The Benefits of a Blog
- Converse With Customers
For most ecommerce businesses, customer interaction is restricted to handling complaints. A blog creates a positive environment for conversation with prospects and existing customers. It is an effective tool to keep your finger on the customer's pulse and gather valuable feedback.
- Enhance Visibility and Credibility
One of the most important assets of an ecommerce business is its credibility. Blogging is a low-cost method to enhance visibility and credibility. Insightful blog posts showcase your expertise. Over time, some of your blog posts could become reference points in industry discussions.
- Build a Community
The Internet is evolving into a social space. People cherish a sense of belonging in their online interactions. If your blog interacts with customers, and facilitates customer-to-customer interaction, it becomes an ideal venue to build a community.
- Add a Human Touch to Your Website
Online relationships tend to be weaker than offline relationships because the Internet provides a high degree of anonymity. Strive to humanize your relationship with customers. With the right voice, a blog can provide that human touch.
- Educate Customers
Ecommerce websites regularly introduce new products. A blog presents the ideal platform to educate customers about the benefits of a new product. If your blog can resist the urge to sound like sales copy, it could generate loyal readership. Some of these readers will eventually buy the products they read about on the blog.
- Improve Search Engine Rankings
Ecommerce websites are some of the largest sites on the Internet. Yet, they attract very little traffic from popular search engines such as Google. Since ecommerce websites tend to regurgitate supplier data, search engines find the same content repeated on multiple websites. This unoriginal content causes search engines to lower the rankings of ecommerce websites.
Besides being reader friendly, a well written blog is search engine friendly too. It provides search engines with the content and context necessary to improve the ranking of the ecommerce website.
- Take a Break From Blatant Promotion
Ecommerce websites tend to hard sell at every available opportunity. A personable blog can be a refreshing change for the visitor.
The long list of benefits you just read may cause you to assume that a blog is an elixir for ecommerce. A blog is a good idea only if you can answer each of the following questions with a "Yes."
- Do You Have the Resources to Update the Blog Regularly?
A blog that has not been updated will work to your disadvantage. Instead of building credibility, it will create doubt in the customer's mind. They may see you as a non-serious player, or worse, a business that is folding up.
Blogging should not be relegated to spare time. You should consider blogging to be one of the mainstream functions of your business. There must be at least one person responsible for updating the blog.
- Does Your Organizational Culture Support Blogging?
A blog is not a broadcast-only form of communication. If readers have a query, the right person should respond. This will happen only if employees view the blog as an important medium of communication.
- Is Blogging Part of a Broader Social Strategy?
There was a time when blogs were the uncontested winners of the social media battle. Today, they must be a part of a larger social strategy. This strategy should involve Facebook and Twitter, among others.
Recent advances in social software have generated a plethora of plugins that interface conversations across platforms. So, a reader reaction on your Facebook page can be made visible within your blog, and vice versa.
