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Why Blogging Is So Important For New Ecommerce Stores

Image credit: Pxfuel

 

Throughout the world, there’s no shortage of people interested in the ecommerce industry, and it’s easy to understand why. In the challenging circumstances of 2020 (which have caused so many businesses and entire industries to struggle), online retail has excelled. It’s actually become significantly more important with brick-and-mortar stores closed.

That means there’s a lot of money to be made through selling online. And while that isn’t enough by itself to draw most people in, we need to factor in the accessibility of running an online store. You can get an operation up and running from your kitchen table. This makes ecommerce a hyper-convenient option for the remote-working age.

Of course, that convenience is for everyone, which means the level of competition is fierce. If you want to get a new ecommerce store into a position of success, you need to commit to various things — and running a solid blog is one of them. Here’s why blogging is such a key aspect of become an ecommerce hit:

 

Plenty of sellers are unable or unwilling to run blogs

Every website needs a software foundation, and an ecommerce store is no exception. It needs a CMS — or content management system — that can handle all the tasks that go into listing products and fulfilling orders. Notably, though, every ecommerce CMS has different features, and many platforms don’t provide much support for blogging.

WordPress (being a blogging platform from the outset) is a solid option if extended through WooCommerce, and any decent Squarespace review will point out its reasonable blogging capabilities (see here). Beyond that, though, the pickings are slim. Most platforms don’t offer native blogs — and some don’t even allow it through extensions.

Provided you’re using something like WordPress for your store, this gives you a notable edge over the competition. And then there are those merchants who could have blogs but have no writing skill or ideas. The pool of great ecommerce blogs is much shallower than you might think, granting you an excellent opportunity to stand out from the pack.

 

Writing posts allows you to show brand personality

Personality isn’t just something that can help you make friends. It’s also a vital consideration in modern business. Many people these days don’t just want to buy from the cheapest retailers: they want to buy from companies they actually want to support, and that requires them to be likeable and laudable to decent extents.

How are you supposed to show that your business is worth supporting? By blogging, of course. With each blog post you write, you have the chance to showcase your brand personality: you can joke, bring up issues that are important to you, discuss interesting topics… Everything you do that goes beyond bland corporate talk will help you get ahead.

 

Targeting actionable keywords will help you rank

One of the core reasons for blogging is to help your website rank for actionable ecommerce terms. If you’re trying to sell shoes, then appearing in the search results for shoe-related terms will obviously be a big deal — and one of the central ways in which Google sorts its search results is by looking closely at on-page content.

A blog post that goes into great detail about how to choose a pair of shoes will make sense as a result when someone searches for “how to choose shoes to buy” — and anyone who places a search like that is clearly interested in placing an order. If you can write a post like that and earn a prominent place in the SERPs, you can get their interest and earn chances to sell to them.

 

It provides material for social media and PR outreach

Lastly, the more blog posts you create, the more material you’ll have for other aspects of ecommerce marketing. Social media is a core concern, of course, and you need more than just occasional ads or retweets: writing long-form blog posts will give you detailed assets you can market through social media, setting them out as tempting lures.

There’s also the matter of PR outreach to be considered. Getting other companies to talk about your brand is a great way to earn attention, but what’s in it for them? You can pay them, certainly, but you shouldn’t need to. Having content that their customers will want to read gives you an advantage. You can give them new pieces to share in return for some promotion.