Many e-commerce stores have woken up to the potential that a blog provides them with. When a blog is utilized in the right way, it can provide a boost for the store it is attached to, while also establishing an identity in its own right. Once your blog has an established audience and a consistent upload schedule to follow, you can begin finding ways to convert those readers into paying customers. But before you can do that, you need to build up a readership, and that requires some solid blog posts. Here’s what you need to know to write effective blog posts for your store.
Maintain Consistency
Establishing a consistent tone for your blog is an important part of establishing a long-term readership. When your blog is attached to an e-commerce store, there is enormous potential for you to profit if you are able to reliably convert readers into customers. Your loyal customers will keep coming back to your e-commerce store irrespective of your blog, so you should be using your blog primarily for lead generation. Establishing an identity for your blog that is separate from the store itself and then focusing on converting readers into paying customers is the most effective way of using your blog.
Every blog post that you add should adhere to the style and consistency that you establish from the outset. If the tone or nature of your blog posts is regularly changing then it is going to be jarring for a reader and make it much more difficult to maintain a long-term audience, let alone find opportunities to convert them. There is nothing wrong with refining your approach in response to feedback and you will inevitably get better at blogging after gaining some first-hand experience. However long it takes you, once you have found your groove, do everything that you can to stay in it.
Have Clear Guidelines For Writers To Follow
Whether you use in-house writers or hire freelancers, you need to have clear and concise guidelines for them to follow. If you leave any ambiguity in the instructions, then you can be sure that people will end up producing ambiguous results. Where you want specific things done or a specific style or tone used, make writers aware of it. If they need to make their writing blend in with everything else on your blog, then let them know so they can look at it ahead of time.
However, while it is important that you give clear instructions, you also want to avoid going overboard. If you don’t leave writers any room for their own creativity then they are going to struggle to produce their best work for you. People expect blogs to have multiple writers and they, therefore, expect to read different voices. Don’t be afraid to allow writers to add their own personality to the blog posts that they write for you.
Update Regularly
One of the most important blog writing tips for establishing a long-term audience as quickly as possible is to add new posts to your blog on a consistent schedule. Maintaining a consistent schedule means that your audience will know exactly where to go and when to find the latest articles and other news from your business. Remember, every time someone visits your store’s blog, you have the opportunity to convert them into regular customers.
You don’t have to restrict yourself to uploading once a week, nor do you have to only upload content on your scheduled day. However, if you are going to constantly publish content instead of using a schedule then make sure that you are able to keep this up; it can be a difficult undertaking if you are doing all the writing yourself. Your audience may well even appreciate some additional content outside of your usual publishing schedule. However, even then you should still have content to publish on your regular publishing day as well.
Always Maximize Value
Every post that you add to your blog should be providing additional value to your users. Before you start writing anything, ask yourself why your audience would want to read it and what they will get out of it if they do. By always focusing on how to maximize the value of the content that you upload, you should have no trouble in building and maintaining an audience throughout the lifespan of your blog.
It is up to you to work out what your audience wants and how you can best provide it for them. When you are just starting out and you haven’t established your audience or really found your voice yet, you need to be attentive to the feedback that you are receiving and the metrics that indicate to you how your audience is reacting to different content.
Hit Your SEO As Organically As Possible
One of the most important functions of a blog for any e-commerce store is as an SEO booster. Your blog gives you a golden opportunity to improve your SEO for your most important keywords and phrases. However, you need to avoid keyword stuffing or other techniques that are highly artificial and will make your blog less readable for your human audience.
Google’s SEO algorithm updates have been trending away from promoting content that is clearly written for its benefit, rather than for a real audience. In other words, content needs to be organic or you might find that Google is ignoring it within a year or two.
If you use a blog the right way, it can be a very powerful tool for boosting traffic to your e-commerce store and turbocharging your conversion rate. Of course, using a blog this way is easier said than done. If you don’t have any prior experience in writing blog posts then don’t be afraid to hire some outside help. Whether you are writing the posts yourself or not, you need to be attentive as to what is working and what isn’t. You can use this data to refine your briefings and sharpen your content.