Everyone Is Blogging, Why Not You?

With my last 7 figure ecommerce business, I was really lazy about blogging. I started the blog early on using the free Blogger platform. Big mistake.

It was a while before I realised that attracting visitors to a separate platform did absolutely nothing for my business website. The blog traffic was going to Blogger.com and all the links in the World weren’t the same as hosting the blog on my own site.

With a bit of technical help, I added a blog to my own website. (It’s much easier today using WordPress). Even with my laidback approach to writing, organic traffic to the blog section grew from Day 1.

It was ten years ago when I started the blog for my last business. That ecommerce site always generated huge amounts of organic traffic. Today generating traffic to your business website is much harder. BUT a blog really helps. It can help you stand out from your competitors and it can help you engage with your customers.

You just need to go about it the right way.

Blogging Attracts Lots of Lovely Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is free traffic. Lovely free traffic generated by ranking well on search engines such as Google. (Mainly Google really, Google accounts for over 85% of all searches). To take advantage of organic traffic you need good SEO, Search Engine Optimisation.

This is where blogging helps.

SEO is a bit of a Black Art. Getting to grips with the basics is easy enough, but it only works well if you have pages on your website with lots of text to optimise.

Product pages with detailed descriptions are fine and dandy but it’s hard to rank a product page for anything other than that specific product. My ecommerce business sold outdoor clothing for women. I could rank easily enough in search engines for “The North Face latest model (name of trousers)” by writing unique product descriptions, but a general term, such as walking clothing, was a lot harder.

This is where your blog helps. There are endless possibilities for posts about walking clothing. Off the top of my head:

• 10 Tips for walking clothing to wear on a hot day.
• How to choose your walking clothing now the weather’s getting colder.
• Don’t fall for these mistakes when you choose your walking clothing.

By making the posts informative and entertaining to read, (so your reader doesn’t quickly get bored and click away), you can end up with keyword rich text that search engines love. Even better, well-written posts engage your readers and will be shared on social media. The result? Yet more traffic to your website. Kerching.

Use Blogging To Engage With Your Customers

Successful small businesses really engage with their customers. As a small business, you won’t have the benefits of market dominance. Instead, you have to work with what you’ve got. The chance to turn your customers into raving fans.

Customers can be awesome. (I’m borrowing an American term here because it really fits). Convince them that you’re the best producer of purple widgets ever and they will buy every single purple widget you ever make. If all your customers buy everything single thing you ever make or sell, you don’t need many customers.

Your blog is your way into their hearts and minds. That may sound a bit cheesy but it’s true. Post regularly and you have the chance to build a good rapport with your customers. A chance to understand what they want and how to sell to them.

If you’re enjoying this post, please share it on social media. My post may help someone else.

Blogging Will Increase Your Sales

Attracting traffic by blogging doesn’t automatically increase your sales. You need to make sure it’s the right traffic by posting about subjects relevant to your business offer. It’s no good discussing what to wear on a beach holiday if you don’t sell swimwear.

You need to pick your post topics carefully.

With my walking clothing example, a blog post about “How to choose your walking clothing now the weather’s getting colder” can easily be linked to the products you’re selling. Provide an example of a warm base layer that you just happen to sell in your store. Or some great mitts for keeping your fingers warm when it’s freezing outside.

It’s important to take the softly, softly approach to selling on your blog. Focus on providing information. Try and put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what they want to know. If your blog provides solutions it will be far easy to entice your customers to buy your products (or services).

Get it right and your blog can be your holy grail driving tremendous amounts of traffic to your business. Engaged, loyal customers…

Originally published at simplyhatch.com on November 14, 2018.