Ecommerce Blogging: The Essentials Every Shopify Seller Needs to Know
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, with over 4.4 million active stores in 2023. Whether you run an established Shopify store, or you're just starting out, you'll need to adopt some sort of marketing strategy to boost your overall sales and conversions. You might have already tried integrating marketing automation tools into your store, such as email and social media marketing, with little success.
An ecommerce blog is the marketing holy grail, allowing you to increase organic traffic, appeal to your customer base, and build your brand. With tailored and well-written articles, you could get 3.5x more monthly traffic to your ecommerce store.
If you're ready to start your ecommerce blogging journey, here are the essentials you need to get started and boost the popularity of the Shopify store.
What is the value of an ecommerce blog?
You're a retailer, not a blogger, so what's the value of adding an ecommerce blog to your store?
Actually, a lot. Businesses with a blog receive 55 percent more site visitors than businesses that don't, so you have more chances to sell your products to the right people. In fact, effective ecommerce blogs can establish your business as a trustworthy and legitimate online store, meaning you're more likely to not only sell more, but see the same customers returning again and again
If you use your ecommerce blog to tell people about your brand, rather than to solely sell products, you'll have a far better chance of establishing a successful online business and reaching Shopify success.
Some of the main benefits of a Shopify blog for your ecommerce business include:
- Establishing your brand personality and identity
- Creating trust and customer loyalty with drives customer retention
- Increasing site traffic
- Driving conversions and increasing overall sales
Ecommerce blogs: the statistics
- 92 percent of marketers use blog posts in their content strategies.
- 97 percent of bloggers utilize social media to promote their posts.
- There are 182,047 Shopify stores that are actively blogging.
- The global ecommerce market is worth around $4.9 trillion, with projections estimating a net worth of $7.4 trillion by 2025.
- 22 percent of bloggers post weekly, with 2 percent posting daily.
How do I set up a blog on Shopify for my ecommerce business?
Luckily for ecommerce business owners, Shopify has a built-in blogging application so you can quickly and easily set up a blog for your online store. As a default, your Shopify online store has a blog called 'News'. You can either keep this title or change it to a custom name depending on your vision.
To make your Shopify blog visible to your customers, you need to:
- Go to your Shopify admin page and click Sales channels > Online store.
- From the Online store menu, go to Blog posts.
- Once in the Blog posts page, Click Create blog post.
You're now able to write your first blog post, and upon clicking save it'll be visible to your audience.
Please note that online marketing can be tricky, especially in a crowded market. If you're a newbie to ecommerce marketing, it's best to consult with a specialist digital marketing agency for ecommerce tips and tricks. If you have a decent budget, a professional will be able to devise marketing strategies for your ecommerce business to help you gain as many conversions as possible.
Alternatively, ecommerce businesses based on Shopify are also taking advantage of other marketing tools such as embedded banners advertising sales and new products. If you're not interested in hiring a marketing team, this could be a better option for you.
Writing blog posts: the basics
If you're ready to start crafting your ecommerce blog for the purposes of content marketing, it can be difficult to know where to start - especially if you're a newbie to implementing marketing strategies.
The main thing to remember when it comes to ecommerce blogs is that all content should be written for your target audience, not search engines. The focus should be on making meaningful content to engage your customer, not on rising to the top of search engines (although this is an added bonus!) So, when planning your ecommerce blog, you should be thinking about customer wants and needs.
It's also a good idea to use some established online marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), including practices such as optimizing your page titles, meta descriptions, and heading structures. Don't worry, if you're unaware of SEO we'll cover this later.
Here are the basics of blogging you need to learn for your ecommerce business.
Consider the target audience
You might already have an idea of who your ideal target audience is from the planning stage of your online business. Generally speaking, all ecommerce businesses will have a set of target personas, with details about their budget, wants, and needs.
Ecommerce blogs need to appeal to their target audience to reach the ultimate goal of gaining conversions. This is known as conversion optimization.
If you haven't yet established the target audience for your online business, or you haven't updated your personas in a while, it's essential to perform a target group analysis. But what is this?
A target group analysis gathers all relevant information about your customers for the purposes of tailoring business communication and content marketing to them. The more precise the findings, the more appealing ecommerce blogs become.
You should define your target group based on these factors:
- Sociodemographic: the age, marital status, and location of your audience
- Socioeconomic: the education and occupation of your audience, and their budget
- Psychographic: consumer behavior, preferred communication style, and attitude to commerce
It's a good idea to use real data from your Shopify store to get a better understanding of who buys your products. This is available to store owners through customer reports, which details your customer's average order count, average order totals, and estimated purchase value.
Engage customers with targeted content
Once you understand your customer base, you need to tailor all your blog content to suit their needs. All successful ecommerce blogs will have a detailed knowledge of what appeals to the customer, whether that's industry news, listicles, or how-to guides.
We wouldn't recommend only advertising your online business, as your blog will come off more like an advert rather than an insightful resource. Similarly, bombarding customers with annoying email popups as part of your content marketing strategies will put them off rather than drive sales. For more ecommerce tips, read our article on Shopify email popups.
When producing targeted content, start by brainstorming a list of ideas that you think would appeal to your online business demographic, focusing on the age, wants, and desires of your audience. After this, we'd recommend testing out your article ideas on people within your target audience, so your blog focuses on the right topics that resonate.
Utilize SEO
SEO is a powerful tool used by marketers to give posts more visibility on search engines such as Google or Bing.
A successful online business will utilize SEO as part of its marketing strategy, including relevant keywords based on research, backlinks to increase legitimacy, and meta descriptions. You should also make sure your page speed is acceptable by testing your Shopify store on Google PageSpeed Insights.
To find keywords relevant to your ecommerce platform, use tools such as Semrush and Google Keyword Planner.
Publish frequently
Successful ecommerce blogs post frequently with the goal of increasing overall traffic and conversions.
To boost your online store, experts recommend publishing two to four times per week to keep your ecommerce store in the minds of your customers. This will not only appeal to your audience, but will increase the number of pages on your Shopify site, which in-turn will boost traffic.
Add CTAs
While ecommerce blogs should focus on actionable insights rather than promotion, the CTA is a simple way to map the buyer journey and direct traffic to your product pages. Keep it concise and snappy while directing to a product relevant to the contents of the blog.
Examples of the best ecommerce businesses utilizing Shopify blogs
Shopify is the most popular ecommerce platform, with over 2.1 million daily active users. Thousands of Shopify store owners have made it big by investing their time and efforts into ecommerce marketing to boost traffic to boost their online store. Some of the best ecommerce blogs come from Shopify stores
If you're in need of some inspiration, here are the most successful Shopify stores with the best ecommerce blogs.
Goodfair
Goodfair is an online thrift store specializing in high-quality vintage clothing at a reasonable price, while maintaining a sustainable business model. With one of the best ecommerce blogs to date, Goodfair pays attention to ecommerce trends within its demographic, such as the history of clothing, tips for maintaining vintage pieces, and thrifting influencers to follow.
Each article is carefully crafted with the target demographic in mind, with Goodfair focusing on providing engaging content for its customers, rather than selling its clothing.
Check out Goodfair's commerce blog here.
Rainbow Vision
Rainbow Vision are online merchants specializing in modern stationery such as planners, notebooks, and journals. The Rainbow Vision blog combines ecommerce trends with valuable insights into the importance of organization and creativity.
Its blog focuses on giving its customers practical and honest advice while interweaving products. For example, titles include How To Pick The Best Planner For YOU, and Tackling Creative Blocks.
Read the Rainbow Vision blog for inspiration here.
Kulala
Kulala understands the importance of sleep, which is why the Kulala sleep lamp is designed to promote melatonin release, giving its customers naturally better nights. While other ecommerce platforms stick to a few article topics, the Kulala blog focuses on everything from 'Adult Sleep' to 'Getting Ready for Baby'.
Check out the Kulala blog and take inspiration from the expert advice provided.
Boost your online marketing with Attrac
Blogging isn't the only ecommerce marketing tool you can adopt for your Shopify store. Attrac is an online store building software which adds beautifully presented high-converting displays to your Shopify store to keep customers engaged and drive conversions. Our software is also fully customizable to fit any theme.
Adding urgency to your Shopify store is an effective way to motivate customers to take advantage of offers and checkout, fast. Boost organic traffic with your Shopify blog, and pull visitors in with Attrac’s embedded banners.
By combining our Attrac Announcement Bar Banner and a regularly updated blog, your store will no doubt boost its organic traffic and conversion rates.
Use our embedded banners with an integrated countdown timer to add even more motivation to act. Find out more about the benefits of using the Attrac Announcement Bar Banner by reading our article ‘Score more conversions with embedded banners’.
For more Shopify marketing tips, keep up-to-date with our blog for advice.
