Last weekend, I spent my Sunday morning visiting nearly a hundred websites of our customers and came across 1 site which has a beautiful blog page: Bikini Luxe Blog. The content really engaged me, making me stay on the site for half an hour reading their elegant pieces of writing. Then I thought, blogging can be a great source of traffic and potential channel to generate sales for our customers.
People normally underestimate and thus ignore blogging because it is so time-consuming and takes a long-term period to show obvious effects. But look at these pieces of data and you will have a second thought about how powerful this marketing tool is.
- BlogHer revealed that 81% of U.S. online consumers trust blogs as information and advice from blogs and 61% have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog.
- 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog, reported by HubSpot.
- Information from Content Plus: 60% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its blog page.
From the perspectives of a marketing guru, I have no doubt about the great effectiveness of blogging in the marketing world. But let me show you throughout this post, that it is a truly powerful content marketing tool in eCommerce and making good use of it can lead amazing traffic and boost sales for your online store.
Why Blogging is so powerful?
1. Help your store climb up Google’s search rankings:
Having worked with many small online sellers, I know that SEO is a big challenge to most of them. However, blogging can help improve a great deal on this matter. In order for your website to rank highly, you need to have new updated content appear on a frequent basis. Google also values genuine content, so blogging is a great way to provide quality fresh content to boost your rank up. What’s more, blog posts help build both on-page and off-page links to your website. The more frequently you blog and the more good SEO keywords you use, the higher your website climbs on Google search engines ranking.
2. Impress customers that you are an expert in the industry:
If you’re not Amazon, chances are that you will be saturated in a fragmented eCommerce market. So how to stand out among so many players and win a share in the market? You have to prove to customers that you are an expert in your industry. This is where content marketing plays its trick: creating the differences between the market leader and the rest.
Besides social media, blogging is a great way to distribute valuable knowledge, expert information and resourceful materials to customers. While social media are so easily to spread content (it takes you less than a minute to share a post on Facebook or tweet a picture in twitter), blogging is effort-consuming and thus a more trustworthy source of information to serious buyers who seek for insights to make online decisions.
3. Build a strong relationship with customers:
Again, blogging is all about building bonding relationships and maintaining trust from your customers to keep them stay loyal to your business. Besides emails, customer services and social media, blogging is another channel to communicate with customers. It reveals a personal side and perspectives of your business that may not be seen through outbound marketing strategies. Blogging is a perfect marketing medium to tell stories, establish the personality of your business, engage and resonate with your customers. By blogging frequently, you can build up an audience which, needless to say, are highly likely to convert into repeat buyers.
04 critical building blocks of a great blog post first for your business:
Needless to say, blogging benefits your business in a long-term process once you stay focused and invest your resources into it. I am going into how to write an engaging blog post later. For this one, let’s emphasize on 4 features that make a blog post worth reading to an online shoppers.
1. Define your reader persona(s)
Understanding your blog readers is the first critical step before starting to tell your stories. Each type of readers have different needs, tastes and habits of reading. Knowing them well helps you decide on writing style, voice, length of post, structure, posting frequency, etc., to name a few.
So before starting, try to answer these questions:
- Who are they?
- What are they interested in?
- What are they looking for when reading your blogs?
- What kind of information will be helpful to them the most?
- …..
Those questions will help you define your reader persona(s) and come up with the most linear blogging plan highly targeted to those readers.
2. Catchy Title & Hooking Introduction
As there are millions blog posts released online everyday, readers only spare a few seconds scanning through each post to decide if they will go on with it or skip to another one. One great way to increase the chance that your posts survive these first seconds is creating a catchy title and a hooking introduction. Let’s look at an example of how a catchy title is like:
Flashback From Amazon Prime Day: Is It A #PrimeDayFail or Is It Not? – I wrote this title instead of making it simple as “What do you think about Amazon Prime Day event?”. Plus, using the popular hashtag #PrimeDayFail secures a perfect keyword for SEO.
3. Focus on delivering quality content for your audience
As you know what information your customers are looking for to make purchase decisions, you know what content you should deliver to them in a regular basis. Focusing on developing resourceful and valuable content is a sure way to educate and entice your customers with benefits from your products.
For example, if you are a cosmetics sellers, invest into blog posts about make-up tips & tutorials, product reviews and recommendations, or make-up trends in the world. Or if you sell workout outfits and equipment, topics about healthy and clean eating, detox tips, workout tutorials or success stories of weight loss or muscle gain will strongly motivate and inspire your customers.
- Make the format clear/ easy to read in both web and mobile browsers
Don’t underestimate readers’ experience while establishing your blog, even if you have a perfect plan for content. Your blog should be as simple, clean and easy for the eyes to read through as possible. Thus, pay attention to every element that contribute to enhancing the reader’s experience such as text font, alignment, line spacing, text and background colors, etc,…You can find lots of tips on how to optimize website UX/UI here.
Furthermore, modern readers now read on the train, on the road, during 5 minutes waiting for friends at the street corner, so make sure your blog is readable on mobile devices. All these seemingly small issues when adding up together can make a big impact on readers’ decisions.
Conclusion
So, start thinking about blogging now to get more money for your business. You will not see the instant results and may feel discouraged at times, but time will tell how worthy it is if you are serious and targeted-driven.
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