Ecommerce store owners understand the importance of marketing and developing a strong web presence. They create beautiful storefronts, invest in advertising campaigns, and build email marketing sequences to attract and win over customers.

But look at their blogs and you’ll notice that a lot of them—especially B2C ecommerce sites—either don't have a blog or don't have a blogging strategy.

This can be a missed opportunity, especially in ecommerce where many niches aren't yet overly saturated with high quality and engaging content.

If you're looking for inspiration about how to blog for your own ecommerce business, we’ll be taking a close look in this post at 8 different examples of outstanding blogs run by ecommerce stores, including the content they create and the strategies behind them.

But first, let's talk about what a blog can do for your business.

What blogging should be

A thoughtful, deliberate blogging strategy can help you nurture customer relationships, generate recurring inbound traffic, and give you a way to promote new products and services while building your brand.

Blogging also gives you a lot of room for creativity. You can go many different routes with your blog, with different types of content, storytelling, and distribution tactics to make your blog beneficial to your business.

In fact, it's likely for this reason that a lot of ecommerce sites struggle with blogging. Simply publishing a few posts a month, after all, isn't enough to regularly bring traffic to your site. You need to develop a strategy in order to get to your blog to that point.

Your blog should:

• Add value. Your blog should contain content that your target audience wants to read. Entertain them, educate them, share news, or do a little of all three. Just remember that it’s not about you, it’s about your customers and their wants and needs.
• Have clear goals. What do you want to get out of blogging? Ideally, you should be focused on bringing readers in through search engines and social media, building a relationship with them, and then eventually driving sales. 
• Build upon your brand. Blogs can be used to not only support your brand, but to help establish it. Blogging gives you a voice and you can harness storytelling to connect with users and make your brand stand out.
• Be consistent. If you can only put out one post a month, that’s okay. Just make sure that you’re making time to hit that once-a-month mark regularly.

Your blog should not:

• Read like an over-hyped sales pitch. People have come to your site to look at your products. If they want more information on what you sell, they’ll head to your product pages, not your blog (though your blog posts can direct them there).
• Consist only of product photos. It doesn’t matter how sought-after your products are, you shouldn’t just have blog posts comprised of nothing but images. Even the most popular photography bloggers—whose images are the obvious focus—will often complement their photos with written storytelling to establish context and create an emotional connection.
• Look random and disorganized. Diversity in what you publish can help you attract multiple types of readers, but it should all fit under the umbrella where your products and your audience's needs overlap. Everything should feel connected to your brand and organized into categories that you consistently contribute to.

Brands that can attract an audience through education, inspiration, or entertainment can generally benefit from blogging in some form or another. Blogging has a lot of potential if you want to build your brand, increase email subscribers, establish relationships with potential customers, and drive sales. All that being said, it can only yield these incredible benefits when you implement it correctly and consistently. As long as you put serving your audience first, you too can find your own approach.

Source: shopify.com