Increase Your Traffic with a Blog Series

During your blogging adventures, you may have wondered if you should create a blog series. A “blog series” is essentially a group of posts that cover one topic over a space of time. For example, you might see a blog series entitled “10 Ways to Make a Little Extra Cash this Holiday Season” or something similar.

There can be a lot of benefits to a blog series.

You don’t have to think of brand new content for a while.
Readers are more likely to stay on your page as they browse through every post in the series.
They’re generally pretty popular.
They help establish your expertise in an area.
It really helps with SEO as you begin to dominate a few keywords.
It gives readers a reason to keep coming back to your blog as you continue to publish new posts in the series.

Overall, it can be a really great method to improve traffic and SEO. But it can also take a lot of planning and work. Be aware that are you committing to somewhat of a long-term project when taking on a blog series.

So how do you get started?

Pick a topic that you have a lot of expertise in. Make sure it’s something that you have a lot to say about. If it could easily fit all into one post, then maybe you shouldn’t spread it out over multiple posts.
Plan it all out! Try to come up with titles or areas of focus for each post in the series. This can help you organize the time period and frequency in which you will be posting as well. Creating a timeline or scheduling a calendar can help you to stay on track.
Start publicizing your future series. You can do this by asking your fans on social mediaquestions pertaining to the topic you’re discussing in the series. You can also announce the series to build up excitement. Some bloggers also suggest creating contests or hashtags for your series, but this will depend on you.
Write and publish! Remember that you’ll want each post in the series to be consistent and cohesive. Titles should relate to each other and formats should be the same. You may even want the pictures to follow a similar formula.
Give your readers a way to find other posts in the series surrounding each one. A “previous” and “next” button or link at the bottom and top of each post is a good idea. You could also create a button for your sidebar that will link to a table of contents for the entire series.
Continue to publicize!

Running a blog series will be different for each blogger depending on your audience, the size of your blog, your chosen topic, and even more factors.

What type of blog series have you created? What have you learned on the way?

Sources:

Saddington, John. “How To: Create a Blog Post Series and Why You Need Them!”http://john.do/blog-series/. (30 Oct. 2013).

Thompson, Kirsten. “How to Create a Successful Blog Series.” http://www.sverve.com/blog/how-to-create-a-successful-blog-series/. (30 Oct. 2013).