How to write a blog that generates not only traffic, but also sales, for your eCommerce or online store?
Is it even possible?
Maybe you’ve tried your hand at blogging and heard crickets!
Maybe you’ve labored over a blog post and felt that it’s just TOO hard.
Maybe you’ve thought about starting or writing a blog but you already have a million things on your plate.
How can you write and maintain a blog that brings readers and results?
In 5 easy steps.
Read on to find out what they are and how you can use them right away!
How to Write a Blog for Your Online Store… in 5 Easy Steps
Step 1: Create a List of Topics Your Customers Want to Know More About
Start by first making a list of all the possible topics your customers want to know more about.
If you sell t-shirts, for example, they may love to know more about fashion trends, how to wear t-shirts to work and get away with it, how to add a custom feel to a mass produced t-shirt and so on.
If you make handmade jewelry, customers may want to know about accessorizing tips, how to care for jewelry, how to wear jewelry without going over the top, and so on.
You get the picture, right?
Sometimes, the questions your customers may have or want answers to would have nothing to do with your core business. They would be related to what you do.
How do you find out what questions your customers have?
- Study the emails you get and identify common questions in them.
- Hang around in forums, groups and on blogs where your ideal customer is. Listen {in a non-stalkerish!} way to their conversations. What are they asking about?
- Survey your customers. Yes, send them out and email asking them what are some of their frustrations with {insert name of niche} and what would they like to know more about it.
Once you have this list of questions, it’s just a matter of creating topics from them and putting them into an editorial calendar.
You don’t need anything fancy. An excel sheet with dates and days can be enough. The idea behind this is for your to plugin your topics on a regular schedule so you can batch writing your posts and stay ahead of the curve.
Say, you come with only 12 topics. Don’t worry. At 1 post a week, you’ll have enough content for 3 months. See?
Step 2: Write Your Post
The next step is writing your post. I recommend batch writing your posts. As online store owners, we have a lot on our plate. Fitting in 10 minutes here or 20 minutes there to write a few sentences for your post doesn’t make any sense.
It’s more productive if you schedule say an hour, every Tuesday to write. Block off distractions.
Shut down Facebook and Pinterest. And just open your editorial calendar, check out the topic… and write.
Step 3: Optimize it for Search Engines
Now that you know how to write a blog, your next step is to optimize it for search engines.
While a well-written post will be awesome for your readers, you do want it to be found by search engines too, right? That will ensure that your content gets picked up by targeted customers easily!
How can you get started with optimizing your content? What tools do you need? Would you need to fork out hundreds of dollars for them?
I know. I can hear those questions whirling around in your head.
Luckily, for you, we have rounded up the best FREE SEO tools to make this job easier.
Step 4: Drive Traffic to the Post
Now that you’ve published your post, you need to drive traffic to it. Luckily, you can automate this part, too.
Once your post is published, fire up a social media scheduler like Buffer and set up the post to be shared on social networks automatically. I’d recommend sharing it all through the week at different intervals.
Next, copy the first half of the post, plug it into your email marketing system, personalize it, add a subject line and whiz it away to your list.
Step 5: Rinse-and-Repeat
The final step is to rinse-and-repeat the 4 steps above. Before you know it, you’ll be blogging like a pro and enjoying the attention that your blog is getting and best of all, the sales that it’s driving up.
So, there you go… your 5-step guide on how to write a blog that brings sales for your online store.
Article written by Andrea of Launch, Grow, Joy.
