Table of Contents
From enterprise corporations to even the smallest of businesses, blogging has become an expectation for just about anyone looking to sell products and services online.
While keeping up your ecommerce site’s blog may seem like somewhat of a chore, it’s impossible to deny the the benefits of blogging such as…
• The ability to tell a story and get readers attached to your brand
• Elaborate on the benefits and power of your products beyond the sales page
• The ability to present your business as a helpful, knowledgeable resource in your field versus just another sales pitch
That being said, it can be rather difficult to assess the success of your blog and how it contributes to your sales as a whole without knowing what to look for. After all, the ROI for your research and writing alone can be incredibly hard to measure unless you’re carefully tracking the right metrics.
Assessing the effectiveness of your blog should be based on hard numbers rather than your instincts. For starters, you need to understand how the following metrics may be impacting your blog’s performance and subsequently your on-site sales.
Crunching Customer Data
First and foremost, you should ensure that your customer data drives the content of your blog. Rather than trying to constantly work backwards, you should use the following metrics as means of influencing content-related decisions:
• Which products are your best-sellers; you should strive to create content surrounding popular items versus trying to push something that isn’t selling
• Who are your most dedicated and satisfied customers; these leads are prime brand evangelists and represent perfect outreach candidates for testimonials
• How your traffic is getting to your store; if you find that certain pieces of content perform better than others in regard to how your leads perform, (how-to’s or review pieces, for example) you should primarily focus on creating those pieces
Breaking down your customer data is crucial but often misunderstood. If you really want to understand what makes your customers tick, a data scientist course may very well be the key to taking your blog to the next level.
Dissect Your Design
Visual content and aesthetics play a huge role in the performance of your blog. From the placement of your calls-to-action and imagery to your color scheme and beyond, the seemingly subtle touches of your design can ultimately make or break your blog. If you have doubts about whether or not you’re ticking the boxes in terms of visuals, metrics such as bounce rate and time on page can help you figure out if your visuals are actually encouraging readers to stick around.
Post Frequency and Length
Determining “how much” content to produce is a problem plaguing many ecommerce bloggers. On one hand, regular blogging drives more traffic and long-form blog posts are attractive to Google; on the flip side, such an approach to content requires more attention and resources. Conversely, shorter posts are easier to craft but tend to create fewer links. Finding a balance between the two requires you to assess your resources and respective content budget.
Take a good look at your analytics to figure out which of your posts are performing best and use them as a template for future content. You may be surprised that your shorter posts actually perform better and therefore you can beef up your content production accordingly.
Boosting your ecommerce blog more than likely doesn’t represent an entire redesign of your site, but rather some small tweaks here and there. By crunching the numbers and truly understanding why your blog might be under-performing, you can have peace of mind as you make changes accordingly.
UI/UX Consultant, Photoshop, XD, SketchApp, Product Designer, Website Designer, Mobile App Designer, Expert WordPress Developer. For web/mobile design and wordpress development related projects please contact me at dibakar@themepurpose.com
