There's an excellent post on ProBlogger right now that talks about the challenges of writing a series for your blog. Having written quite a few series in my own career, I found the post to be full of honest, helpful suggestions that any blogger can put to use.

Glen Stansberry, the author of the post, points out the benefit of a series on both links and traffic. He's right. My popular Zero Dollars series of posts is still generating new links and traffic nearly 18 months after I wrote it. I've written quite a few other series over the years that I've been here at Search Engine Guide, I've even working on two separate series right now.

On the other hand, I've also dropped the ball on a series before. That's the problem with being ambitious. Sometimes life gets in the way.

That's why Glen's suggestion for series success struck me as interesting.

I found that the best way to write a blog series is to write it all before you hit publish. Just by writing them all up, and use the advanced posting feature to automate the process over a few days (or however long your blog series is), you can kick back and watch your series take care of itself throughout the week. It's a beautiful thing.

Yep, write it all out ahead of time.

Interesting.

Now obviously that type of thinking isn't always going to fit. The Zero Dollar series pretty much had to be written day by day. On the other hand, some of the smaller series that I've written could easily have been prepared ahead of time.

Overall, I think it's a pretty good suggestion, especially for small businesses. Small business is often feast or famine. That leaves plenty of time for writing during the famine, but it also cuts the line of communication with your blog readers while you feast. Using that down time to work on a series that could be automatically published when you get busy again seems like an excellent use of time.






About the Author

Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.

Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.