The one thing that every e-commerce website in the world can always use is more traffic – and when you start looking for ways to bring more visitors to your site, one of the first pieces of advice you’ll always find is that you need to start a blog.
On the surface, adding a blog to an e-commerce site makes perfect sense. Without a blog, after all, basically all of your website’s text content will be on its product pages. People don’t just search for the names of products. They also search for product reviews and rankings. They look for advice about how to fix problems with products or make them work better. Having a blog gives you a chance to rank for all of those keywords, and there’s a chance that some of the people who view the content on your blog will go on to become customers.
When owners of e-commerce sites try content marketing for the first time, though, they almost always make one crucial mistake: They choose the wrong topics for their articles, and they don’t end up seeing the anticipated traffic boost. If you want to emulate the content marketing success of top e-commerce brands, you’re going to have to change your mindset – and in this article, we’ll explain exactly how to do it.
First, though, what is the biggest content marketing mistake everyone makes?
Writing About Commercial Topics Is the Biggest Content Marketing Mistake
The biggest mistake that small business owners make in content marketing is choosing article topics with direct commercial angles. Suppose, for instance, that your company sells vaporizers like Rokin Vapes. In that case, your first instinct will be to write articles ranking and reviewing the best vaporizers. It’s likely that people who search for those sorts of topics are looking for products to buy, and those topics present natural opportunities for you to recommend the products that you sell.
So, what’s the problem with writing about commercial topics? The problem is that all of your competitors are doing exactly the same thing. Their websites are all much better established than yours, and that means your articles will be unlikely to gain any traction on Google at all. The most likely result is that your efforts will be completely wasted.
How to Choose the Right Topics for a Content Marketing Campaign
So, if commercial topics aren’t right for a content marketing campaign on a small e-commerce site, what should you write about? The answer is the exact opposite – you should write about topics without direct commercial angles. Here are a few types of articles that tend to work well for smaller e-commerce sites.
- Direct comparisons of two individual products
- Directions for fixing common problems with products
- Tips that can help products work better
The narrower and more specific an article’s topic is, the more likely the topic will be to rank well on Google because there won’t be as many competing websites with articles on that same topic.
When you write an article, try to sprinkle it with relevant keyword phrases that people would be likely to search for if they wanted to find content on that topic. A keyword research tool can be helpful here; it can show you keywords related to the main idea of your article along with the monthly search volume those keywords receive.
Before you publish an article, the final thing you should always do is search for the article’s main keyword on Google and read the articles that currently appear on the first page for that term. Are you sure that you’ve done a better job of covering that topic than your competitors have, or could you spruce the article up a little more by adding some additional information or an alternative point of view? Don’t click the “Publish” button until you can honestly say that your article is better than anything on Google’s first page.
How to Make Your Blog Content Generate Revenue
Reading this article, you’ve learned that the best way to generate traffic with a content marketing campaign if you have a newer e-commerce site is by writing about topics that don’t have direct commercial angles. You might be wondering, though, how you’re supposed to make money with that type of content. It’s actually not as difficult as you think.
- You need to make sure that your website has very strong branding. That way, people will remember your site after they’ve left it. When they’re searching for a product to buy – and your site shows up in the search results – they’ll remember the fact that they previously found helpful information in your blog.
- You should link to products from your blog posts whenever it makes sense to do so. There’s no need to use hard sales tactics when writing informational content. If people are interested, they’ll click the links to view what you’re selling – and in that way, your blog can become a direct source of revenue.
- Consider starting a mailing list and adding a signup form to your blog posts. When people join your mailing list, you can continue marketing to them after they’ve left your site. Offering a single-use coupon code is usually a good way to convince people to subscribe.
Even if you don’t write about commercial topics and don’t attempt to generate direct sales from your blog posts, a successful content marketing campaign can still have a positive impact on your website’s revenue in the long run. That’s because solid informational content generates organic backlinks from other websites, thus improving your site’s authority. One of the biggest factors that Google uses when ranking search results is the quality and quantity of the inbound links pointing to those sites from other websites. In other words, publishing helpful content in your blog is a great way to improve the rankings of your commercial pages, and any increase in organic traffic for your commercial content will always lead to a direct increase in revenue.
