Benefits of Starting a Blog and 5 Tips to Get You Started

A dozen or so years ago, any mention of the word blog would probably have conjured images of a sappy online journal chronicling a person’s day-to-day life. But the modern blogging world has turned that paradigm on its head.

Blogs have become a critical tool for businesses both large and small. And their function can be summed up in three words: consistent content marketing. 

Simply stated, today's ecommerce blogs serve as the engines that drive traffic to websites and often result in increasing sales.

Ecommerce blogs supply a constant stream of relevant content that appears in the rankings of Google Search results. This allows stores to continuously expand their customer base by reaching larger audiences through their blog posts.

So, now that you understand their function, you might be wondering how you can get started writing ecommerce blog posts for your store.

Read on to learn about blog benefits and the need-to-know of starting and maintaining an ecommerce blog.

Why start an ecommerce blog?

As we've already mentioned, the function of a blog is to provide consistent content marketing on topics relevant to your brand, product, or industry. But what are a blog's benefits?

Quite simply, consistent content boosts your site's Google Search rankings over time, which results in the funneling of more and more traffic to your store.

Static sites, or those without blogs or another platform for a constant content flow, forgo this marketing advantage.

Of course, advertising your products through services like Google Shopping is still essential to the success of your business. But an ecommerce blog is another simple way to expand your brand awareness and capitalize on the benefits of search engine optimization.
 
So now that you know why you should start a blog, here are some best practices for how to do it.

Your ecommerce blog should engage, inform, and (hopefully) entertain your readers.

• Engage - A good blog post engages its readers foremost. The content is relevant, and it's written in a way that your audience wants to read it from start to finish.

• Inform - It should inform your audience about something pertinent to your brand, products, or industry. Avoid fluffy blog posts that don't provide any relevant information. Google Search rankings are impacted as much by the quality of an ecommerce blog's content as they are by optimized keywords, which are also critical to the performance of your posts. Relevant optimized keywords should be repeated at least a dozen times throughout each blog post.

• Entertain - If your blog post can entertain your readers along the way, that's all the better. Zippy, readable language, and maybe even a little bit of humor, will keep your readers hooked.​

​
​5 tips for formatting your blog

The formatting of your blog can make or break its overall impact. Here are five tips to help you get started with formatting your posts.

1. Links - In order to rank on Google, each blog post should have a healthy number of internal and external links. Let's say six or seven, at least.
2. High- quality images - Don’t go more than 300  words without an image break. This will help make your posts easier to read, resulting in more time spent on your webpage — another metric that Google uses to rank sites.
3. Blog length - Optimal blog benefits are seen when posts are roughly 1,200 words or greater in length and typically perform better in Google Search results. Length can be a balancing act. Too short and your blog post won’t have a chance to rank on Google, too long and your run the risk of your reading only reading part way through. 
4. Call to action - It's also important to have a call to action at the end of each post: never miss an opportunity to promote your products or services. After all, that's the whole point of having a blog to begin with.
5. Publish frequently! - In the world of content marketing, quantity is just as important as quality. The more you publish on your site, the higher Google indexes it as an authoritative source.

A good metric for publishing ecommerce blog articles is at least once per week. But if you have the bandwidth to post more, do it!

Ecommerce blog ideas

So you're sold on a blog's benefits and you understand how to format a post. Now, how do you decide on what to blog about?

You can start out by answering some of these questions:

• What are your competitors blogging about? 
• What are topics relevant to your industry that you frequently Google yourself? 
• Is there ample material published on those topics already? 
• Do you see any opportunities to write on a topic that's underrepresented in Google Search results?
• What are Google's "Frequently Asked Questions" suggestions associated with a topic you've recently searched? Maybe one of those is the title for your next post.

Ideas for ecommerce blog posts are everywhere. The key is to remember that your posts need not only be optimized but also relevant to your audience as well.

If your posts check these boxes then they can easily segue into sales conversions for your store.

How to start a WooCommerce blog

This last section is geared toward ecommerce store owners who use the WooCommerce platform. Do you fit that profile? Then you're in luck!

WooCommerce is built in WordPress. So it's a natural blogging platform. 

Starting your first WooCommerce blog is as simple as 1-2-3.

1. On the menu to the left of your WooCommerce home screen, just below "Dashboard," you'll find the "Post" section.
2. Simply click "Add New Post" 
3. Get started writing your title, adding categories and tags, and filling out the body of your blog post.

Soon enough, you'll be well on your way to a functioning WooCommerce blog.

Kliken for your ecommerce store

Content marketing is tough work, but starting an ecommerce blog is a simple step to gaining more traffic on your website.

Beyond blogging, is it your goal to market your products to the right shoppers at the right time?

If so, Kliken can help your ecommerce store take its marketing efforts to new heights.

We make the process of syncing your store with the Google Shopping & Ads platforms seamless. So you can start running Google Ads campaigns almost immediately — we'll deal with the onboarding headaches.

Whether you want to access more high intent shoppers, better engage shoppers who are just browsing, or something else entirely, Google Shopping & Ads powered by Kliken can help you to meet your goals.

As the world’s #1 Shopping and Ads marketing platform, Kliken has helped over 1,000,000 small businesses worldwide grow their sales on Google and get a return of up to 7x their original ad spend. Its proven marketing solutions can help you to unleash the potential of your ecommerce business.

Learn more about how customers use Kliken to grow their businesses online here.

Author: Michael Arnold

Michael is a freelancer from New York City. When he isn’t writing about how Kliken unleashes the marketing, you can find him reading, writing for pleasure, or traveling the globe.