Using blog articles for content marketing is on the trend of e-commerce. Research from Demand Metric has shown that the engagement rate of content marketing is 3 times more effective than traditional marketing. When a web store has reached a stable stream of revenue, there’s more that needs to be done to scale the business. For some business owners who just started their online business, a blog can be beneficial for building brand image, creating a long-term marketing strategy, and perform content marketing.
With SHOPLINE’s new feature, now merchants can have a blog integrated into your website, easily.
Blog and Social Media
Before we cut into the chase, let’s review some of the social media management tips we mentioned in the previous post. Posting regularly and finding ways to engage with your potential audience is vital in running a successful social media marketing. Also, your social media fans might already be interested in your brand, so creating and sharing content that is related to your product is a great way to increase the chance to convert more leads into sales.
For merchants, running a social media profile can be low-cost but high in return; the same as starting a blog.
I already have a social media profile, do I still need a blog?
A lot of you may ask what are the difference between a blog, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms? Simply put: The purpose of social media is to share and spread messages instantly, while the blog can provide detailed information on products and related information. In the shopping process, most consumers will receive brand messages through social media and blog first, and then move on to a branded online shop to make a purchase.
A lot of bloggers would write unboxing blog posts, to give out detailed product introduction and comparison to allow potential buyers to know what suits best for them. Besides, audiences who will read unboxing articles tend to have a higher interest in purchasing the product. Also, a blog can effectively improve your brands SEO on the search engine as opposed to social media platforms. Blogging allows you to boost SEO quality. By generating high-quality content that are relevant to your audience, can keep people on your website for longer and allows you to connect with them. All of these are considered pretty great from an SEO perspective.
Why should you host your blog on your website’s domain?
After reading the first part of the article, hopefully, you have grasped how blogging can be important for your e-Commerce business. Once you have decided to build a blog and manage it, the question lies within whether you should host your blog on your website domain or build it individually with a new domain? If you’re not sure of the differences between these two, I’ll recommend you to integrate your blog into your website. But why? I’ll explain it below:
Beneficial for users
a. Having your website and blog under the same domain creates a smooth user experience. While most visitors would expect to retrieve more information from the blog without redirection from the online store.
b. A great blog creates value and answers to their users. Usually, a blog is the place where the brand can get into detail about its product, vision, usage, and more. Integrating it with your brand store allows visitors to access this information easily.
Good for SEO
a. Although having a blog itself isn’t a ranking factor, but blogging is good for SEO because it helps to keep your website fresh and current. Google doesn’t want to deliver outdated information, websites that are regularly updated gives the search engine more reason to index your website more often.
b. A blog keeps people on your website for longer, and if you’re providing with the information they’re looking for, by staying longer on the website also signals to Google that this website is helpful.
c. It gives opportunities for internal and external linking. Earning external links are hard but when you’re blogging with valuable information, linking to external sites can build a relationship and expand your reach to increase ranking.
Improve sales performance
a. A blog can help you to enhance your brand image and positive professional image.
b. Easy to track customers’ conversions in terms of, download, member registration, purchase and more.
How to do great content marketing with your blog and bring in sales for your store?
1. Define your objective
Every time you start working on a new article, make sure you have a clear objective in mind. Ask yourself: who is your target audience or potential customers? What is the objective of this article, is it for brand promotion, brand updates, providing useful information to your customers?
It’s best to have a core value for each of your articles, whether its for tutorial purpose or promoting brand news, try not to put too much information in one article, and focus on just one or two messages you’d like to convey to your readers.
2. Headline and keywords
Headlines should be treated with much more consideration, your blog post headline needs to clearly articulate what you’ll be covering in the article and explain to visitors why your offer is valuable. Think about your audience and what matters to them. In addition, be sure to use keywords in your headline, it will help your blog post rank better on Google, as well as make it clear to readers what you’ll be discussing in your post.
3. Layout and images
Keep attention to details of your layout, font size, and colors to ensure your articles are easy to read, the last thing you want for your reader is tiny fonts with messy layouts. Use short paragraphs, subheaders, bullets, bolding and links.
Visuals are important in articles, sometimes, a picture is worth more than a thousand words, and can catch a fair amount of attention. In addition, Images are a supporting tool that can take your content from bland to exciting. To keep your readers interested throughout the article, make sure to throw in some photos that are related to your content.
4. Opening
You want to open your blog post with a bang and get people hooked immediately, this will also reflect how your readers would perceive your brand. You can write your opening statement in many ways and get readers engaged. You can try asking a question that creates curiosity and gets the reader thinking; share a quote to make people laugh or immediately establish the main point of your post; present a fact that resonates with your topic, people like being provided with interesting data.
5. CTA
A call-to-action is an invitation for your readers to take a certain action, it’s best to place one at the bottom of your articles, once your readers finish consuming your content. CTA is an important component for your website to generate leads and convert sales, an effective one can act as a logical extension of your blog posts. Your CTA can be used in many ways such as gain subscribers, facilitate comments, place an inquiry, learn more, buy service and more.
Conclusion
With SHOPLINE’s blog feature, merchants can start drafting posts to perform content marketing and bring in more web traffic with valuable information. However, running a blog requires time and patience, your blog won’t bring in sales and fame for your brand immediately, but as long as you’re providing valuable, new, and current information to your readers, it will certainly help with your sales in the long run.
Marketing Associate at SHOPLINE. A digital marketing nerd and a podcast fan. You can find her out in the woods once in a while but most of the times she’s glued to her laptop screen indoors.