Chapter 5: All You Need to Know About eCommerce Blogging
If you’ve ever thought about starting a blog for your eCommerce store but didn’t follow through it’s time to reconsider. Ecommerce blogging can help drive more traffic to your website.
With more traffic, you strike a better chance of growing your sales.
Compared to a company that doesn’t blog, companies who blog can get as much as 97% more backlinks giving them more traffic to monetize.
Also, businesses that blog drive 55% more traffic back to their website and eCommerce stores with high traffic tend to have higher sales.
In this article, you’ll learn why you should start a blog, blogging tips, eCommerce blogging, where to find blog post ideas, and how to monetize your blog.
Why You Should Be Starting a Blog
An eCommerce blog allows you to connect and communicate with your customers.
If you run a fitness store, creating fitness blog content allows you to talk about a topic that both you and your customers love.
A store blog allows you to open the dialogue with your customers so you can get to know them, their interests, and their needs.
Starting a blog helps you rank better in search engines.
While product pages can rank if optimized, in general, long-form copy tends to perform best.
By creating regular blog content for your store, you’ll be able to build out your web pages which will help bring in more customers.
You can use an SEO plug-in on your store and Keyword Planner to ensure you’re optimizing for keywords correctly.
Ecommerce blogging gives you an opportunity to educate your customers about your niche.
People who are passionate about a topic often look for resources where they can learn more.
Educating your customers has a twofold purpose: it helps position you as an expert, as mentioned earlier, and it helps you overcome customer objections.
Customers who may be skeptical about a product or niche can learn the facts about a topic — this can ease them into your sales funnel.
Blogging Tips for Better Blog Content
According to expert Jeff Bullas, adding images to your blog content can help your blog get 94% more views.
You can use images from free stock image websites, create your own infographics, or make images on Canva to break up your copy with pictures.
If you write long-form blog content, images can help break up the text making it easier for someone to read.
Create an epic headline. Approximately 80% of readers read the headline, while only 20% of readers get around to reading the actual article. To drive more blog readers to your article, you’ll need to create a headline that is relevant, attention-grabbing and provides value.
When starting a blog, you should use other blogs as inspiration. What type of blog content do popular niche blogs write about? How do other blogs layout their blog content? Who reads and comments on their blog posts? Which websites link out to their blog posts? You shouldn’t copy other blog posts but you can learn a lot by seeing the type of content that’s out there.
Allow your customers to write guest posts. You can offer a free product in exchange for a well-written guest post. You’ll want to make sure that the value provided in the guest post is high enough to warrant adding it to your website. So be sure to create blog guidelines for writers if someone expresses interest.
Write long-form content. The top articles ranked in search engines tend to have at least 1,000 words. By creating long-form content that’s optimized for keywords, you’ll have a better chance of ranking higher in Google. Long blog content often details more information that can help educate your customers. The more value you provide, the more likely they are to share the content and the more traffic you’ll get which also helps boost your ranking.
Update your blog content regularly. Every three to four months, you’ll want to go to your older articles and add more content to it while removing outdated information. This shows Google that your content is still relevant making it more likely that you’ll rank high.
Share your secrets. If you know cool tricks that’ll make your customers lives easier or help them master a relevant skill, you’ll be able to grow an audience quickly. Don’t be afraid of sharing your insider knowledge with your fanbase. By teaching them cool hacks regularly, they’ll keep coming back to your site instead of a competitor’s.
In ecommerce blogging, it’s important to bring your customers into the conversation. Keep it casual by using words like you, your, and you’ll. You’re speaking to your customers through blog content, so make it a personal conversation.
Optimize Content for Keywords
Search engine optimization (SEO) needs to play a huge role in your blog strategy.
Use an SEO plug-in to help you rank for the right keywords.
You can use the keywords throughout the article without overusing them as that can be considered keyword stuffing.
Use Keyword Planner to find the best keywords to rank for that have high search volume and low or medium competition.
As your blog gains authority you can focus on ranking for high competition keywords.
As part of your SEO strategy, you’ll also need to link out to other relevant articles that’ll be of value to your customers.
Here are some more tips for optimizing your content:
Be consistent. At some point, everyone considers starting a blog. However, you’ll likely be blogging (eCommerce blogging) for several months before you start seeing any traction. The more high quality blog content you create on a weekly basis, the more traffic you’ll get over the long term.
Spell check your work. There’s nothing people hate more than finding typos in an article. If there are many spelling or grammatical errors in a blog post, you can be assured that the comments will be about your inability to spell check rather than the content of the article.
Promote your content. If you spend half a day writing an article, you should spend half a day marketing it. You can share the article on social media, promote the article to relevant blogs in hopes of getting backlinks and sharing it in groups or forums.
How to Come Up with Blog Post Ideas
When you’ve been writing blog content for a while, it can be hard to come up with blog post ideas that are valuable to your readers.
There are a few ways to generate blog post ideas.
Ask
your customers.
Email a survey or make a post on social media asking your customers what type
of content they’d love to see on your blog. You can ask them for blog post
suggestions or ask what their pain points are within your niche for some great
suggestions.
Do
competitor research.
If you get stuck and can’t think of any blog post ideas, go on popular blogs or
competitor websites and look at the type of content they regularly post.
Write
about your experiences.
Write about topics that you experience. For example, if you run regularly and
experience knee pain, you can write articles about how to cope with knee pain
as a runner. By injecting your own personal experiences and adding research to
the article, you’ll create a post that’ll be relevant to your audience while adding
a unique perspective to the post.
Do
keyword research.
When in doubt, Keyword Planner can
give you insight into great blog post ideas that get searched. You’ll likely have
to devote some time trying different keywords for suggestions. However, after
spending half a day playing around on the tool, you’ll have a comprehensive
list of topics that people are generally searching for that’ll likely be
relevant to your target audience.
How to
Drive Traffic to Your Blog
While creating content is important, making sure people read your blog content is equally important.
You’ll need to market your blog posts so that you’ll be able to monetize them.
You can drive traffic to your blog through social media.
Sharing articles on Twitter or Facebook can help you build a social following while keeping your pages updated regularly with unique and fresh content.
You’ll want to make use of hashtags so that people can find your posts organically.
You can also run Facebook or Google Ads to your blog traffic so that it gets more views.
SEO will also prove to be a great way to drive traffic to your blog.
You can use a tool like Plug-In SEO or Yoast to help you determine if your blog posts are optimized for keywords.
You’ll know if you need to incorporate the keyword more throughout the article if your image tags are optimized and more to ensure you’re doing SEO the right way.
You can also share blog links in relevant forums and groups.
If you write a detailed or interesting piece of advice and add a link at the end of the post, your post isn’t likely to be deleted.
If you post only your link on several forums and groups, you’ll likely be banned, which will ruin your chances of ever having your content shared in those channels.
Emails can drive traffic to your blog.
If you send emails more than once a week, you can receive traffic back to your store more frequently.
Your emails can include a mix of products or blog content.
You can drive traffic to your blog by running contests on it, can host a giveaway or contest with Rafflecopter.
You can run ads to the contest page to get more entries.
Contests are also great for building email lists.
After the contest has ended, email the runner-ups to let them know they’ve won too.
Offer them a gift card for a small amount (make sure none of your products are lower than the amount offered) or a discount so that you can grow your sales.
How to
Monetize Your Blog
If you plan on pumping out tons of blog content regularly, you’ll want to make sure you retarget your blog traffic.
You should install the Facebook Pixel on your store.
You’ll want to have retargeting ads running all the time.
The good news is that these types of ads are typically really low in cost, but the return on investment is super high.
In the beginning, you can mention relevant influencers in your articles and tag them on social media to mention they’ve been featured in the article.
If they share it with their audience, you’ll gain free traffic.
As your blog grows organically, you’ll likely have far more people reading and sharing your content which makes this a great long-term strategy that’s pretty easy on your budget.
Adding an email opt-in section to each blog post can help you grow your email list.
While retargeting will be an effective strategy to grow your sales, having an email list gives you yet another way to connect with your customers.
Creating gift guides is another great way to monetize your blog.
You can create a series of gift guides a few months prior to the holiday season starting so you can rank high in search once the holiday season.
Starting a blog can really help your business gain new visitors and customers.
While it can take some time to develop a big audience, with patience and consistent effort you can start seeing results take form within a few months of working on your blog content.
Focus on adding value and a unique perspective to your posts and over time you’ll build a big audience that you can remarket to through retargeting ads or email marketing.
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