The Benefits Of Incorporating A Blog Into Your E-commerce Content Strategy
Business owners who run e-commerce websites are usually so preoccupied with focusing on listing products or services and then writing descriptions for them.
They may even go as far as to research keywords on Google and then incorporate the best ones into those descriptions. While those are all effective things to do for driving traffic to your website, it might not be enough to keep people on your website.
For this, you need to develop an e-commerce content strategy that will both attract people and make them want to come back again in the future.
The most affordable and effective strategy for doing this is to add a blog to your e-commerce website.
Below are the Top 5 Benefits of Adding a Blog to an E-commerce Website:
Educates Visitors About Your Business
According to Lemonstand.com, about 70% of potential online customers like to learn about a business through posted articles rather than advertisements. Remember that people have a lot of options when shopping on the internet.
If you simply advertise products for sale on your website, people may not feel comfortable doing business with you because they don’t know who you are. If there is nothing on your website to educate them about your business and the person who is running it, they are likely going to get scared away.
A blog will help you avoid this situation because it gives you the opportunity to post up messages about your business and answer people’s questions directly. It also gives you a chance to showcase big content – additional tools and resources that your blog has which keep people engaged.
The best part is that all your visitors will get to see these posts and it will help educate new visitors in the future, so you don’t need to keep answering the same questions repeatedly.
Increase Search Engine Ranking
Google is the biggest search engine in the world. If you can rank well on it, then you will be driving lots of organic traffic to your website without spending a dime on pay-per-click advertising.
An active blog on your e-commerce website can do wonders for search engine optimization. When a website has new or updated content every single day, its search engine rank will increase.
The Google algorithm favors websites with fresh content.
The only real way to get this fresh content on a daily basis is to have a blog where dozens or even hundreds of people are constantly using it. Then, you might get 1% to 3% of these people actually convert into customers.
Bigger Social Media Presence
There is no doubt that social media marketing has been a huge asset to online businesses and e-commerce websites.
The ability for people to share webpage URLs and blog posts with their friends and family members becomes a real asset to the content creator. In a blog, you can integrate social media sharing buttons into each post.
That way, a reader can easily share those posts with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with just the click of a button.
This will bring free word-of-mouth traffic to your website and you’ll potentially get new customers and begin to measure the success of your content marketing ROI (Return on Investment).
Selling More Products Or Services
Blog content can contain all kinds of information. It should not always be content that pushes to sell a product or service.
However, if you have some exciting new product or service that you want to introduce to people, then a blog post that talks about it could help gain you more sales. This doesn’t mean you necessarily turn your blog post into a mere advertisement.
Make the post a discussion about the product or service which will engage other people to participate in it. At the very end of the post, you could put a link to the product page if people are interested in purchasing it.
Personalize The User Experience
If you want to get people to keep coming back to your website, you need to give them an incentive to do so.
A blog makes users feel like they’re more than just potential customers. It makes them feel like they’re part of your business “family” because you can have discussions with them on a more personal level rather than strictly on a professional level.
Make sure you don’t respond to people with scripted or auto-respond type language. Make your brand personality through your blog and you will soon develop a following.
If you address their concerns in your reply and personalize the experience for them, they’ll become a regular visitor to your website. People feel more comfortable doing business with someone who is straightforward and direct. It shows them that they care.
