If you find yourself writing lengthy blog posts of around 1000-1200 words, you may want to consider breaking these up into more digestible bites of information for the reader. One of the best ways to go about this is creating your own series of articles that focus around a certain idea or theme.
Benefits of writing a series of articles
Keeping it short, but sweet, is the best way to keep your articles memorable and keep the reader engaged with your writing. The likelihood of the reader making it through your entire post goes up dramatically if you break it up into smaller pieces. It’s the sad reality that the internet reader, no matter their literacy-level, will find it harder to concentrate.
This strategy also adds more anticipation by breaking up the concepts into individual posts, giving the reader more to look forward to. By breaking up the concepts into a series of articles, you may actually get new subscribers faster. They can jump right into one of your posts and sample your writing and immediately make a decision to subscribe to read the rest of your series.
Also, don’t forget to time-stamp and prepare all of your posts so that you can deliver a timely, episodic, and regular series for your readers. You can do all of this in-advance and even put little snippets at the end of the posts to give teasers of the next articles in the series.
How to write a series of articles
In order to accomplish the above, the first thing you want to do is to write each article as its own separate entity. Even though you’re writing a series, you want to make sure that if they were discovered on their own, that they make sense and don’t alienate any new readers who haven’t read any of the previous submissions.
This strategy also leaves opportunity for publishers or other blogs to share your articles for what they are, with the added bonus that they come from your series. That means no “to be continued” or “previously” recaps.
These types of identifiers make it confusing for the reader and they may feel like they’ve missed something and just abandon reading the article that they found. Same goes for those who want to publish your work on their website. They want to capture the reader’s attention and not lose it.
I have read so much about this. Whenever I am trying to figure out a good length for the post that I write but I hear so many different opinions on the subject. I tend to read Copyblogger.com quite a bit and they suggest that if you write frequently then to keep them a bit shorter and if you write less often you can make them longer.
It is like any technique there are two points of view. In How to posts, for example how to install a blog, you will need to do a long post all in one. I suppose you would break the post with screen captures anyway.
Great tips! I have tried doing series posts before and my problem is that I never finish them. Next time I attempt a series, I am not going to schedule/post until all parts are finished.