Create a Blog Series to Hype Your Product

In the last post, we talked about how easy it is to use the knowledge you already have to start a blog. If you’re not sure a blog will help your company, check out this post on why a blog can help your company.

You know it’s important to use one topic per blog post. But, if you come up with fifteen different ideas related to one topic, how should you write about them? That is when you use the power of the blog series.

Blog Series: Linking Related Content

A blog series is a set of blog posts relating to a single topic. They each cover a unique idea, but are connected to a larger topic. Blog series are useful for B2B hospitality and tourism companies because they can be navigated. If a buyer searching for a specific answer finds your blog post, they’re directed to explore more posts related to the topic in a series.

This continues to improve your standing as an expert in your field. It also creates a distinct part of a content strategy that is part of a larger sales funnel.

Let’s stick with the company that creates software for small-to-mid-sized hotels. One feature of the software is management of beds and rates. A post on how to change the rates in less than 5 minutes is created. Another entry on how to add beds is posted a week later. Yet another post on how to mark a bed as booked before a guest has arrived is created. Each post relates to property management. How do you connect those posts into a series?

Using the Category Option

Most blog platforms contain something called tags or categories, much like tagging on LinkedIn’s article platform. It’s very easy to set up a series. Simply tag or categorize each post. The software company tags or categorizes each post under property management. One advantage of using a template or theme meant for blogging is these are usually built in. You don’t need to find a coder to add these designations to each blog post.

WordPress is one of the most common blogging and website platforms. When you are creating a blog in WordPress, there is a column on the right side of the blog editor. One of the widgets says tags, and another says categories. To create a simple series, use categories for SEO and navigation purposes. Tags used to be more useful, but now don’t carry the same weight in search engine algorithms.

Each time you have a new category, simply create a new category in the widget. One of the advantages of using WordPress is you can put a post into more than one category.

Double Your Exposure

The post about marking a bed as booked relates to property management. It also relates to reservations. You can choose to put the post in both categories.

When a potential buyer finishes the first post, she can choose to click on the category she’s interested in learning more about. When she clicks on a category, a new feed appears only containing posts in that category. You can also choose to have your categories listed on the side of your site, making it easy for a prospect to see what categories you offer information on, even if you haven’t published a post on that topic for a while.

Using categories is an easy way to link related posts together for easy navigation for your prospect.

In the next post in this series, we’ll cover other ways to create diverse content.