Blogging is an important SEO and marketing strategy for any small business. Whether you advertise a service (like us) or sell products, you should start a blog on your website. But what in the world are you supposed to blog about when you have an online store? Read on to find some inspiration!
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Introduce new products or services
As your business grows, you’ll come out with new products/services to offer your customers. Your blog is a great place to introduce them. Your post should explore the features and benefits of your new product and explain why it stands out from the crowd. If applicable, you could also explain how best to use your new product, or illustrate the problem(s) it solves for your customer. And at the end of every post you write about a product or service, you can include links to the actual product or service page, for anyone who is ready to buy.
What would a product intro blog look like? Let’s take a look at a quick example. Erin owns an online shop that sells sustainably made clothing for women. She designs a beautiful new dress and decides to write a debut post for that dress on her blog. In that post, she could write about the materials used to make the dress, where she sourced those materials from, what dyes, fabrics, and threads she used, the different colors and sizes available, etc. The possibilities for Erin in this single blog post are endless. In fact, she could probably write a couple different posts just about this one product, if she loves it as much as she wants her customers to.
Write about your company
Your company has a mission. It has values. It is comprised of people who share the same vision and seek to make a difference in some way. Tell your customers about these things! Give them updates on what’s going on. Have you been in business for 25 years now? Write about that. Are you hosting a fundraiser or raising awareness about a particular social injustice? Blog about it.
One caveat, though. If you do this too often, people may stop caring. Save blogs like these for the truly important goings-on that you want customers to know about as it relates to your products/services and your business.
Educate your audience
If you are running a business, hopefully you know what you’re doing! And if you know what you’re doing, share some of that knowledge with your customers. It may be tempting to gate keep information, to only give something once you get something. But trust us: providing information for free and educating your audience makes you into a trusted guide. You become someone they can rely on when they have X problem, because you’ve helped them before when they had a question about Y.
If you’re having trouble coming up with things to blog about that aren’t products or major business initiatives, brainstorm some ideas for informative articles. What could you teach your potential customers about your area of expertise?
Going back to Erin, she could write a series of posts about how to plan cohesive outfits, how to appropriately care for handmade clothing, or how to determine the right color pallet for your wardrobe. Or Hannah, who sells cleaning products in the building next door, could publish weekly, monthly, and seasonal cleaning guides for each room in the house.
Blogging helps you stay on the radar
Posting to your blog on a regular basis has incredible benefits for your site’s SEO. Firstly, it makes Google happy, because Google sees that you are active and relevant when you put out new content on a set schedule. When Google notices this, they will then send bots to your site more often. The bots then crawl your site, analyze your pages, and rank the ones that deserve a spot in the search results. The more high quality content you publish, the more chances you give Google to notice you!
Secondly, creating great shareable content keeps you on your audience’s radar. Every blog post is prime content for an email blast, whether it’s a sales email or part of a nurture campaign. You can also share your blog content to social media, which keeps your brand in front of your potential customers. Even if they don’t buy right away, your brand is in their inbox, on their feed, it’s on their minds, if only for a second or two. The more great content, the higher the chances that those people turn to you when they are looking to buy.
For more inspirational blog ideas, check out this post: How To Find Ideas For Your Blog Posts
A few practical reminders:
1. Conduct keyword research first
Before you dive into writing all these blogs, remember not to skip your keyword research. Not sure how to do this? Check out our keyword research guide for small businesses for some helpful tips.
Keyword research helps you determine what search terms your audience is using. These are the words you want to be found for on Google. So, naturally, these are the words you should focus on when deciding what to write about on your eCommerce blog.
Make your posts easy to find
After writing these awesome posts, your audience needs to be able to find them. At a minimum, put a link to your main blog page in your navigation menu. This gives visitors easy access to all your posts in one place. We recommend putting it all the way to the right, next to your Contact page, or all the way to the left. If you don’t have room in your main menu, place your blog link in a prominent place in the footer. That way, it still shows up on every page of your site, but won’t clutter the navigation at the top of the page.
We also recommend including a section with your most recent posts somewhere on your homepage (see our own homepage for an example). This will show your visitors that you are putting new content out there, and they can investigate further if they are interested. Don’t forget to include a link or button for them to find more blog posts!
Actively promote your content
One mistake far too many people make is to set it and forget it. While this works for some things, it is definitely not a philosophy to adopt when it comes to blogging. If you simply publish it and let it sit there, that post will fade away into the digital wilderness almost instantly. If you want your customers to find the content, you have to serve it to them.
Share a link to your new blog post on social media, to help drive traffic to your site. Send out an email blast featuring the new post, advertising your new product, etc. If you want people to remember your brand, you need to make them remember.
Conclusion
Blogging is a great way to market your online shop and boost your SEO. Use some of these ideas to help get started writing your first posts. Tell people about your company and your products. Educate them and provide valuable content that can help them solve a problem or learn something they can use to survive and thrive out there in the real world. Just make sure it relates to what you sell, otherwise Google (and your readers) will get confused. Happy blogging!
Keep Reading: How To Optimize Your Blog Posts For Search Engines