6 Ways to Improve your Blogging Efforts
Guest post today from Kevin Fournier of Made With Real Juice
The way I see it is if you are going to put the effort into creating and keeping up with an eCommerce blog for your business, you may as well make it count.
Here are 6 ways to optimize your efforts and get quality, targeted traffic to your online store.
1. Be Transparent
The first rule of blogging for any business is to keep it personal. People may visit your blog for helpful content but your real followers will want to get to know the person behind the business. This also helps new customers quickly build the trust it takes to give someone their money over the internet.
2. Stay Consistent
If you are putting in the blogging effort make sure you are being consistent with your posts. This is good for readers as well as optimizing your blog for search engines.
There will be times when you feel like writing and times when you don’t. Set a good pace so that when you feel like writing you can get ahead and schedule those posts for when you might not have time to write.
3. Encourage Interaction
You can use giveaways or user generated content to create a community and encourage interaction. This will help drive sales and also help build brand awareness for the long term.
User generated content works great for blogs and social media because people are always interested in what others of similar interest have to say.
4. Give Give Give
One of the most effective methods to blog is to give away information that is actually worth something. For example if you have an eCommerce site selling outdoor gear you could blog about some do-it-yourself trick.
Many business owners say that this is counter-productive if you’re trying to sell products. The thing is, internet users will find the information they want somewhere, it might as well be on your site.
The guy that actually uses the article is grateful, spreads the word and might buy later. The rest of the people read the article, think it’s too much of a hassle and buy a product from you. You can use this no matter what niche you’re in.
5. Use Your Tools
You need to connect your blog to social media in order to get better results. Search engines look for social signals in order to judge content, if your site is not being shared socially then you are missing out on social traffic as well as organic traffic via search engines.
Don’t think you have time for blogging and social media? No problem, there are tools that are great values (less than 10 dollars a month) that can help automate your social media efforts.
6. Give More
Along with giving away information you should be giving away information in a well bound package. The best example of this is when a business gives away an eBook in exchange for a newsletter sign up.
Using the outdoor store example they could make a survival eBook or something similar. Then they collect emails and have a whole new audience to market to.
This makes you look good, pushes brand awareness and gives you more of an audience.
In Conclusion
Blogging can be time consuming but when done right you should be able to see great results in a few months. Be personal and create engaging content, people will respond. Don’t be opposed to user generated content, its free and usually engaging. And most of all give, give, give.
Kevin Fournier is the co-founder of Made With Real Juice. He has spent the last two years perfecting his content strategy. As the internet has evolved, his motto has always remained ‘content is king,’ and now it rings true more than ever. He has a passion for creating sustainable internet marketing models. Having Kevin on the Made With Real Juice Team ensures that your blog will be working for you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
