Writing long-form blog posts is a challenge for most people, but it doesn’t have to be. For one, the more you write them the easier they become, but there are also different tips and strategies you can use to write long-form blog posts faster, more efficiently, and ones that are much more engaging for your readers.
Here in this *wink wink* long-form blog post, I want to dive in and teach you exactly how to create long-form content that keeps readers engaged and informed.
If you want to know how to conduct keyword research and find search engine optimized words to use throughout your post, check out my video that I linked below where I go over two different methods to find keywords for your blog post: one through Google search engine and the other with ChatGPT.
Perform Keyword Research with Google & ChatGPT
Benefits of Writing Long-form Blog Posts?
Long-form blog posts typically include 2,000 to 6,000 words. They’re good for covering topics in great detail and make you look like the subject-matter expert in that topic. They’re helpful for companies because they build their reputation and gains the consumer’s trust before they make any purchases. Long-form content is there to provide resources, tips, and answers for specific problems and does a number of things.
Provides many opportunities for backlinks, keywords, and info.
Get’s better rankings on Google because of backlinks, keywords, and info.
Shows you are a subject-matter expert in a particular field, which makes you a trusted, go-to resource.
As a content creator, copywriter, and writer in general, long-form blog posts can make you a TON of money. Many writers simply don’t have the stamina to write them at a high-quality level, so if you can master this technique, you will be WAY ahead of 90% of other writers.
Content Creation
This is the most important step for creating a long-form blog post. One, because you need content in order to write an article, but two, you also need great content that speaks to your audience and provides value to them to make your post more engaging, worth reading, and gives you a wider reach of influence.
What is a Long-form Blog Post?
Long phone blog posts are typically between 2,000 and 6,000 words in length and cover either a wide variety of topics or one topic in great detail. What makes long-form blog posts an ideal marketing tool is how much depth you can get in writing them. If your company wants to be seen as a subject matter expert in a particular field, long-form blog posts — and posting consistently — gives your audience a sense of who you are and how much in-depth knowledge you provide for them.
Long-form blog posts are incredibly difficult for people to write. This is due, in part, because of their length, but also because of how much content you have to put in and cover and still make it readable and valuable for your audience.
So, how do you actually write long form blog posts? Let’s dive in…
Tips for writing engaging and shareable long-form blog posts
One of the challenges in writing long front blog posts is keeping readers engaged. there are so many other types of media that your audience could be drawing from such as media audio and social media so you are one of many different sources and resources jumping at your audience. What you want to do as a blogger, is make your content stand out from the rest and present yourself as these subject matter expert within your particular field.
Here are some guidelines that you can use to write your long form blog post:
Do your research
If you haven’t checked out the video linked above I would suggest to do that now. when doing research for your topic idea you need to go in depth into your target content and find other great content that relates to what you’re going to write about.
One helpful way to do this is to just Google whatever topic you’re going to cover and see the search results that come up. With this method you want to click on relevant links red relevant articles and look at the other search suggestion box that Google includes to find relevant sub niches and subtopics for your content. This will also help you develop an outline later on where you have different subtopics to include as headers in your outline.
I can’t stress this enough, but go check out the video above because I go into WAY more detail about how to do keyword research and how to optimize your content for search engines, making it really easy to find those keywords.
Find out what others are doing
Similar to the above topic where you’re doing your research for kind of the content you want to include you want to find out what others are doing you want to read relevant articles relevant blog posts about your target topic and see 1) what other people are including, 2) what they’re leaving out, and 3) how you can improve in your own writing.
Create an outline
For most people, this is going to be tedious work — for me, this is where the fun begins. Creating an outline is like drawing a first draft of an architectural structure: you’re beginning to put your vision onto paper and you’re beginning to manifest what you’re seeing into real life.
In creating an online, you want to focus on a few things. As a general rule, you want to make sure your formatting is correct. You want to include H1’s, H2’s, and possibly H3’s as well as paragraphs to make it easy for readers to quickly scan through your blog post and find the information they need. This also helps search engines to scan your article for readability and document keywords into their search engine optimization process.
Within the outline, you also want to include relevant information that you found while doing your research, such as any helpful tips for information you found, any statistics numbers or data that could back up your claim statement whatever you’re writing about, and a simple bulleted list of things you plan to include under each header.
Write your post
WE’RE FINALLY HERE!!! You’re probably thinking to yourself “screw everything you’ve talked about Owen, this is what I was looking for!” But I’m telling you right now, that if you haven’t paid attention to the steps above, you’re only setting yourself up for failure.
You’re not going to write a great post.
You’re probably going to burn out before you hit that 2000 words.
You’re definitely not going to get ranked on Google.
Writing your post is definitely the fun part, but if you haven’t done the research and the outline it’s only going to be a pain in the butt.
Attempt it.
Don’t skip the research and outline.
That said, there are several helpful strategies that I’ve found when writing your post that make the writing process much easier to get through.
Use voice typing
Voice typing is an incredible tool to use to make you write faster in less amounts of time. It also makes it easier to write in that conversational tone and to write in a fifth grade reading level (see the next two steps). Voice typing can be hard to get used to, but the more you use it, the more the tool learns how you speak and the more it gets things right.
Within this draft alone, there were so many typos as I was voice typing, that I had to correct them. But already in writing this post, I noticed how it was getting better at picking up my speech and my words and putting it into a readable format (hopefully).
Write in a conversational tone
What a lot of beginning writers don’t realize, is that they’re not writing for a scientific community (90% of the time). What they’re writing for is a general audience that is looking for tips, tricks, and advice.
This goes along with knowing your audience. If you don’t know who your target audience is, it’s going to be harder to specifically write for them. Obviously, if you’re writing for a scientific journal, you’re going to be using a different language than if you’re writing a blog post such as the one you’re reading right now.
The conversational tone keeps the writing light and easy to follow and you want to come across as an informed friend who is casually giving you information. Keyword: informed.
This is also true for any type of copywriting you do.
Write at a fifth grade reading level
As a lit major this bit was hard to swallow. We spend YEARS of our life refining our writing style, using ostentatious words (see what I did there?), and crafting complex sentences.
THIS IS NOT AT ALL THE TYPE OF WRITING YOU WANT TO DO.
Keep it short.
Keep it simple.
Keep it dumb.
Not dumb as in you’re writing for a stupid audience, but dumb as in it shouldn’t be a college level piece of work.
If your heart is breaking right now, trust me, mine broke first. But in the end, if we want to create content for the web, we need to step down from our literary horses and write at a fifth grade reading level.
Use keywords
Again, if you didn’t do the research before starting your writing process, you’re going to fail. When writing your blog post, make sure to use specific keywords because it’s going to help you stay focused and get that ranking.
How many times have I used the words “blog post” and “long-form content?” It might be a hard guess, but yes — those are MY target keywords for this “long-form blog post.” ;)
However, DON’t OVERDO THIS. You shouldn’t spam your article with keywords just for the sake of it.
Put in the keywords where they fit, and leave them out where they don’t.
Now the process of ranking on Google is relatively straightforward, ACTUALLY doing it is incredibly complicated. This is NOT an important step for beginning writers, but if you’re seriously wanting to gain traction with your blog posts, I suggest doing a bit more in-depth research on SEO and keyword research.
Tell a story
Last but not least, you want to tell a story. Telling a story creates a personal connection with your audience and keeps them more engaged. Because you are writing 2,000 to 6,000 words, you need to keep your readers focused and entertained, while also providing valuable information for them.
This is why long-form blog posts are SO hard to write for SO many people: they simply don’t have the stamina. They don’t have enough to say in 2,000 words. This is where stories come in because they can relate to aspects of your writing and give you a higher word count while entertaining people at the same time.
Include visuals
Including visuals in your post makes your article easier to scan through and also provides another sensory input to keep your reader engaged. Breaking up your text with an image is a great way to regain their attention and continue reading.
BUT.
Yep, there’s always a but.
Make sure that your visual images are related to what you’re talking about. Don’t throw in stock images or random pictures that have nothing to do with your content. Try to include screenshots, relevant posts with statistics, numbers, quotes, etc.
Edit and publish
The final step of writing (anything) is to edit and polish. Especially if you are using text-to-speech services, you want to make sure that your content is clean, correctly punctuated, and easily readable. Then it’s time to publish — either as a guest post or on your own website.
HOORAY!!! You’ve written your first blog post! (Or maybe not yet, and that’s OK.)
If you want to learn ore about writing blog posts, SEO, and copywriting, check out the Copywriter's Blog!
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