series” model to do it. The first post, which I DO want to appear as a new post, would simply be the title of the book with an image of the cover and a list of the chapters. Each chapter would be a post in the series, but I do not want the chapter posts to appear as new posts when I add them. Is this possible?
sure, just back-date it.
I’m thinking of starting a blog series on my blog to gather some traction, as well as giving my blog some direction which I feel that it lacks at the moment.
When it comes to posting a series, do you give it a single category for itself?
Also, would you create a list of topics and work down the list, or would you haphazardly work through the list, sometimes skipping some posts and coming back to them later? With the potential to add to the list later?
no, i typically put it in a master category beyond the series.
I have just been considering writing a series on my blog and I found your post just at the right time. Interestingly enough, my idea for a series came about naturally. I had started with the intention of writing a detailed pillar article on a topic. However my article ended up being 4000 words. In the end there was no better way than covering it in a series.
I had never even thought of blog series posts until I started reading tentblogger…and this is the very reason why my site has them