One of the most effective ways to maintain a reliable flow of customers is through a search-engine optimized ecommerce blog. Google loves blogs because most people don’t search for products; they search for solutions. Writing articles tailored to popular search terms allows you to get your store in front of people who need your products but don’t know they exist.
- Over 50% of blog readers regularly shop online6
- The average company blog generate 55% more traffic to its site7
- 434% more indexed pages which are essential to help you rank in Google.8
However, keeping up a high-quality, regularly updated blog can be a challenge. Even the most creative writer can run out of ideas. Fortunately, you don’t have to rely on raw inspiration to get your content ideas. There are methodical techniques that you can use for continually generating ideas for your ecommerce blog. Here are five of them:
Broaden Your E-commerce Blog Ideas
You need to strike a balance between blogging about products and more general topics related to your niche. There are two benefits to this. First, your visitors will appreciate your unbiased information on the issues and infer that your product blog postings are similarly fair. Second, broadening your topics beyond your products gives you more subject matter to write about which significantly eases the problem of finding new content ideas.
Broadening your topics also casts a broader SEO net which brings in traffic that doesn’t know about your products, yet are researching topics closely related to your offerings. These newcomers are essential for expanding your customer base. The broader subjects also increase your brand’s appeal to your repeat customers.
When writing about your products, it’s best to leave the heavy promotion to your sales and listing pages.
Your blog posts should help readers realize how your products meet their needs. For example, you could write about underused features of your products and their benefits, or about creative and new uses for your products, or about more effective ways of using them. Another approach is writing a “how to” post about an interest of your visitors that shows how using your product makes the process more efficient or convenient.
Action Steps:
- Brainstorm at least a dozen blog ideas. 20
- Use a keyword search tool to determine if any of them have any search traffic.
- Add the ideas with the highest search volume and low to medium competition to your editorial calendar.
Use Customer and Reader Feedback
Make a note of commonly asked questions in email correspondence from your email list members and customers. Because of their extreme relevance to your readership, blog posts directly addressing these issues can become hugely popular. In the same vein, look for questions commonly discussed or asked about in your blog comments. People who comment on blogs are typically avid readers so, tailoring content to their feedback is an easy way to keep them engaged with your
Action Steps: Here is how to generate ecommerce blog ideas from customer feedback efficiently:
- On a weekly or monthly basis depending on how much engagement you get, put all of your blog contents into a spreadsheet.
- Delete comments that are irrelevant (like self-promotions and arguments between customers that are not related to the article).
- Use a drop-down list with your blog sections to categorize the remaining comments.
- Whenever you’re struggling to think of blog ideas, choose a piece of feedback from the spreadsheet to write about.
Look for Unanswered Questions on Your Competitor’s Blog
Are there common issues with your competitor’s readership that are left unanswered? These questions are in in the comments on your competitor’s posts. Make a list of these and publish blog posts about them. Leave a comment on your competitor’s blog posts where these questions are raised with a link back to your answers.
Action Steps:
Here’s how to generate ecommerce blog ideas from your competitors:
- Identify who your top competitors for web traffic are because, they are likely different than who your business’s direct competitors.
- Google several keyword phrases that you’re targeting and look for the websites that appear the most on the first pages.
- Review sections of their blog that you also write about and add questioning and critical comments to the spreadsheet we spoke about in the previous section.
- Look for any other gaps in their content.
Developing a marketing strategy based on your competitors’ weaknesses is a highly effective way to draw more leads to your ecommerce blog and outrank them in search.
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
Within all content lie the seeds of yet more content. Look through your past tips and lists posts and consider turning a particular tip or list item into ecommerce blog ideas. You can do the same thing with sub-headers where each can serve as the topic of a new article. You can even break down a piece, sentence by sentence to find the seed for yet another blog topic.
Creating new posts from existing posts has several benefits including:
- It allows you to add more internal links between similar articles. Internal links are links to other content on your site. Not only do internal links reduce your bounce rate by giving people more options to explore, but they also improve your website’s overall search engine optimization.
- Blog posts that hone in on smaller elements give hesitant customers the additional information they need to feel confident making a purchase.
- Publishing content that delves into multiple facets of your topic can help make your blog a go-to source for consumers who want to learn more about your niche.
Action Steps:
- Use analytics to find your most popular blog posts.
- Break those blogs posts into at least 2-3 additional ones.
- Moving forward, when you come up with broad content ideas, break them into several posts that focus on 1-2 elements of the big idea.
Include User Generated Content
If you have an active email newsletter, ask them to submit useful tips about a topic of interest via email. Let them know in advance that you will make a blog post featuring the tips you receive with credit given to each contributor. You can also base blogs on questions solicited from your readers. You might start a piece with “One of our readers, John Smith, asks…” and then continue with your answer to the question.92% of customers are more persuaded by user-generated content than they are by company advertisements. People know that companies will say just about anything legal to sell their products so, there is little reason.
Action Steps:
Here are some ideas to gather user-generated content:
- Ask your email list for testimonials and to explain how they use your products.
- Invite your email list and social media followers to submit pictures of themselves using your products.
- Create a hashtag for your most popular product line and encourage social media followers to tag themselves using your product. Consider making it a contest and give away free products to the person who gets the most engagement.
Use these tips to keep your e-commerce blog fresh with new and useful content. Remember that engaged visitors are the key to keeping your e-commerce business thriving. Try to keep a good-sized list of topics well before you need them. Whenever an idea strikes, immediately write it down on your topic list. For more information on successful e-commerce, please contact us at Epic Design Labs.
