No bullshit social publishing news and opinions. Follow Brandon.
I will never promote a product or service unless I believe in it’s value to you. 31 Days To Build A Better Blog? It’s the only e-book I feel comfortable recommending to you.
Not only am I going to recommend you purchase the book, I’m going to go through each task step-by-step to show you how valuable it is.
Day 1: The Elevator Pitch
The short elevator pitch for Soap Box Included is “Everything A Social Publisher Needs To Succeed”.
Seven words. Perfect. Ten is the maximum for any headline, regardless of media. Six or seven is that succinct sweet spot that you want to work in.
Keep it simple. Keep it descriptive. Keep it short.
Darren has some great exercises in the workbook, but I also touched on this issue a bit in a guest post for Daily Blog Tips, entitled “9 Tips To Pitch Your Blog Successfully“:
1. Tell Me About Your Blog. Briefly.
In the comment section for this post, can you describe your blog in a sentence? Two? If you can’t quickly describe your blog, to anyone really, the reporter or editor will move on.
Exercise: Pretend you are leaving a voice mail and only have so much time for your message. What do you cut?
Lesson: Can you tell us about your blog in ten words or less? If not, practice and work on the elevator pitch until you can.
For The Long Description
Why have a long description to go with your short description? As Darren points out:
Be Ready to Expand Upon Your Pitch—at a recent conference I had a person approach and give me what seemed like an elevator pitch about their blog. It worked really well, they had me interested—so interested that I asked them to tell me more. The problem was that they lacked anything else to say about their blog. See an elevator pitch as a conversation opener, designed to lead into further interaction with people. You don’t have to say it all in your initial pitch, but you should be ready to say more if people are interested.
Until this point, I have not thought about a long description, so here is what I have thus far:
Soap Box Included is designed to empower and mobilize Americans to organize, operate, and promote their own social networks to help those in need.
Does it tell you about what I’m doing? What this blog touches on? What our mission is? That’s what you should shoot for.
After several months, in November of 2009, I revised our long description to: SBI serves as a blueprint for readers to follow and features case studies (Astonishing Tales Of Mediocrity), book reviews (The Social Publishing MBA), how-tos (Archive), and observations from it’s author, Brandon Mendelson (Humor).
More clear, more focused on what the content is about and who the author is, and what the end point is for our readers. The social activism part is played down as that will have it’s own website in the not too distant future. I also added links to other pages on the website to keep the reader interested.
Lesson: Your long description will take a while to fully develop. If you have something now, great, but don’t get married to it. After a few months of blogging you’ll have a better idea of what you want to accomplish and that will shape the blog’s description for you.
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