Why a blog increases your eCommerce sales

So can blogging help you reach your target audience? It can help promote your business, product or service as it works as a method of attracting an audience. Content marketing is just another method of boosting relevant traffic, the fact it’s long lasting and beneficial to your business is what sets it apart from all the other traffic generation strategies.

The rise of the blog

Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Content is king’ before? There’s a good reason for this because nearly 50% of customers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before actually making a purchase.

Why do you need one?

In this day and age, blogs are often neglected and this is because running a blog alongside your business can be time-consuming, but the positives massively outweigh the negatives.

To make a long story short, an active blog will drive sales, attract quality leads and create noise for your business. So what’s stopping you from increasing your organic traffic with a blog on your store?

Quite simply, no you don’t, especially need to be a tech genius to start and maintain a blog, especially if your blog is maintained within a content management systems or CMS for short. If your site isn’t a CMS currently and you’d like to know more about how you can get one set up for your business then get in touch today.

Search engine optimisation

Optimising your blog for key search terms so that you rank high on the search engine results page is by far the number one advantage of starting and maintaining your blog. When you write your blogs, ensure you always have targeted long-tail keywords in mind which you wish to rank for in Google. Organic traffic is the best kind of traffic as it’s completely natural, much higher quality, completely free and it will continue to serve for you whilst you are ranked highly in the search engines results page.

Nurturing client relationships

Consistently providing value to your audience via your blog posts is a great way to develop and maintain personal connections with both potential and existing customers. If a customer feels as though he/she can relate to you or your story they are much more likely to make a purchase and become a brand advocate. In the long term, this will help increase awareness and drive sales.

Become authoritative with your niche

As business owners, we know you possess competitive qualities, which is perfect for blog writing. If you spend quality time researching your competition who are already posting successful blogs but find a way to add more value, you can build a reputation for yourself as an industry leader, which is going to do wonders for your ego but most importantly it will create noise. It can take time to become a well-recognised industry leader on the internet but determination will serve you well.

Build your network

Using internal & outbound links in your blogs is how you can leverage the traffic that your blog is going to attract. Your blog traffic is going to then check out your online presence so you are packing high quality leads into your sales funnel.

A by-product of a well structured and value-packed blog is the commercial opportunities, potential sponsorship requests, product reviews and brand ambassadors/ advocates.

How long can it take to become established?

Instagram and Blogging both take similar amounts of time to become well established, although there is a possibility of going viral from one post. It can take around 3 years to become established on Instagram. Blog sites could become authority sites in 2 years to 4 years but this all depends on the consistency of your posts, value and demand for your information for both Social media and blogging.

How much effort does it take?

Technically speaking, the effort required to upload an Instagram image is next to none, whereas the effort to write a blog is much more.

Which performs better?

The content on Instagram lasts a hell of a lot less time than that of a blog, your blog will continuously reel in traffic as the attention it attracts is longer-term however on Instagram, the attention is lost after the first 24 hours.

Exit plans

Something that’s always good to consider is if you want to sell your business, and you have to sell off your assets, what’s more valuable? Social media pages built up around your brand are essentially worthless to anyone else unless one of your competitors acquires your pages whereas websites that generate healthy profits whether that is from your blog or eCommerce store typically sell for 25-35x your monthly profit. SO the blog is a much more secure investment of time and money!

Verdict?

In terms of longer-term, blogging is by far the better option, it’s not controlled by an algorithm like Instagram is, so naturally, you have much more control and you don’t need to pay to be seen in masses, also the volume of searches compared to the total users on Instagram is completely outweighed. Ideally, a fine balance of both would be perfect but we know it’s not as simple as that.

First ask yourself, what topics and search phrases do I want to rank for? Then you would go and research that topic or search phrase in Google. It’s good to see what you are up against, the search volumes and generally if the content is outdated. You also need to look and see if you can add more value than the competition.

Secondly, research the competition. Are the competition a similar business to yours, are they large or medium enterprises and is there any chance that you can compete with them?

In terms of SEO, the structure of your blog is the next consideration. What points do you want to get across and how are you going to divide it so it's a fluent read from a users perspective?

Finally, write it and count how many words it contains, word count is really important when it comes to ranking in the results pages.The best way to determine your word count is to analyse the top 10 results, average out the word count of the posts and add 10%. Note that this is merely a target and you shouldn’t add words that are irrelevant just to achieve a target word count. You want to write for the user not search engines.

1. Seasonal blogs

Jump on the bandwagon at Christmas, Halloween and New Year, when the long-tail keywords will have an increased search volume and you can capitalise your percentage of the traffic.

2. Demonstrate your product in us

If you sell kitchen appliances, a good idea would be to write recipes that would involve your appliance or if you run a clothing line you could showcase the best outfits for summer 2020. Comparison posts often perform very well on the internet, consider comparing your product to competitors to really demonstrate how yours is better.

3. Informative blogs

Provide valuable information that your audience can’t stop reading, This could be anything from stats, faqs or anything else useful. Roundup information posts perform well, they are where you would collate all the industry leader’s knowledge in one place and present it to your audience.

4. Tutorials

Show how to navigate your product efficiently or how to get the most out of your service!

5. Discounted offers

Everyone loves freebies, so you can’t go wrong with this!