There comes a time in your online business when you realise your ecommerce blogging platform has plateaued. The traffic needs to grow, the content is good but it’s not great, and your blog should be starting to help you make money.
You need to take your blog to the next level.
Average ecommerce blogs are a dime a dozen. You come across these every day and end up scrolling past them almost instantly.
Good blogs are few and far between. They have some interesting insights, but they’re not exactly what you need.
A successful blog stands apart from the rest. It follows a simple yet effective strategy, enabling you to churn out high quality blog content consistently and in turn help the platform generate a profit.
Let’s look at a few key ingredients you can use to create a strategy for a profitable ecommerce blog.
Content is a Smart King
The meat of any blog post is always the content. With the attention span of readers dropping incredibly fast, the average time spent reading a blog post is only 37 seconds.
It’s important to grab their attention with content that is smart, regular, and well informed.
Here are a few ideas you can follow to help turn your content up a notch.
Choose Topics Relevant to Your Business
More often than not, blogs can become inundated with large amounts of content, not all of which is actually relevant to your core business and in turn will only confuse your reader as to what the blog is actually about.
It doesn’t matter if you feel your blog is too niche or your product has a very specific audience. Some of the best blogs out there are streamlined to content which is mainly relevant to their business.
Creating a Content Calendar and Posting Periodically
Plan, plan, plan. If you have time left, plan some more. This will go a long way in ensuring you have a successful blog.
The trick here is to create a bucket of content with your writing team and systemically strategize how and when those blog posts will be published. It will ideally be over a per-month basis or even longer, depending on how much you want to plan ahead.
There are some great templates available online to help you get started.
Review Analytics Regularly
Data is your friend and there is nothing more honest than a set of metrics rating the success of your blog.
Analytic tools will help you gauge how your blog is performing and will go hand in hand in tweaking your content calendar on a month to month basis.
Smart Use of Visual Content
Judging a book by its cover has taken on a new meaning in our digital world today. We love to scroll quickly through our phones and websites.
It’s usually when we come across something that not only catches our eye but also appeals to our sensibilities that we tend to engage further.
The same goes for strategy blog posts. Visual cues are necessary in drawing your audience in. Intelligent use of the same cues will help them stay longer and eventually increase the chance of their direct interaction.
It’s a Team Effort – Not Only a Group of Writers
Having an in-house team of dedicated writers for your blog is great, but having a team that understands your content and can create a blog with an intimate understanding of web hosting and tools like WordPress, will take your blog to an entirely new stage.
How do we do this? Let’s look at some routes you can take.
Hiring Writers With Different Skill Sets
Hiring a writer who is a jack of all trades will only allow you to start a blog with a limited amount of quality content, leaving you placed in the middle of the pile of the millions of blogs already in existence.
Instead, hiring a team of professionals, with experience and specialised skills can create a streamlined system for your blog posts and push you closer to the top of the pile.
A potential team hierarchy could look like this:
- Editor in Chief
- Senior Editor
- Associate Writer
- Junior Writer
- Web Hosting Specialist
The number of people in each role will naturally depend on the size of your blog.
Quality Control Through a Feedback Loop
Once you’ve set up your team, you want to implement a system of checks and balances. This will keep your blog content rolling on a regular basis as well as maintain a high standard of quality control over your content.
For example, you could have a writer pick a topic. Then he/she will submit it to an editor, who in turn will have another senior writer look at it as well.
Basis the feedback on content, language, and grammar. More drafts of the blog post are written and polished before publishing.
Regular Strategy Sessions
A team that communicates regularly is one that is bound to be successful. It is therefore very important that your team meets often to strategize about the blog.
Essentially, these meetings can help form the backbone of a strong blog.
Outsourcing to Professional Services
You may find yourself requiring the services of companies who specialise in helping blogs gain an extra edge. They do all of the above and more.
A good example of this would be CopySmiths. They provide a plethora of solutions for clients and even publish case studies as free blog material for anyone looking to start blogging.
“They understand the corporate goals, listen to what your needs are and then develop a digital plan to meet your goals”
– Monique Welsh, National Business Manager. Alsco First Aid and Fresh & Clean Washroom
Top of the Pile – Ensuring Your blog Has High Visibility.
You’ve got some stellar content ready to be published. It has been polished and vetted by a dedicated team.
Now, the question arises — how do I make sure I can get the necessary eyeballs to gain a solid return on investment?
Here are a few strategies you can adopt:
SEO Management Through Intelligent Use of Keywords
SEO is the formula by which any successful blog can find its way to the top of any search engine query. The lynchpin is the intelligent use of keywords.
It’s important you identify the strongest keywords that define your blog post and then identify complementary words or phrases that help strengthen the initial search.
Choosing Keywords Based on Competition and Ranking Popularity
To go even further into SEO integration, peppering your blog post with keywords which have a strong ranking based on competition and popularity will solidify your blog search priority.
Tools like SurferSEO help writers maintain a strong quality standard while guaranteeing their post will have a higher visibility on search engine queries.
Catchy and Relevant Titles
Newspaper headlines that grabbed our attention would always fly off the newsstands. The same goes for high quality blog posts. They need to pull the readers in.
Keeping a title short, sweet and to the point is half the battle for a blogger.
Using CTAs to Engage Readers Directly
It’s important that you get your CTA right for each of your blog posts, because this is what will make or break your profitability in the long term.
Keep it on point to the main focus of the article and directly relate it to where you want to take your reader or turn the reader into a potential customer.
Promoting the Page Wisely
Lastly, always remember to promote your blog wisely. You can end up spending a lot of money on ad spends and promotions only to end up with less than satisfactory results.
It really is all about balance. Social media platforms are your key gateways to readers for clicks.
But they are also the potential multiplier in enabling your blog to hit high levels of shareability.
As part of your strategy, figure out how you can spend on intelligent avenues — podcasts, for example — while ensuring the content you put out is relevant and engaging enough to be shared exponentially.
