Strategy & Series [Blog Writing Series #8]
Part 1: Ideas & Research for blogs. Part 2: Frameworks. Part 3: Actually writing. Part 4: Bonus Blog Elements. Part 5: Editing Your Writing. Part 6: Optimizing Your Blog. Part 7: Publishing & Promoting.
Perhaps by the time you’re reading this, you’ve written a blog or seven and you are ready to take your blogging strategy to the next level. This is precisely where a blog series comes into play.
Writing one-off blogs is a fantastic thing to do when the lightning strikes and you suddenly know what it is you want to say.
After a while, though, you might find that individual blogs that have little connection to each other don’t benefit your brand quite as much as you’d hope.
That’s what a series will help with.
A blogging series allows you to drum up more intrigue and investment from your audience around a given topic. The hope is that through this repeated discussion of a particular topic, you’ll see a corresponding spike in sales.
Is blogging guaranteed to help you make more money? Ha! No. Nothing is. But I do believe that blogging will shape you in direct and indirect ways that might lead to this outcome anyways.
Where do you begin?
A blog series is just a handful of articles that discuss a product or idea from various viewpoints.
It’s really that simple. If you can name a handful of common questions, opinions, misconceptions, applications, uses, histories, or trends about a given thing, you can probably come up with 4 - 10 different blogs that will make up an entire series.
How many blogs should I write per series / per year?
Really difficult to say definitively! It’ll vary massively depending on a few factors:
How long can you consistently write? Do you have the stamina to write 1 a week for more than 8 weeks?
How much do you have to say? Is your topic a simple one? Or is it layered with many complexities?
How much does the volume of your content impact your sales / other key performance indicators? Do you see a big uptick in sales when you blog more?
Ultimately: experimentation is the way that you’ll learn what your answer is.
Rules of thumb:
Again, there’s no official quantity of how much you should write. Various authorities will have different numbers, but I’d suggest the following quantities:
If you’re going to “start taking blogging seriously” - You should be writing a minimum of 1 blog a week. Anything less and it just becomes a biweekly or monthly newsletter.
If you’re going to really actually take blogging seriously - You should be aiming for 2 or more blogs a week. More the merrier
If you’re writing a series - You should have a minimum of 3 blogs on the topic.
As with everything in life, there is a balance between quantity and quality. Don’t think that you should be pumping out 16 250-word blogs because you can.
Each blog needs to be good enough to give the reader no choice but to come back for more amazing content.
And if you’re following all the other tips and tricks about using CTAs, crosslinks, and so on, you create more opportunities for your blogging series to succeed!
Creating a Content Calendar
How to create a content calendar really is an entire blog post in and of itself, but it plays into blog series in a way that makes sense to touch on here nonetheless.
If you’ve got a few key products you really want to make sure you emphasize in a calendar year, create a content calendar where you set goals for yourself to have X many blog series across time.
A goal that isn’t written down isn’t a goal; it’s a daydream.
Just like a blog series that isn’t started isn’t a blog series.
So if we’re averaging that every blog series is 4 blogs long, and you have the ability and discipline to write a blog a week, then you know that your series should be 4 weeks long.
With a content calendar strategy, blogging should be just one of the avenues you’re discussing your given topic on at that time.
Social media, email marketing, video marketing; all of these play a huge role in getting the message out as well. Refer to the last blog if you skipped it and want to know how you should be using every available tool to discuss a topic at once.
In conclusion:
Man oh man, writing this blog series on blogging was way more intense than I thought it would be. I have realized how much I really do know about each stage of the process lol.
I hope this has been beneficial to you! If it has, shoot me a message letting me know. It would mean a lot to me to know my hours spent writing weren’t done in vain.
