Recently we wrote about setting up a blog for your e-commerce site. Hopefully, it gave you the information needed, and that is now a work in progress, or already ticked off your to-do list. If you missed that post, and are unsure how to add a blog to your Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Volusion or other e-commerce web builder site, you’ll find it here.
Once you do set up your e-commerce blog, it needs content published often. The content also needs to be varied, engaging and SEO friendly. And encourage readers to fill their shopping carts and spend, spend, spend, which can be quite a challenge to keep up with when you are trying to run a successful retail business as well.
The fact is that personal blogging is relatively easy; business blogging can be much more challenging. For even the most competent blogger, making posts enjoyable, tying your posts into your product line, and achieving the correct voice every time are serious challenges. No wonder writer’s block usually sets in fast.
The good news is that we’ve got you covered if you’re struggling with blog post ideas for your store’s website. Here are is a look at our top 10 e-commerce blog ideas to get you started.
Top Staff Picks
Posts showcasing your staff picks, favorites, or suggestions from your current product line are a perfect way to introduce and recognize your staff members while presenting users with targeted product recommendations at the same time.
Featuring staff picks is also a smart – but simple – way to humanize your brand by letting customers know that your company has actual humans behind it! People prefer to do business with brands they feel they can understand and trust, and this is a great way to build that feeling with your readership.
Year-Round Gift Guides
Lots of brands feature gift guide blog posts at Christmas, but why stop there?
Gift guides are created all year for any event or holiday. And we mean any holiday. If you check out a site like this one, you’ll discover a ‘holiday’ on every day of the year you can theme a blog post around.
Gift guides are a great way to inform or remind your clients that an event is coming up, which will make a fantastic gift for your goods. Gift guides are also a valuable form of content because people looking for gift ideas search Google for them. Useful gift guides will are not only picked up in the organic search results, but they are often widely circulated because they are generally very visual.
You should try to include a range of products from your store at different prices, so that you can meet the needs of all kinds of customers, from those looking to spend a little (but maybe spend a little often) to those looking to splurge.
Hot Industry Trends
Every retail niche is subject to trends, and consumers love to be up to date/in vogue. As a retail business owner, you already keep up with those trends as a daily part of running your company, so why not turn that knowledge into a blog post too?
Answer Customer Questions
FAQs make great e-commerce blog post topics in general, but why not take it a step further. Ask your customer service reps to note down the questions they are asked by real customers. When you start to see patterns and which queries pop up most often – and they always do – start turning the answers to those questions into blog posts.
Featured Product Posts
Writing a blog article that illustrates a product in your store can be useful in several ways. You can write a post about a new product, a best-selling product, or a little-known product that you want to raise awareness about and more.
Product highlighting blog posts will help the consumers understand more about the item while they are in the all-important shopping research process. When highlighting a product, you may want to remember to include: how to style the product, use the product, additional product images, consumer feedback, location of product source, and more.
This is your opportunity to include a broader range of product details than would be suitable for posting on your product pages AND a great way to have more of those SERPs boosting keywords to catch researching shoppers’ attention as they search.
Product Teasers
Are you launching a new product/product line soon? Use your e-commerce blog posts to tease it and build a growing sense of excitement for the launch, which is a much cheaper way to do so than a lot of expensive PR.
Interview an Influencer
Depending on someone else’s review or evaluation of a product or brand has become the norm among online shoppers. Think about your own Amazon experiences, for example. Most of us head for the reviews first, right?
If the opinion or review comes from someone famous or who your audience believe is an authority in a particular field, the weight of this influence is even greater.
In addition to engaging content for your clients, having an expert share knowledge and their opinions through an interview on your blog is also incredibly useful. If approached the right way, there is a lot of benefits from backlinks and SEO.
If yours is a smaller brand you probably can’t hire an A list celeb, but hooking up with TikTok/Instagram/Facebook influencers is easier than you might imagine, you have to seek them out and make a great pitch.
Feature Customer Created Content
In social media, videos, and reviews, consumers will often show off items they have bought from your store without you ever asking them to. Start looking for hashtags relevant to your brand on social media marketing sites to find who has posted about your products.
Keep an eye out for content about your products or brand, so that you can include this content in your posts. And see if you can contact the creators and ‘interview’ them so that you can create an even more engaging and informative e-commerce blog post.
No-one posting anything right now you could use? Encourage them to do so via a social media contest. Instagram hashtag contests/Facebook photo contests/ TikTok challenges are inexpensive and relatively straightforward to create and if you promote them the right way you may be able to get enough content created for you to turn into not just one but a series of engaging e-commerce blog posts.
Numbered “Top X” Lists
Hey, after all, you are reading a numbered list post right now, so you know they can grab attention, but that is especially true in the retail space. Numbered list posts are some of the most popular e-commerce blog posts out there for many good reasons.
First, people are looking for their online shopping ‘trips’ to be as easy as possible and presenting them with a list that suits their current product research cuts down on draining product research fatigue that often derails online shoppers.
The second reason is that these posts are great for SEO, as you can organically add lots of great keywords to attract search bot attention without your e-commerce blog post coming off as spammy or manipulative.
And thirdly? It’s a great way to drive people to your product pages fast and to build customer loyalty fast. Once consumers know that the chances are that you will have what they need, you are far more likely to become their first port of call on their next shopping trip!
Go Behind the Scenes
Another way to add a human face to your brand that consumers can connect with (and feel like they can trust) is to offer a ‘behind the scenes’ e-commerce blog post. Let your audience in on how – and who – sources your products. Highlight the town where your company is based or from where the goods arrive. If you make the products yourself, share some of that process.
Final Thought
Blogging is right for every business, especially a retail brand. Content creation is also a cornerstone of successful SEO strategies and essential for engaging customers and building your brand. Every e-commerce blog post you publish can become a useful asset for informing and engaging customers and driving sales.
Need help getting an e-commerce blog set up or with content creation for your e-commerce store’s blog? Get in touch with the Pearl Lemon team, and let’s discuss just what your needs are and how our expert content creation team can help.
