So your long form blog is just like this blog that the Guru is writing in now. It’s WordPress or Blogger or whatever other platform you wish to use. Firstly let’s ask ourselves two questions, what is blogging and why do we do it?
Well, blogging can be whatever you’d like it to be. It can be part of a world domination strategy or something much more simple, from a platform to express yourself and keep friends and relatives up to date with your activities, to a complex marketing and brand power scheme for your business.
The Guru uses the long form blog to keep you updated with useful Alpine info ranging from updates in the lives of our athletes through to technologies and marketing (like this blog). Blog content can be discussed all day what you write about depends entirely on what you are doing and or what your business is.
The Guru’s Top Ten Tips for a Successful Long Form Blog
1. Only write when you have something to say, content is crucial. Make what you say count and matter, you only get one shot to reel in a subscriber.
2. Respond to any comments if there is anything useful you can add.
3. Give people reasons to subscribe and highlight these at the top of your blog.
4. Utilise the many ‘share’ buttons and widgets that are available to download and put these below each post.
5. Lay down the law – tell people to comment and let them know that spam and offensive comments will be deleted.
6. Use your blog as a new currency, don’t only think of the $, but think of authority and audience as two new currencies.
7. Monitor your blog’s performance – try posting at different times of the day and on different days of the week. Within a few months you’ll know the best times to click ‘publish’ on your latest work.
8. Use short- and micro form blogs (i.e facebook, linkedin and twitter) to send out Bit.ly links to your latest blog posts.
9. Make sure to have interesting and engaging titles, people judge books by their covers (or in this case blogs by a few words.)
10. People read an average of 250 words per minute, so if you’ve written a ten page essay, highlight main areas and tell people how long it’ll take to read both the whole lot or just the bold text.
and… Lucky 11. Optimize your blog posts like you would any other web page on your site. Good quality meta data, 70 characters maximum for the page title, 150 characters maximum for the description, no more than 10 keywords, valid HTML code, the works.
The next technologies blog will be on how to best utilise your short form media, so check back to learn how to engage on facebook, linkedin and other platforms.
