Blogging - how to add your personality

Learn More About These Strategies!

Provide helpful articles to get the most from a product or service

What about email newsletters or forums?

Benefits of a blog with an ecommerce site

Feature a class of products each month

Last point - it sure ain’t gonna hurt anything

Here’s the whole “educated customer is the best customer” thing: you can provide insider tips and insights into using and getting the most out of the products you sell. You can’t really put this kind of information any place else that’s appropriate or that makes sense. A blog is the way to go!

Feature a class of products each month

Every month, you could write a few blog posts about a different category of products. This gives you the opportunity to deal with a group of products in a set, which makes for nice mental “chunking” and organizing of information for customers. By exploring a category of products in-depth, you give customers a chance to gain a more holistic, encompassing view of them, their differences, similarities, and nuances. This type of in-depth knowledge makes for a confident purchase decision.

Benefits of a blog with an ecommerce site

1. Each blog post about products with links to those product pages acts as a doorway to those pages, used by visitors and search engine spiders
2. The more content you generate about a product or a topic, the greater chance of increasing your search rankings for related keywords
3. By helping your customers get the most out of products, you are improving your relationship with them and earning more of their trust, which will lead to greater sales
4. You will bring some life and some personality to an otherwise stale, lifeless shopping experience
5. Because bloggers tend to link to other blog posts, you will increase the number of visitors to your product pages as people get to them through the blog posts which have been linked to
6. Having a blog can be an important component of an overall strategy that involves social media, too, such as StumbleUpon and Twitter

What about email newsletters or forums?

I’m not saying don’t have an email newsletter. I’m saying the blog serves a different purpose and allows for more public interactions. After all, when you get an email newsletter, do you reply to it? Have a conversation with someone about it? Not usually! But this is expected on a blog. Your email newsletter does a better job at reaching less tech-savvy customers or people who do not want a high-touch relationship.

Forums have been around longer than blogs and many ecommerce sites have a community forum, a support forum, or both. This means you can drive forum traffic to the blog and vice versa. Forums are for in-depth dialog, blogs are for shorter communiqés and a shorter, looser version of the conversation. Blogs serve a nice middle ground between the deep, involved interaction on forums and… nothing.
One thing to remember - don’t oversell

In all this happytalk about having a blog on your ecommerce site, let’s not forget one very important thing: people hate to be sold, but they love to buy. When you’re featuring products on your blog, you don’t need to tell people to go buy stuff or encourage them. you need to sell without selling on the blog. If you provide the information in a passionate, knowledgeable way, and engage your community of customers, you won’t need to do any crass selling in the blog.

Last point - it sure ain’t gonna hurt anything

I don’t see how adding a blog to an ecommerce site could possibly hurt existing sales, so you have nothing to lose! Go for it!