Successful online businesses are using blogs in a variety of ways to interact with consumers and build solid customer relationships. You have considered taking the plunge and commit to running a blog on your company website, but are not sure how to get started. It is important to realize that a merchant blog is actually quite different from the type of blog your kids regularly keep up with. Merchant websites tend to talk about products, opening the door to make potential sales and hopefully get paid in the process.
But a lot of times, Merchants make mistakes with their blog sites that can cost them huge sums of money in lost sales. Here are a few tips to help your Merchant blog perform at a much higher level for your company.
How a Merchant Blog Is Different
Unlike a blog where someone is talking about anything that comes to mind from day to day, a Merchant blog must contain content that is far more niche specific and professional sounding. Blog posts on products and services must contain authority content, providing the consumer with all the useful information they need to help them to make an informed purchase. In addition, you must watch out for spelling errors more on a merchant website, because misspelled words tends to turn your readers off. Which is not good when you are trying to use your blog to attract paying customers.
Look and Feel Is Everything
The look and feel of your merchant blog is perhaps one of the most important aspects any merchant has to contend with to ensure their blog performs properly. If readers of your blog fail to intuitively make the transition from your blog posts to your products, because they do not properly and quickly grasp the layout of your site, then you will miss out on tons of sales. Many merchants make the mistake of allowing the person who has programmed their site layout to be the judge of how easy their site is to use. Unfortunately, the person who programmed their site knows how to get from the blog to the products the blog posts are pointing too without any difficulty. It is best to test your blog pages, asking people who have never used your blog site before to navigate your blog site and give you feedback. Often fixing how something looks can make all the difference to the end user, making it easier for your blog readers to find the right links to the right products.
The Call to Action
Once it becomes clear that your site is intuitive enough for anyone to use, the next step is to actually reach out to your paying customers, prompting them to buy. Offering these customers a lot of great information in your blog posts is meaningless without a call to action. A call to action lets them know that they must act now before this offer expires, for example, if they want to get their hands on the latest deal you are blogging about.
You have to let your reader know that latest deal you are offering is for a limited time only, to provide a sense of urgency. These types of clauses in your blog posts help to encourage a reader to understand that they can only get your products, subject to conditions like, while supplies last, further increasing the urgency to prompt the buyer to act.