Blogging helps you get discovered through Search Engine Page Results.
Organic discovery of your brand and products is always ahead of paid advertising. The impression is different
when someone finds you organically and comes to your store. To be precise, it's more natural.
Say that a user searches for 'Pink Floral Skirt,' and your store appears on the first page of Google search
results. The chances of him/her coming to your store and buying that 'Pink Floral Skirt' is high.
Search results are suggestions from a reputable entity like Google. So, you have the edge over an online store
that targets the same customer with an advertisement based on 'Browsing Behavior.'
A business and customer relationship do not bloom in one day.
Conversations are a must to build a relationship. Your customers may not believe you at first. And why would
they have to in the first place? After all, you are just a business.
You have to prove to them that you do care about their concerns. A blog is a great place to achieve
that.
It enables a customer to voice their opinion. It is where you show them you are there, not just for business.
Let's say yours is a store dedicated to swimwear. Your potential customers are those who are into
swimming.
As a business, if you target people in general, the conversion rate will not be that good. Even for
intelligent programs like Facebook Pixel, you must give some time to collect relevant customer data.
The more targeted your audience is, the higher the conversion rate will be. Blogging will help you attract the
right audience, who, comparatively, have a high purchase intent.
The trick here is to address your audiences' queries. Write about the latest trends that rock the swimwear
industry. Write how-to-type articles, give swimming tips, discuss swimmers' pain points, and the like.
In short, your blog should be a one-stop solution for swimmers to educate themselves.
Compared to other marketing strategies, blogging is relatively simple. You don't need expensive cameras to
shoot content, sharp editors to edit videos, and automation tools to stick to a posting schedule.
Your hard work is finding content ideas your target audience is interested in.
Once you develop a list, you can start blogging even by yourself. You can also rely on sites like www.freelancer.com and www.upwork.com for your content needs.
Suspects are those who may or may not be interested in your products, and they may not be your target also.
You may be promoting a '$5 fidget spinner' to a billionaire like Elon Musk, whose full-time job is spinning
ideas (pun intended).
Put simply, showcasing your products to them is akin to a blind date.
You know nothing about this person, their likes, dislikes, social status, financial ability, or gender.
For all you know, you are marketing your product to a human being. And with the advent of click bots, even
that would be wrong.
This is where blogging comes in as a savior, and it can help separate the cold audience from those with strong
purchase intent.
You need not hire pay-per-hour content writers to make your blog brimming.
Good SEO content writers from countries like India are available for relatively cheap pay.
If you are on a shoestring budget, many sites are available to hire freelance content writers from third-world
countries.
Do not underestimate their command of English. Sites like Upwork screen the writers before allowing them on
board.
Blogs are great for telling stories.
You can convert your business name into a brand through consistent posting and sticking to a specific writing
style.
A blog is a great place to show your audience who you are and your knowledge of your industry.
You can become the apple of their eye when you do it consistently and address their queries.
Every industry's audiences have questions and doubts regarding it.
When a doubt pops up in their head, they usually turn up to Google.
Google, in turn, will mainly direct them to blogs that reign in your domain. For instance, if a user searches
for the "Best outdoor tactical weapons," Google will show him many Adventure and Outdoor blogs with content on
tactical weapons.
The user will likely visit one of those sites, get warmed up, click one of the advertisements displayed, get
redirected to another store, and buy the product.
If you are active on social media platforms, you can use your blog to gain more followers.
You can embed links to your social media accounts in each blog post. Even if a reader is highly interested,
the chances of them searching for you on all social media platforms to follow is highly unlikely. Hence the
links.
TIP: Use a strong and distinguishable call-to-action (CTA) button to make the readers follow you on other
platforms.
You need not spend a penny on promoting your blog posts.
The very nature of a blog is its discoverability. Pay attention to your blog's SEO aspects, and you are good to go.
Use platforms like Pinterest to promote your blog posts. For those unaware of the power of Pinterest, here is
a shocker. As most of us think, Pinterest is essentially a visual search engine and not a social media.
And the best part is you can create unlimited pins linking to one blog post.
Blogs are excellent conversation starters.
Random people do not come together that easily to discuss something, and your blog is the cornerstone for them
to engage, discuss, and fight sometimes.
We all know how engagement benefits a brand. Never make the mistake of turning off the comments section of
your brand. Moderate comments, filter out spam and abusive words but do not turn it off, period.
Once you have gotten a head start in blogging, people will return to read your stuff.
When this happens regularly, you will get a loyal following, and a section of them will eventually become your
customers.
Of those, a section will become frequent buyers and develop an interest in your future launches. A blog is
ideal for informing such loyal customers about your upcoming product line
A nicely written blog post can generate traffic for years if not decades.
But bear in mind that not all blog posts will perform well for years. The longevity of your blog posts depends
on the content type.
Create evergreen content that will stay relevant even after ten years.
For example, blog posts like "5 Golden Tips to Take Care of a Newborn Baby' will never grow old (pun intended
again).
Active blogging can get you a loyal following, provided your content is on point.
Don't be another blog in your niche, and expect exponential growth. To build a community, you need to set
certain things straight.
Keep your sales language at bay and be conversational. Talk in everyday language. Be funny, emotional, and ask
them questions.
Run leaderboard contests and reward the loyal ones.
Not all customers will be straightforward. But give them a face, and they will call a spade a spade.
Keep a tab in the comments section of your blog, and you will get valuable insights. Some businesses disable
the comments section of their blog and never make that mistake. But do filter out abusive messages intended to
tarnish your image.
Let your customers tell their opinions and suggestions. Take business cues from them.
You can repurpose your blog posts in multiple ways. To begin with, you can publish an eBook after categorizing
your blog posts.
The posts can also be scripts for your video content, though you may need a little tweaking.
You can publish your content on platforms like Reddit and Quora. The trick is to find questions about your
niche and post a synopsis of your blog post as a hook.
Another intelligent way to use your blog posts is to create pins on Pinterest and link those to your site.
Once your blog has many posts, you can identify the best-performing posts and compile them into an eBook.
Then you can offer the eBook to your site visitors for free in exchange for their details such as email id and
phone number.
Say that yours is an online home decor store with a blog. Your eBook title can be along the lines of "77
Awesome Ideas to Decor Your Home."
An SEO analyst knows the importance of long-tail keywords for a website.
First, let's understand what long-tail keywords are. Search queries containing more than a few words and
clear-cut intent are long-tail keywords. For example, "Blue striped formal shirt for men" is an excellent
long-tail keyword.
If yours is a men's clothing store, you can write a blog post and weave the keyword above into it. For
example, "Why a Blue Striped Shirt is Perfect for Officegoers" adopts the keyword naturally.
Long-tail keywords have less competition in general. Thus, your chances of getting discovered for such terms
are high.
But you cannot stuff long-tail keywords without context; if you do so, the site will look unnatural. For a
site like Amazon, intentionally stuffing long-tail keywords is ok. But if you are a small player, stuffing
long-tail keywords into your product page will negatively impact the user experience.
To begin with, you need to understand why you need an additional entry point to your business.
You may have ads running across social media channels and have a steady cash inflow. But let's not forget that
the competition in the e-commerce industry has grown by several folds.
As an online business, the more entry points you have, the higher the traffic.
Since the global e-commerce conversion rate is steadily declining, you must showcase your products to as many
people as possible.
Blogging can be a profitable entry point for your business as it has the potential to warm up the audience.
Show, Don't Tell, they say.
But how do you show things in words? You do it through meticulous descriptions infused with feelings and
actions. But there is an alternate way that will help your readers comprehend things better. And that is
video.
Videos increase engagement to a great extent. Your blog is a natural habitat for videos.
Let's assume you run a DIY online store featuring home renovation and repair supplies.
Your blog will undoubtedly have how-to-type articles and tutorials, and these content pieces are best
understood when shown as videos.
You must have a great product line and exceptional customer service to achieve word-of-mouth marketing.
Assuming that you have both, let's discuss where word-of-mouth marketing stands today.
Word-of-mouth marketing has evolved a lot. In today's context, likes, comments, shares, and testimonials are
the natural channels of word-of-mouth marketing.
Blogs allow customers to comment, discuss, share, and give testimonials.
Say your blog has a post titled '7 Great Porch Ideas for Summer.' If the ideas work out, the readers will
comment on them, and the likelihood of them sharing them on their social media accounts is also high.
Trust is essential for any business to survive. Though there are several ways to build it, backlinks are
instrumental.
And blogging is a proven way to acquire links from high-quality sites in your niche.
Take this article as an example. We have given links to a few sites, and we swear that none of the links were
sponsored. But how did we end up choosing those sites to cite as examples?
The answer is discoverability. As a part of writing this article, we researched and found that those sites
provide value and fit into our queries. Hence the links.
The same can happen to your ecommerce blog if you are genuinely invested.
For search engines like Google, backlinks from authoritative sites are a crucial ranking factor.
Search Engine Optimizers know the challenge of acquiring links from high-quality sites. Many sites even got
penalized for indulging in black-hat link-building strategies.
Your blog is an excellent link magnet, assuming you produce high-quality articles.
Remember that a blog is not just for your customers and the potential ones. It is for other players in your
niche as well.
Blogs and organizations in your niche usually give links to relevant sites either as a source of information
or to add value to their content. If they find your site relevant, they will naturally start linking to your
site.
Shaping a brand's image is essential for long-term success. True that advertisements and offers bring you
sales. But domain expertise will help you position yourself.
Let's take good house keeping, for
example. It successfully positioned itself as an authentic source of information about home economics. They
did it through hundreds of articles on food, home decor, DIY projects, renovation and repair, and the like.
From recipes to repair tips, organization hacks to product reviews, they cover all aspects of home economics.
You can do the same in your niche and demonstrate your subject knowledge to visitors.
An email list is an asset for any modern-day business, and it gives you the ultimate power, unlike your
followers on social media.
Facebook and Instagram may perish one day, but not email services. There are various ways to make your site
visitors subscribe to your newsletter.
Businesses usually place a newsletter subscription box on their homepage and some use pop-ups. Though these
two methods yield some success, embedding newsletter opt-ins into your blog posts can prove much
better.
Because the readers are already warmed up, it gives a reason for them to subscribe.