In addition to my daily work with eCommerce brands, I spend a lot of time writing about industry tips and tricks.
While researching, I come across countless eCommerce sites without a blog – this is a huge mistake! Let me explain to you why your online store needs a blog.
Benefit 1: You Can Use a Blog to Solve Your Target Customers’ Greatest Problem
You don’t have to make your blog all about self-promotion — as a matter of fact, I would never recommend this. You can use your eCommerce blog as a tool to solve your target customers’ everyday problems.
It’s likely that you have a good grasp of who your customers are. So, find out what problems they’re facing and use your blog as a forum to answer these problems, in detail.
Answering these questions is what sets you up as an authority.
A blog makes you seem more trustworthy. When you write about trending topics and helpful solutions on your blog, your brand will become more trustworthy in the eyes of shoppers and customers.
Customers who see that you know what you’re talking about and can help them with common issues will see you as a leader in your niche.
How to Find Out What Your Audience Wants to Know
You can discover what your audience wants to know by perusing forums and using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Ahrefs.
Keyword planner is free, and the search volume data is based on Google searches. Ahrefs is a paid tool that provides you with everything you need to know to find the best search phrases to try to rank for.
See also: How to Find Topics for Your Content Marketing.
Once you have a reliable and well-established blog, you can monitor the comments for questions.
One of the best ways to generate new, relevant blog content is to answer your readers’ queries — in the form of a new blog topic – promptly.
Benefit 2: Information is a Free Lead Generation Tool
Without content to attract leads, you will never get a single visitor to your website. Rather than rely on paid advertising to your product and category pages, a blog can help you qualify leads.
Those attracted to the topics you write about will become subscribers.
As you build relationships by sharing helpful posts, your leads become customers.
On top of your blog, you need an email newsletter to optimise your relationship-building efforts.
You can use a free email marketing platform like MailChimp to get started; this tool is free for up to 1,000 subscribers and will help you automate nearly everything about the email process, including RSS-fed newsletters, segmentation, and abandoned cart notifications.
Benefit 3: You Will Have Nearly Unlimited Social Media Content
Coming up with new ideas for social media posts is a chore. Having set up your eCommerce blog, you will never run out of quotes and images to share on social media. Include links to the source on your blog to get more shoppers to your online store.
Schedule new social media content with a tool like Buffer, which makes the process easier and allows you to spend less time creating new content.
Social Media Marketing Tips for eCommerce
Most of your social media posts should link back to your website to generate traffic to your blog posts and sometimes products; this sounds easy enough, but Twitter and other platforms are starting to ban duplicate content.
So, you can’t post the same thing over and over anymore.
Instead, you can repurpose your website content by creating several customised, branded posts for each page and post on your website.
If you don’t have design skills, don’t worry – you can use Visme, Canva and similar tools designed for a retail business to quickly create templates for quotes, images, and infographics related to the content you will share.
[Source: Canva dashboard]Your social media presence should have a brand consistent with your website. If you look at top retailers in your niche on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, you’ll notice that their posts are easily recognisable.
Your logo, brand colours, and fonts should be consistent throughout all of your advertising and marketing.
Still, need to get started with this? – Try a logo maker to start building your unique branding package for use on your blog, social media posts, and ads.
Benefit 4: More Website Pages = Better Search Rankings
A blog gives your more website pages, which is especially helpful if you only sell a handful of products. Thinking of your website from a purely SEO perspective, you need more pages to rank well in search results.
By setting up a blog and incorporating it into your site, you create the opportunity to rank for unlimited search terms.
The more categories you have on your blog, the more opportunities you have for new content.
But, keep in mind that Google, Bing and others will read the material to try and make sense of what your site is all about, so keep it relevant.
How Many Categories Should an eCommerce Blog Have?
While there’s no set number that an eCommerce blog should have, you should take a look at your product categories and think about how they might relate to your potential customers and information they might seek.
If you only sell outdoor gear, for example, your readers may be interested in survival tips and also camping and hunting advice and hacks.
Here are some tips that will help you generate category ideas for your online store’s website:
- Company newsTrending topics amongst your audience
- Product-related advice/ hacks
- Interest-related advice/ hacks
- Contests/ promotions
- What’s your competition writing about?
Final Thoughts
Not all online stores have a blog; this is a mistake. A blog can be used to solve your customers’ problems and establish you as a leader in your niche. You need content to generate new leads and keep growing your business.
Sharing social media posts that point to your blog will generate more traffic to your website. Having more pages on your website will help improve your search rankings. If you don’t already have a blog for your eCommerce ventures, use the advice above to get started creating one today!
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