The Importance of a Blog and How to Start One for Your Store

Like it or not, blogging has become an essential part of doing business. When you have an online store, it’s the most cost-effective (read: free) way to attract customers who are searching online for exactly the products or services you provide.

Your blog not only helps to increase your store’s online visibility, but it’s the perfect outlet for you to share stories, connect with your customers, and establish trust and loyalty. Learn more about the benefits of blogging and how to start a blog quickly.

Also read: “Buy Now” Button: A Simple Way to Monetize Your Blog

How will Blogging Help My Business?

Blogging not only helps your store become a more credible resource, but it helps increase your visibility online by optimizing your website for search engines. This is an essential component to achieving a high search engine ranking because it provides search engines with more pages to crawl and index. The higher your blog posts are ranked, the more traffic and sales you’ll gain.

A blog is an effective marketing strategy that can drive nearly 6 times higher conversions rates and return visitors can increase by 133 percent!

Blogs help you rank in search engines

As beneficial as it is, many avoid blogging because they feel they can’t write, but this doesn’t have to hold you back. If you’re still uncertain about where to begin, consider inviting guests to write blogs for you or hiring a professional. Ultimately, blogging doesn’t have to be overly complicated.

Take Simon Carter’s blog as an example — it offers unique content to help optimize the website while sharing valuable and compelling information to connect with their customers.

So if you have a little time to write a blog post once a week, here is a few tips to keep in mind in order to increase your rank in search engines:

• The linking game. Using links in your blog is important (especially links to your product pages), but more importantly, you need to get other sources linking to your blog. Why? This is what helps get your site ranking higher in search engines.
• Key phrases. Articles in your blog are the perfect place for you to naturally use key phrases that people search for. For anyone looking for “the perfect pair of vintage 1970s ear muffs” that happens to be what you sell, telling the story around that product is not only interesting but more likely to get ranked based on your blog post.
• Use images. Images are a great way to give your blog posts visual appeal, but make sure to name the files in a way that also describes the product or a key phrase. This is also a good way to optimize the article for search engines.

Blogs will help you tell stories

Blogs offer the perfect opportunity to share personal stories about your business, such as what inspired you to open your store, events you’ve attended, and personal stories featuring your products. It acts as a one-on-one connection with your customers to encourage trust for customer loyalty. It’s the personal touch your business needs to earn credibility in the customers’ eyes to keep them coming back time and time again for repeat purchases.

By sharing stories, you offer your customers more value, such as Karakoram’s blog where they share numerous stories related to their store and products.

Blogs can connect you with traditional media

Your blog will open many new doors to exciting opportunities. A well-written blog post has the potential to go viral. Not to mention, it can attract the attention of industry influencers and traditional media outlets for a massive exposure potential. A great post can land your business featured by high profile bloggers, reporters, media outlets, and much more.

Marc Chernoff created the post “30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself,” which ended up receiving over half a million likes, 20,000 tweets, and uncountable shares on social media outlets. If one blog post can offer even half of the success as his post, think of the benefits your business will gain.

How to Start a Blog for Business

First, you’ll need to decide how to create your blog.

Choosing the right platform

Blogger and WordPress are two of the most popular CMS for starting a blog, and here’s a closer look at the benefits of each system:

Blogger

• Offers a variety of blog templates that you can use to set up a blog quickly and easily.
• Provides a free blogspot.com domain, ensuring you can give your blog a home that is easy to find.
• Boasts Google AdSense capabilities that allow you to display targeted, relevant ads to earn extra income from your blog.
• Delivers built-in analytics so you can find out who is visiting your blog, what your target audience is interested in and more.
• Ensures you can store thousands of blog posts, photos and other media with Google for free.

WordPress

• Offers custom, commercial and free themes, along with the ability to create your own theme.
• Enables you to upload custom, paid and free plug-ins to help you optimize your blog‘s performance and extend its functionality.
• Features comprehensive documentation and a community forum, ensuring you can get immediate support from WordPress experts.
• Provides you with the ability to set up sign-up forms that allow readers to subscribe to your blog posts, account creation capabilities that ensure visitors can purchase products directly from your blog and marketing capabilities to help you promote your blog.
• Gives you the flexibility to choose your blog’s storage, security, server speed and more.

If you’re starting a blog, which option is better: Blogger or WordPress? Both CMS empower you to establish a high-quality blog without delay. However, for those who want a custom blogging solution that has been shown to deliver long-lasting value, WordPress may prove to be the superior choice.

Large organizations like CNN, Time and others trust WordPress for their blogs. Also, WordPress has grown significantly over the years and boasts millions of users around the globe. It even welcomes 50,000 new users daily — a clear indication that WordPress is dedicating substantial time and resources to provide users with a top-of-the-line blogging solution.

Choosing the right strategy

Now that you know about the benefits of blogging and some of the leading CMS, let’s take a closer look at what it takes to build a successful blog.

To create a blog, you’ll want to consider the following strategies:

1. Define your target audience. Who is the target audience for your blog? If you define your target audience before you set up a blog, you’ll be better equipped to produce meaningful, engaging blog posts that will garner attention from the right people consistently.
2. Be unique. Use your blog to show your industry expertise — you’ll be glad you did! By doing so, you can provide your readers with timely, relevant blog posts that they will enjoy. Perhaps just as important, unique blog posts will help your blog stand out from others in your industry and boost your chances of ensuring readers return to your blog time and time again.
3. Be consistent. Add new content to your blog regularly. Establishing a blog calendar may help you stay on track with blog posts. Or, you may want to set aside time every day or a few times a week to  prepare blog posts.
4. Interact with your readers. Respond to blog readers’ comments, questions and concerns. This will enhance the quality of your content and drive engagement. Don’t forget to add a “Share” button to  your blog that enables readers to share your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as well.
5. Maintain a professional approach. Ideally, you’ll want your blog to highlight your business’ commitment to being an industry leader and maintain a professional-looking blog. Plus, you’ll want to create blog posts that are error-free and easy to understand.

Generating compelling blog ideas

The secret to successful blogging is to create posts that are unique and valuable to the reader. You don’t necessarily have to be a great writer, but instead, hold that mystery ingredient other blogs in your industry lack. Even one blog post a week with a unique approach that’s delivered to add value and information to your readers will produce benefits.

If you’re not sure what to blog about, create product tutorials to show your products in action. If you can, include real life videos of customers using your products and feature reviews.

Offer advice regarding your products to promote the customer experience. Insider tips and information are excellent to delivering a compelling and informative blog.

In addition to sharing your story, feature announcements about your business, such as the release of new products, events you’re attending, awards, milestones, and any other piece of exciting information. This will help build your credibility and promote a positive reputation.

Take a look at the Cooking with Tenina Blog to get the idea of possible content types you can consider for your blog.

How to Add E-commerce to Your Blog

With a successful blog in place, your business will be able to garner attention from consumers and prospects globally. And with Ecwid, your business can add an online store to your blog with ease.

Add Ecwid e-commerce plugin to your blog

Selling online with Ecwid is convenient for different purposes: you can add a full-featured e-commerce store on your blog, website, open a Facebook store, add a storefront on popular marketplaces, sell on-the-go with mobile control panel or even get your own mobile app to put your storefront in customers’ pockets, and manage it all from one place.

And growing your business with Ecwid’s shop doesn’t require you to be a code wizard or e-commerce guru. Once you signed up for an account and set up your products and checkout pages, it will automatically embed into your WordPress or Blogger platform and adjust itself to the page layout. All of this is free but there are more premium options.

Add “Buy Now” button

Another cool way to start making money with your blog is to add Ecwid’s “Buy Now” button.

Essentially, it’s a piece of code that you can directly add to any post and that allows your customers to purchase your products in just one click — they don’t even have to leave the page and they won’t be directed elsewhere to complete their checkout.

The widget automatically adapts to your blog’s colors and looks authentic, as if it was always part of your website. The most exciting — you can get started for free, without transactions fees!

“Buy Now” Button

Read more about how to start selling from your blog in three quick steps.

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Having a company blog is only the first step to getting the most out of content marketing. To truly reap the rewards of an engaged audience, you need to create valuable content, publish it consistently and look awesome doing it.

The combination of blog and Ecwid e-commerce can deliver many benefits — adding a plugin is easy and you can start making money same day.

Let your brand’s personality shine, and let your team give you input. Once you’ve got an audience waiting for your posts, you’ll get a boost in sales in no time.