Don’t Publish a Blog Series for Your Business

At one time or another, most of my clients have suggested we break up a complex topic into a series of blog or video posts. It’s a convenient approach for busy business owners: you know what you’ll be publishing for weeks at a time, and you can fully explain a topic important to your business success.

There’s only one problem.

Hardly anyone will follow your series to the end.

Time after time, I’ve tracked the abysmal results of serial publication for businesses. An author triumphantly announces the beginning of a five-part dive into “Business Strategies to Double Your Sales” or tells his audience to expect weeks of videos on “How Tech is Disrupting Real Estate.” Results for the first installment are acceptable, although never as high as the best-performing content. But with each new publication, open rates and clicks exponentially fall, until installment number five only engages a handful of customers.

Why Do Blog and Video Series Fail for Business?

As a small business, the ultimate goal of your content is to grow your community, find new customers and encourage existing customers to buy more. Your customers (like everyone else in the modern world!) are likely busy and have limited time to commit to consuming your content. When they encounter a series, a couple things might happen:

1. Your customer perceives that you are asking her to “commit” to reading five articles before she sees any benefit from the series. It’s easy for her to think, “No time for that!” and dismiss the series from her mind.
2. Your customer didn’t see your first installment. When he sees article number two, it’s easy for him to think, “Missed this series! Guess I’ll skip the rest.”

Here’s my secret: If you want to publish a series of articles or videos, don’t tell your customers. Make each post stand alone, and you’ll benefit from more engagement, higher open rates and higher click rates.

I’m following just this tactic with my Video Marketing “series.” Currently, there are two installments:

• 5 Tips for Marketing with Video
• 5 Basic Tech Tips for Creating Marketing Videos

Check these videos out to see how to make your related posts independent of one another, and free yourself from creating a series that no one will remember.