Why do you need a blog on your online store?

If you are an online store owner that ever went seeking advice on promoting your website and gaining more targeted visitors, you’ve probably heard you need a blog. You might wonder how does blog actually help you in gaining more visitors and ultimately earn more money with your online store.

Having a blog by default will not help you at all. It’s what you do with your blog that’s going to effect both your SEO and other aspects of inbound marketing. It’s a long process but once you start experiencing the benefits of your work you will see it was the right thing to do.

To understand how blog will help you, you must first understand what’s your online store missing:

• Online store is missing content – Most online stores have really low amount of actual content for search engine spiders to index. There are usually just a few lines of text that represent your product’s description and an image or few images at it’s best. Some stores go one step further and allow their visitors to post ratings and reviews of their products. This might generate useful content, but in order to have any reviews (and if you’re in this business, you know it’s not that easy to motivate visitors to write them), you first need to get a significant amount of traffic and customers. If you’re starting a new online store, don’t expect to have lots of reviews any time soon. This brings us to conclusion that when we’re dealing with online stores, we can’t really rely on user generated content to satisfy all of our content marketing needs.

• Online store is missing viral potential – Sure, you could have some crazy products that might go viral and links to them could be spread all over the internet, but in most cases, you’re an serious business that doesn’t really sell crazy and funny products. You need some useful quality content that will attract backlinks and will make people spread it via social networks.

• Online store is missing non commercial content – People really don’t like to be sold to. Sure, some of your visitors will be interested in buying your products and that’s exactly why they came. The problem is, most of your online store’s visitors will be people who are casually surfing or just exploring options, exploring prices and so on. If you have nothing to offer to them except your product’s image and description they will most likely just bounce of your store. But, imagine you had some interesting articles useful to such visitors. They might read it and decide to subscribe to your newsletter or follow you on social networks such as twitter or facebook. One day these visitors might be in need of your products and you already have a way to attract them back to your store.

So this is where your blog kicks in. It’s a tool that will enable you to create all of the things your store is actually missing. It’s a perfect tool for all of your inbound marketing needs. A place where you can write about your products or your niche. A place that will attract search engine traffic from much broader targeted audience that one day might be interested in buying your products. A place that will get you more backlinks and more social media exposure. A place where your visitors can interact and connect with you.

This is why marketers and SEOs usually advise you to start a blog. It’s the useful content you create with your blog that’s going to help you, not the fact that you have a blog. Having a blog and not writing often or not writing interesting and useful post is the same as not having a blog at all.

In case you’re interested to learn more about e-commerce content marketing, read this!

Adding additional information to support the argument: HubSpot’s Study shows that small businesses that blog gain 55% more website visitors, 97% more backlinks (inbound links – links from other websites to your website) and have 434% more indexed pages on average compared to those that do not blog.