| Article Index |
|---|
| Promote Your Sales by Adding a Blog to Your osCommerce Store |
| Page 2 |
| All Pages |
The benefits of running a blog to promote your osCommerce Store
Because it's becoming such a popular medium, just starting a blog can be a benefit. All of a sudden, your customers who enjoy blogs will find one available on your web site for their blogging pleasure. But a good blog also has some specific business benefits:
-
Benefit #1: Blogs increase traffic to your store
This is a HUGE benefit. Blogs are all about good, relevant content. And search engines LOVE good, relevant content! They evaluate and rank your site partly through the keywords contained in the content of your site.
A blog provides content related to the products or services you sell containing tons of targeted keywords for the search engines to index. This is why it's SO important that your blog talks about your products and not your home life!
That's not all -- if there's one thing that search engines love more than good, relevant content, it's good, relevant, and FRESH content! And that's where the blog really starts to shine -- it's a fresh-content generating machine, allowing you to add a new post EVERY day in just a few minutes!
It's a great way to get ranked higher in search engines and attract more traffic to your web site.
In addition, listing your blog in blog directories and linking to other blogs increases the visibility of your online store and increases traffic to your site. -
Benefit #2: Blogs can boost your revenue
A well-managed blog can provide a couple of additional revenue streams for your store. The most obvious is through the extra traffic a blog can generate and an increase in repeat traffic when customers return to read the regular blog updates.
If your blog showcases new products and includes subtle marketing messages, you can drive people from your blog to the sales and product pages on your web site -- and, with a little effort, close some sales!
The other potential revenue stream is third-party advertising. A blog can increase traffic to your web site, and heavy traffic can make your site attractive to advertisers! You may want to check out Google AdSense (see Lesson 81), or look into other advertising options.
Big business has also taken notice of blogs, and high-traffic blogs are now finding they are being targeted by advertisers. One new company, BlogAds, places ads for large corporations on 50 to 100 blogs a day.
-
Benefit #3: Blogs act as an information resource center for your web site.
Through the archiving feature common to blog software, all posts to a blog are automatically stored -- making it a great information resource for visitors to your web site. Some blogs have search functions allowing visitors to find the topic of most interest to them.
