Blogging is a powerful tool to take your e-commerce business from an average to a sustainable venture. When you effectively embrace blogging, you’ll not only attract visitors to your website but you will consistently acquire new customers as well.

Blogging is great for you E-commerce SEO and is also good for other content distribution channels such as social media, display advertising, among many others, are quite expensive. They both take time and money.

However, blogging is one of the inexpensive marketing strategies that can help you acquire and connect with your customers, and help you to generate brand ambassadors.

But don’t take my words for it. A recent study by Hubspot shows that 82% of marketers who blog daily have acquired customers from their blogs.

If you’re yet to add a blog to your e-commerce website or you’ve not been serious about blogging, it’s time to wake up and take an action. Aside from the traffic and leads, a successful blogging strategy can help you convert leads to customers, establish authority, and drive long-term results.

In the rest of this article, we are going to analyse 7 ways on how you can use blogging to achieve significant results in your e-commerce venture:

Boost your e-commerce store visibility in search engines and increase traffic through guest blogging

Macy’s, Amazon, Zappos, and other e-commerce brands generate lots of sales from search users. These are people directly searching for a particular product to buy.

For example, if you search for “Nike walking shoe,” a keyword that gets thousands of monthly searches, Macy’s’ store ranks at #2. Trust me, that’s a lot of sales.

To a large extent, the success of every online business depends on targeted traffic and customers it generates on a consistent basis. An e-commerce business is not an exception. Truth be told, your website will get lost in the wild if you’re not generating steady traffic.

Guest blogging is “actually” blogging — but in this case, you are a guest on someone else’s blog. In other words, instead of publishing that awesome post on your blog, you simply find a trusted and relevant blog and send it to them. It’s as simple as that.

Guest blogging can be a great way to increase traffic to your website, increase your website visibility, and generate more revenue. GrooveHQ went from 0-$100,000 in monthly revenue by simply publishing high-quality guest posts on 26 industry blogs.

Every e-commerce business is expected to build its brand. For this reason, guest blogging can help you establish authority, earn trusted links, and create more brand awareness.

And you must be consistent at blogging. It’s predicted that companies that prioritise blogging would record a positive ROI.

Several Marketers named guest blogging as the best inbound marketing strategy.

Some of the key benefits of guest blogging include:

i). It can help you expose your e-commerce business to your target audience: While your business is still growing in exposure, you can help it grow faster by contributing helpful articles on relevant blogs that already have the audience that is interested in your products.

For example, if you sell sporty Adidas sneakers in your e-commerce shop in the USA, submitting a guest post on FoxSports can expose your business to a large audience you wouldn’t have been able to reach so easily and quickly.

Besides, if you have content that is valuable to their audience, it’s easy to get approval on any authority blog and become a contributing author. After all, “62.96% of people perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible.”

So, practically, guest blogging allows you deliberately increase your brand’s visibility on social media, search engines, and other online communities.

ii). It can help you build high-quality links that will boost your rankings: Link building is an integral aspect of your SEO strategy. Most SEO expert leverage guest blogging for solely this purpose.

It’s also important to note that all links are not the same. Links from Entrepreneur.com and a link from a new website aren’t equal. And when it’s a contextual link that appears within the post, then the SEO value will be higher.

So, do your best to publish your articles on blogs with high domain and page authorities — this would result in a push in your organic search rankings, and of course, this would also drive more search users to your e-commerce website.

I know several companies that started from scratch and grew their revenue as a result of blogging + guest blogging. For example, with just a single guest post at Okdork, Bryan Harris built a full-time business generating over $15,000 a month — His business has since grown to well over $100,000 in MRR.

Having seen these benefits and verifiable results, are you going to use blogging (in-house) and guest blogging (contributing articles to industry blogs) to help you grow your ecommerce business? The choice is yours.

Become a storyteller: Blogging helps you tell your brand story

Another cool benefit you can get from blogging is that it allows you to tell your brand story in a way that resonates with your audience.

Truly, it does. It helped Marcus Sheridan to embrace storytelling — a blogging tactic that helped him generate $2 million in sales for his River Pools and Spas company.

Here’s a fact: Human-to-Human (H2H) connections are the heart and soul of any business, no matter the model. Your blog brings that personal human touch to your e-commerce website as it allows you to connect with your audience.

I know you’re sick and tired of internet ads everywhere.

That’s not what customers want. In reality, customers want you to talk to them, tell them stories. Your blog allows you to tell those stories and inspire prospects to become loyal customers.

But what stories are you going to be telling?

“Once upon a time, the coning Tortoise became a king in the animal kingdom…” No. that’s far from what brand storytelling is.

Brand storytelling is about:

The reason why your company exists.
What motivates your team to wake up and do the work every day.
How your product can address people’s pain points.
What types of customers find value in working with your brand and why.
A transparent view on the people behind your company
Relationship marketing.
A concept that underscores your entire web presence
Something that your entire team, at organisational levels, embraces.
A look into who you are as a company

And most importantly, it’s about your customers and the value they get after buying your product. You also want to share case studies about your happy customers — these are all essential in your brand storytelling.

You create blog posts that address your prospect’s questions and also engage with customers via the comment section.

Share positive customer’s reviews and testimonials

Another strategy to boost your e-commerce business through blogging is to share your customer’s testimonials on your post.

You can interview your best customers and email subscribers and allow them to share their experience with your brand and your products. If these testimonials are from influencers, that’s a powerful social proof.

Here’s an example from Backlinko; Brian Dean shares the testimonials from Neil Patel and John Jantsch.

This type of content will overtime perform well on social media and organic search because people want to communicate with other customers. They feel more comfortable and they trust what other people say.

Help your users choose the product that’s right for them

An educated customer usually turn out to be the best customer.

Customers are usually excited when you help them choose the product that’s right for them. That doesn’t mean you will tell them the product they should buy. It simply means that you can create blog posts that cover in-depth products that have helped you — It could even be tricks, hacks, and new ways to use a known product.

You could create content on topics that people in your niche care about. If you make it a “how to” article, that would be appreciated. For example:

How to choose the right Wi-Fi
How to Find the Best Wireless Speaker
How to choose the perfect engagement ring

This type of content will attract people who want to buy such products.

Similarly, it’s important that you create a lot of content. Generate lots of content ideas for your products targeting an ideal customer — you’ll likely never run out of content ideas as you discuss different products in your online store.

Additionally, you could create product demo and host them on YouTube, then embed the video on your blog as well — and start educating your customers on the best ways to use the product.

Coupled with your link building strategy, if you get things right, you will attract new customers to your ecommerce store.

Most e-commerce product pages don’t usually contain enough content. So, take advantage of this opportunity to add useful content to your product pages — this would lead to a lot of indexed pages and increased organic traffic.

The graph below shows that leads jump significantly once a website achieves 300+ indexed pages.

In another study Anna Hoffman, founder of Traffic Generation Cafe found that once you write 21-54 blog posts, your blog traffic increases by up to 30%.

A blog creates a personality behind your ecommerce store

Blogs are not some boring newspaper or corporate business brochure content. Blogs are conversational. Blog posts are mostly written in a personal tone.

Blogs add the human touch to your business. Microsoft discovered this earlier when Robert Scoble was their Technology Evangelist. Microsoft achieved significant results, and eventually, the company embraced blogging and made it their core brand strategy. I’m sure you will agree with me that it’s paid off.

You can experience similar or even better results with your e-commerce website/blog. Your blog gives customers the feeling that someone is behind the store, someone they can connect with and ask questions.

So it becomes interesting when they comment on your blog and you reply as quickly as possible.

The bitter truth is that if you stick to creating engaging content consistently, your customers will love your brand a lot. As statistics show that blogging frequently impacts customer acquisition.

Blog posts can help you go viral

In this age of social media, it’s no longer an uphill task to go viral when you create amazing content. Come to think of it, who will share your product pages? Hardly will customers share your product pages.

On the flip side, if you create amazing content, your audience will naturally share it with their networks, and if more people love the content, bingo, it goes viral.

That’s your e-commerce brand gaining lots of traction.

This explains why 60% of marketers believe that blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Essentially, you also need to amplify your content reach through social media. And of course, you need to have a strong social media presence to be able to engage with your customers on social media and to encourage them to engage with your content.

Truth be told, social media has become an invaluable tool for digital marketing, you should have a social media strategy that helps you stay organised on social media so that you can achieve optimal results.

Make no mistakes about it. You can’t successfully implement any of these strategies without knowing your customers well enough.

You should take a deep dive into your customer persona, find out what they truly care about and create a viral-friendly content based on what is defined in the persona.

Remember the Real Beauty campaign by Dove — a powerful campaign to redefine natural beauty.

According to Entrepreneur:

“Dove’s “campaign for real beauty” goes beyond product promotion. A YouTube video depicting an ordinary girl being transformed into a billboard model with some hair, makeup, and Photoshop tweaking, is a persuasive message about the modern beauty industry. It’s something anyone can get behind even if they don’t buy Dove products. Having been watched by more than 18 million people, the video has built brand advocacy for Dove as a different way of thinking about beauty.”

Your content should be natural and highly valuable to your target audience. There’s no other way to make an impact and ensure that your audience sticks to your brand — and refers others your way.

Lifestyle content that hooks readers

You should blog about lifestyle that relate to your products. For example, if you sell Campfire kits you could blog about how to stay safe in the camp, and share tools that are required to have an exciting campfire experience.

This type of content will hook your readers. They’ll be asking for more!

This will not only generate traffic, but it’ll also generate sales as your product gets featured on the blog as well. A lot of affiliate marketers do this and include affiliate links. You can as well.

Make your e-commerce website pop with your lifestyle blogging approach.

This strategy is affordable. It can get you long-term brand engagement and sales. Why? Because the average company that blogs generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.

That’s a huge win. If you implement this strategy you will likely record a similar success. It’s not surprising that over 51% of marketers are even planning to increase spending on content over the next year.

The beauty of sharing personalized content that helps your customers solve certain problems and also featuring your products as some of the solutions is that the content will not sound promotional.

Remember this: People hate to be sold to.

But as the content connects with them, they get hooked. Next, they begin to see you as a trustworthy brand and an expert. They will likely want to buy from your ecommerce store.

Conclusion

The importance of blogging for ecommerce businesses can’t be overemphasized. You have seen numerous benefits. But it’s not an easy job. It’s hard work.

Creating a single blog post isn’t the challenge but being consistent is where the work is. Make up your mind to be consistent because that’s when the results will become obvious for all to see.

And your ecommerce business will experience tremendous growth regardless of the competition.