There’s no denying that blog content is king, no matter what industry you’re in and what goals you, your business, or your cause have. Blogs, articles, and any kind of written online content are ideal for drawing in potential customers, educating people on what you have to offer, and just getting some hype going about what you’re all about.
When it comes to promoting your eCommerce store, blog content works just as well, especially when it comes to boosting your overall sales total, but this is where you need to focus. Blog content is only going to work if you do it properly. Nobody is going to feel inspired to buy from you if your blogs are tedious and don’t engage the people who read them.
In many cases, your blog content may not be performing because people aren’t clicking on them in the first place.
This guide is all about breaking down the process of writing blog posts for your eCommerce business to boost your sales and help your business become more profitable. Let’s get straight into it.
Start with Your Foundations
Before jumping into the content writing aspect of things, you first want to start by asking yourself a few questions so you can define your purpose and what you’re aiming for in terms of your content strategy. For example, what is the aim of your content strategy?
Sure, you know you have goals, but what about your sub-goals? Are you looking to increase sales within your existing customer base, or are you looking to increase your reach and grow your customer base? Are you promoting an upcoming product or one that’s already available? Are you promoting a special event you’re running?
Secondly, you want to ask who your buyers are. What age, gender, and geographical location are they? What kind of income can they spend, and what kind of lifestyle do they lead? These demographics will determine how you word and style your content, as well as stating what kind of imagery you’re using, and even things like sentence structure and whether or not you’re using slang.
The final question to ask is to see what kind of content your competition is producing and what angle they are approaching the industry. This is important because you want to see what they’re doing that’s successful and determine why it’s successful, and you always want to make sure you’re tapping into the angles that nobody else is.
This approach will help you succeed with tried and tested content while allowing you to stand out and be unique in an industry where attention to your brand is the most important thing you can have.
Answering these questions will help you to define what kind of content you’re creating and what the goal of each blog post is. It’s this sense of purpose that will help you create purposeful and meaningful content, rather than taking a stab in the dark with the topics you’re writing and simply hoping for the best.
The Basics of Blog Writing
Before we get into the nitty-gritty tips of writing a blog post, it’s important we first cover the basics. These are the bog-standard points you should be integrating into and thinking about every time you sit down to write a blog post. These are also the tried and tested elements of a blog post that will contribute to making them successful.
For example, you only want to be writing about topics that are connected with your business and your customers are going to be interested in. It can be so incredibly tempting to try and spread yourself and your content over as many different topics as possible while trying to draw the most number of eyes, but the past shows that most succeed more often when they knuckle down and focus on being the top of their niche.
Then, once you’ve established yourself in a certain niche, you can branch out and expand into other areas. This is far more beneficial than spreading yourself too thin and not getting the results you’re after.
Next up, you’re going to need to make sure you’re choosing the tone of voice and style that best suits your business and your industry. Again, it’s easy to fall into the trap of coming across as commercial and almost too-business-like. People don’t want to connect with faceless businesses but instead, want to personally connect with a person or people.
In terms of blog content, you need to be yourself and be a person. This is why it can be such a good idea for the same person to write your blog content, and that person to be someone with a personality that they can inject into the content, effectively making content that people will be captivated by. Long story short, be original and personable, rather than generic and commercial.
You also want to make sure you’re providing value with words. This means not bragging about your products and not forcing them down your customer’s throats.
We’re going to talk about this a little more later on, but for now, understand that you’re aiming to give people an experience or fulfill a purpose with what you’re writing, not saying, ‘This is my product, and it’s amazing, and you should buy it.’ That approach just doesn’t work.
This goes hand in hand with the point about not being too commercial. Finally, just as a general rule of thumb, you should aim to make your content around 1,500 words in length. This is because this length is enough to provide value to the topic you’re writing about, and it’s not short enough to be junk, but it’s also not too long that it goes on and on.
Content of this length also tends to rank higher in terms of SEO. Aim for around this target for the best results.
All About Choosing the Right Blog Topics
With the basics out of the way, it’s time to start thinking about the blog content itself, and this all starts with choosing the topic of content.
Ideally, you’re going to want to focus a lot of your attention on writing about trending topics in your industry. This is vital because trending topics are trending for a reason, which in short means that people are reading about these topics and are interested in them.
This means you need to proactively spend time looking for topics that are trending, which you can do by searching your niche terms in Google and seeing what comes up and what blog posts are most popular.
Following industry leadings, companies, and media pages on social media, as well as tracking trending hashtags, is also a great way to find topics that your readers will be interested in.
Now, you may be wondering, how are you supposed to sell products and boost your sales if you’re writing about topics and not about your products specifically? This is where you need to start thinking creatively.
Think about ways you can incorporate your products or your business into the blog content you’re writing, but only in clean, subtle ways. Remember, your blog content is all about providing value to the reader, not selling what you’ve got to offer.
For many businesses, blog content is a number game. If 10% of people who read your blogs then visit other pages of your website, including your eCommerce pages, if you get 100 visitors, 10 are visiting your store, and maybe one is buying something.
Through successful blog content, you might get 10,000 visitors to your website, of which 1,000 are visiting other pages, and 100 people are buying. The percentages remain the same, but you’re getting more eyes on what you have to offer.
Talking About Benefits, Not Features
Of course, there comes the point where you do need to talk about your products and what they have to offer. These are the subtle sentences or the single paragraphs you’ll sprinkle into your blog content, but there’s a huge mistake that so many businesses fall into the trap of making.
This is to bombard your readers with a list of product features rather than a list of benefits. Put it this way. People don’t care that your television has 20 million pixels or your headphones have a dB range of 20 -180. What they do care about is the fact they can watch their favorite shows in true HD and listen to the most beautiful bass notes when enjoying their favorite playlists.
No matter what you’re selling, always try to share the benefit that your product provides or the problem that your product solves. Even if this problem is trying to find a dress, so you look good on your upcoming date, you’re still leaning into the benefits rather than the features themselves.
Look at any modern, leading ad, and you’ll see these same techniques employed because it makes your products a purpose in the lives of your customers, rather than being something you’re just trying to sell. It’s a way of making the customers feel as though you’re putting them first.
Michael Dehoyos is a web developer and editor, working with Coursework writing services. He also works with companies, helping them create and implement marketing strategies. He has contributed work on this subject to several publications.
Apart from that, if you are interested in knowing the Adobe GC Invoker Utility, how to share screens on Discord, Groovy bot, Discord spoiler, how to recover deleted Facebook pages, and WhatsApp business for beginners, you can follow our Tech category. Thanks for reading!
