Keeping a Blog on Your eCommerce Site

By Adam  |  25 Jun 2015 08:00:00

If you've got a website, one thing you want to do is keep people coming back to it as often as possible. This can be tricky when you've got an eCommerce website because people mainly only visit websites like that if they're planning on making a purchase (which won't be every day). The reason it's good to get people returning to your site is that that means they won't forget you and also, the more often they visit your website the more likely they are to favour it over a rival business the next time they need something. A good way to keep your customers coming back is to set up a blog, which is a feature you can integrate with Sellr.

Starting and maintaining a blog may seem like a daunting task because it means you're regularly going to have to be writing for it, but don't worry! Keeping a blog can actually be quite simple. The important thing to do, and what many people do not do, is to update your blog regularly. One post a week should be fine. If you update your blog irregularly it's not going to be a reason that people return to your site. Furthermore, if you do not update your blog on a regular basis then it's possible that somebody will come to your website and see that your blog has remained un-updated for months or, in extreme cases, years! This is surprisingly common and it will not give prospects a good impression. If you're an independent business and somebody finds your website without ever having heard of you before, when they see an abandoned blog it could then lead them to believe that the entire website has been abandoned too. There are a sad number of sites out there which have just been abandoned, so you can see how somebody might come to this conclusion. Maintaining a blog means that there'll always be fresh, new content on your site, assuring customers that your website is both up to date and current.

While it may be important to keep a blog which you regularly update, you might doubt that you have the ability to do so, but anybody can keep a blog. Subjects can range from things that have been going on with your business, current affairs in an area related to your business, your reflections on things related to the business and just about anything else which will be relevant to the people coming to your site. One thing that it might be worth doing is setting up a Google Alert. If you sold animal care products, for example, you could then set of a Google Alert for 'Animal Care' which would mean that you'd periodically receive emails from Google giving you a list of all the latest news related to animal care. It's an invaluable resource for bloggers! People like to see the human side of businesses too, so seeing photos of you (and anyone who works with you) doing things to represent the business on your blog will be good. That way they see who they are supporting by using your business.

Blog posts should be between 300 and 1,000 words in length and that's not actually very long at all, once you get into writing something. Of course it's fine to write a blog post that exceeds 1,000 words, but with that you risk somebody seeing it and dismissing it as too long without even reading it. People use the internet to get quick and easy information and a large block of text might be off putting, so make sure the longer ones are a little rarer.

Additionally it's a good idea to keep a blog for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes. Put simply; the more pages there are which are related to your eCommerce website, the more likely people are to find any one of them. If you write a blog post about a big event in the same industry as your business, for example, somebody who was looking for information about that event might then also find your site. You have to think of the kinds of things that people who would buy from you would also be interested in, if you write about those things they’ll find your business through your blog. Generally speaking, the more ‘niche’ a subject is the less likely it is that many people will be reporting on it and the more likely you are to have people find your website.

So what are you waiting for? Why not launch a blog today? There's no time like the present, after all. A blog can be quite an effective marketing tool and hopefully you'll be able to make full use of one.