Half and half - About multi-part blog entries, Part 2

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Two months ago, I explained why multi-part blog entries are a bad idea.  I'm now going to follow it up by explaining why they are a good idea.  Yes, you did read that correctly.

"Multi-part" can mean two things.

The example I gave at the end of the previous blog entry was a pet hate of mine: articles that span multiple pages where each page has very little content on it, but plenty of ads.  This is a "multi-paged" entry.

I recently dissected a list of 77 mistakes that new bloggers make.  This became quite lengthy, so I decided to split it into a seven-part series.  Initially I said it would be an eleven-part series, but partway through I chose to write fewer parts as eleven would have been a lot of blog entries.  This is a "series" of blog entries.

A series can work wonders.

I think that if you find a good subject that is too large to cover in a single blog entry, it can be very helpful to split it into multiple blog entries.  You won't have to write a ridiculously long post just to cover everything, and your readers won't have to read the whole thing in one sitting.

A high quality series of posts not only encourages readers to stay with you until the end of the series, but you'll also get people who visit partway into the series and go back to read the previous entries.  You can't link to the future entries until they're online, but you can link to the previous entries in every entry you do beyond the first.  This is a very effective and very easy way to link some of your blog entries together.

A series opens up new opportunities.

Ever wondered if your blog could be turned into a book?  Start a series and you'll be able to use those posts in an e-book.  The fastest way to do this is to write the content in Microsoft Word (assuming you have it, of course) - or just use any word processing program to organise the content neatly.

Now you just need to convert this to a PDF.  You can get a free PDF converter or you can download OpenOffice.  I prefer to use OpenOffice but it can take some time to download it.  If you choose this route but you don't use Microsoft Word, when you save the content, change the file type to RTF - Rich Text Format.  OpenOffice can open Word documents or RTF files, as well as many others, and there is an option to Save as PDF on the File menu.

Once you've got your PDF, simply put it online and make the link available to your readers.  There's your e-book!  This is a really convenient way for your readers to view some of your best content.  Don't forget to put a link to your website in the document.  You may wish to provide it as a benefit to people who subscribe to your site.

Coming soon

In early 2008 I'll be publishing the list of top 77 mistakes as an e-book, so keep an eye out for that.


What do you think?  Have you published multi-page entries or a series of related entries?  Have you made an e-book?

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