Good day! Zak here from Cape Town, South Africa.
It has been a while since I have done one of my guides for the newbies of my community. Generally I do these Hive Guides for any sort of topic that I tend to have to explain over and over again.
One of the questions is this: "How do you know what to write about?"
Or: "How do you manage to Blog every day?"
As the title might suggest, one of my reccomendations is that you write a blog series about something.
This could be something a simple as asking yourself: What sort of content am I going to be posting? Perhaps you plan on blogging about an interest you have. Is it something that you do every day or every week? Then you generate the possibility of content out of that.
Generally I reccomend people blog about stuff they DO and not to invent stuff, just to be able to blog.
If you are going to spend time in the garden every week, then blog about your garden! If you go for frequent hikes up the mountain, blog about this. If you have a crafting hobby or a sport that you do, this is also your regular content.
Write about what you have a passion for!
But then you can take it to the next level and write a Blog Series!
Types of Blog Series
There are a few types of these. Many people have a lot of success in these, even in our own community!
Continual Blog Series
This is where you have created a name for a blog series that you write about and you number them sequentially. The chances are that if someone enjoyed reading your content about this particular topic, they will go look for the other posts with the same name. Not everything you post about will be what each other person likes, so if you have a name for that series and it is easy to see what the post is about before opening it, it will help your reader find the things THEY want to read.
Here are some examples!
@clairemobey writes a lot of blog series like the following
Mommy's Mental Health - 20 Chapter Recap: Celebrating year of blogging for my therapy
💙💙Claire's Makeup (and Hair) journey: Part 3 - Singing the Blues So Much My Hair Went Blue! 💙💙
In this example we can see clearly that the first one is Mental Health, then one about Pets and one about Make-up. If I was a unfamilliar person who just scolled on through, perhaps I would be interested in the Pet stuff and the Mental Health and not the Make-up stuff. Or another person would look at the Pet stuff and the Make up.
If I did like one or more of these topics I would then want to read the previous ones and follow the page so I can read the next blog article in that series.
I can show you MANY more examples of successful bloggers who do this, but Claire's done a great job of showcasing this.
Limited Series
A Limited series is maybe something connected to a large project or an event.
One example is if you are building or rennovating something and post into the DIY communities. You work on something for a day or more, you post. The project takes weeks or months to get through. Keep blogging about it.
Give those posts numbers as well, link your previous work on the same topic, talk about what is coming next.
When doing an event, you might have a big overall post to talk about and then follow-up posts that deal with certain parts of that event. In my case I can give an example from myself.
I went to a Warhammer Tournament. I made a rather long post about the event and the results. But I would not be able to make a post about each battle included into that post. Most people do not have time to read one post for a half hour. Keep it down. Split it up.
Here are those posts:
- Warhammer 40k - King of the Cape Tournament 2023 and Results!
- WARHAMMER 40k - King of the Cape Match analysis - Match 1 VS Imperial Knights
- WARHAMMER 40k - King of the Cape Round 2 - My Battle against the forces of Nurgle!
- WARHAMMER 40k - King of the Cape Round 3 - The (Yellow) Emperor's Children
- WARHAMMER 40k - King of the Cape Tournament, Round 4 match - Tyranids!
- WARHAMMER 40k - Final Battle! Round 5 of the King of the Cape Tournament deep dive!
One event, 6 posts about the day. I am pretty sure I posted about first thinking about going to the tournament, my progress getting ready for the tournament and about things I got at the tournament.
Note also how I put "WARHAMMER 40k" at the start of the post title. If someone has an interest in Warhammer, they will want to read it. If you don't know what it is and check the first one and it's not for you, you will know to not bother with the other ones, or the inverse, you find it interesting so now you will look at the others.
Note of warning: Beware "spinning". This is a harmful action taken by certain bloggers where they write the same information over and over but rewording it so the bots don't pick up on reposted content.
In the case above, the follow up posts of each match might use the same pictures, those were all the pics I took at the two day event.
But the induvidual battles has more in-depth details about the matches. Unit selections, turn by turn events and strategy employed. That's appropriate for that hobby. Its new information about those matches that was not in the first post and thus it is new content that gives the reader more entertaining information about that match.
And that is it! That is how you write a series on Hive! This will make you write with an automatic structure in mind as you start planning your blogging week!
If you have any questions or your own suggestions, please feel free to leave comments below, I would love to hear them!
Thank you for reading!
Cheers!
@zakludick
Nice, short and simple tutorial on how to write a blog. Yea, it is very important to share stuff that you do in the blog, since it allows others to validate or share similar experiences.