How to Create a Blog on a Website and Attract an Audience

A blog on a commercial site has become an important element in the strategy of promotion and interaction with buyers in recent years. While the goal of any e-commerce site is to generate visitors to sell a product, there are many reasons why a blog is an important step towards achieving that goal.

Advantages of a blog on a commercial site

In an increasingly competitive environment, a quality blog can be an effective tool to attract new customers and make a brand stand out from other companies. To understand why you need a blog, it is important to know all its advantages.

Building a brand. Blogging allows the company to show what it is, how it can help its customers in choosing how well and deeply understands the topic.

If we are talking about a new brand, potential customers may not know about it, so information traffic will attract an audience to your site and introduce you to the products and the company itself.

Positioning the company as an expert in its field. How you talk about your products and how fully you disclose additional information about it affects the perception of the business by customers. Many companies use a blog to position themselves as industry experts. By posting content that contains helpful tips, tricks, and how-tos, people will turn to the tips from your blog, even if they haven’t bought anything yet.

Growth in traffic and leads. Information traffic is a great way to grow visitors. If your content is relevant to the niche and product you are selling, as well as user requests, this will give a boost to increase traffic to the site.

By blogging, search engines see that you regularly update your site and post relevant information, so your site’s rankings can improve not only for informational pages, but also for the commercial section. Visitors who visit your blog have the potential to become buyers.

Acquisition and retention of a loyal audience. To maintain the loyalty of your audience, you need to establish communication with it. A blog can be a great platform for this and is an effective marketing tool. The more visitors understand who you are, the more willing they are to do business with your company.

Opportunities to describe your products or services in detail. Usually, the commercial sections of the site contain small descriptions of the product so as not to distract visitors from the main goal of the catalog page – the purchase of the product. But many customers want to better understand which company they should choose. And it is the blog that allows you to talk in detail and in an accessible language about:

• your product
• catalog novelties
• product differences
• comparison with other products from this area

Availability of an additional free marketing platform. Blogging is an affordable marketing tool. Of course, for some materials it may be necessary to attract additional funds – for example, for placement on third-party sites, but in the future the blog will provide a constant stream of organic traffic.

It is also important to remember: For stable and reliable operation of the site – you need high-quality VPS hosting

Some articles may remain relevant for a long time and attract more and more visitors, and on your part it will only take time to create and publish the material.

Support for interaction between the website and the company’s social networks. Blog materials can be published in the company’s communities on social networks, as well as adding buttons for sharing on the articles themselves. This makes it possible to distribute your content through social media profiles, organically growing your business and attracting an additional audience.

Stages of creating a blog

It is not enough just to create a blog on the site. To achieve the goal of attracting and retaining an audience, you need to create high-quality and useful content. Next, we will tell you how to achieve the desired result.

The content strategy for filling the blog should include topics of articles that are relevant and useful to potential customers, which will allow you to actively attract a new audience.

First of all, you should answer the following questions:

• Who is the target audience for your content?

It is important to clearly understand for whom you are writing texts in order to speak the same language with your target audience.

• What problems will you help your audience solve?

Any product is aimed at solving certain problems for customers. Content, in turn, gives users the opportunity to understand these problems and help with their solution.

In aggregate, you help customers from two sides: with the help of content, you bring them closer to the problem and how to solve it, thereby making them more qualified in choosing, and on the other hand, you give them the opportunity to purchase a product that solves this problem.

• What makes you unique?

Most likely, your competitors are selling a product very similar to yours. Therefore, it is necessary to convey to the buyer why you are better than your competitors, or what makes you different from them.

• What content format are you planning to focus on?

Your blog may contain different materials: long reads, short instructions with an emphasis on graphic materials, video content, etc. The choice of format depends primarily on your capabilities and on the specifics of the business.

Based on the formats you choose, you can plan how often you can publish new content and how much budget you need.

• How will the materials be prepared and published?

Here you should decide who will be writing, creating and posting content.

How to evaluate the effectiveness of a blog

There are many different metrics to measure how visitors interact with your blog. But in order to find out the effectiveness, you need to understand which metric is important and in what situations, as well as what measures need to be taken to improve the situation.

It is important to understand how engaged your audience is in reading your blog, as well as how your blog affects customers, purchases, and revenue potential.

Audience engagement can be determined by monitoring the following metrics:

• The total number of readers. How many visitors read your blog articles.
• View depth. How many pages users visit on average per visit. This indicator will help to find out what percentage of visitors after reading the article continues to interact with other site content, and how many people are limited to reading only one article.
• New website visitors whose first point of interaction was a blog article. The indicator allows you to evaluate the growth of the site’s audience and the percentage of new visitors that the blog helped to attract.
• Average time to read an article. Determined for each individual blog page and reflects the average time visitors spend on a particular article.
• The average page scroll rate of an article. Shows which parts of the page users skip more often, how many people scroll through it to the end.

The effectiveness of a blog in increasing conversions and the number of buyers can be analyzed based on the following indicators:

• Achieving the goal of subscribing to the site’s newsletter or filling out a form in a pop-up window. These achievements allow you to expand the list of e-mail for mailing lists, that is, the number of potential customers.
• Tracking buyers of products whose first point of interaction with the site was a blog article.

As a result of evaluating these indicators, you will determine which articles are the most interesting to readers and allow you to convert the reader into a buyer, and further update them, prepare materials in their likeness, highlight the main attractive points in the articles and follow them.

You can also conduct experiments on different pages with the subsequent evaluation of the metrics listed above to determine which forms, interaction elements are more beneficial for sales, and which, on the contrary, repel potential buyers.

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