Writing a series of blog posts is a great idea for creating anticipation with your readers and making your blog more sticky or making it more likely that readers will come back.
If you can develop a compelling series of blog posts which you drip feed to your audience, they will be hanging on every word, looking forward to the next installment and possibly subscribing to your feed.
It is also a great way to break down a big topic into more manageable chunks so that:
1) it is less daunting to write
2) It is more palatable for your readers to consume in small chunks.
One problem with writing a series of posts is that you need to link to the other posts in the collection, and this can be a little fiddly to update and keep all these links in order.
Enter The Plugin
Never fear in-series is here.
The plugin I like to use for this task is in-series.http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/in-series/ This is a tiny little plugin, but it does the job very well.
What Does It Do?
In series puts a table of contents at the top of every post you mark as a series, it also automatically updates the posts with links when you add a new post.
It also adds a link at the bottom of your posts with pointers to the next or previous post in the series.
You can see it in action on my series about backup and recovery https://neilmatthews.com/backup-recovery-introduction
How Does it work?
A little widget is added to the edit posts page, near the bottom, using this you can create a new series, or add a post to the start or the end of the series.
The only downside of this plugin is the way you need to bubble posts up or down if you add them to the series in the wrong order, but this is still easier that changing a load of links in several posts.
Small Plugins Save Loads of Work
The tiny footprint and unassuming interface of the plugin masks some brilliant functionality, if you are planning a series of posts check our in-series to save you quite a bit of work updating your links