Why a blog is important for eCommerce growth - 5 key benefits

The business opportunities presented by an online shop are much more than most people realise.

Having an extension of your physical store online, or a niche online shopping cart with some Adwords or SEO to drive traffic is an awesome start - yet to really maximise your returns you should look to connect with, or create communities who are outside of your traditional reach.

The internet presents many different ways to achieve this. One is by regularly blogging on your website, creating useful content that links directly to products or pages on your website and which contain unique and useful content. For example a seller of fitness equipment might write regular blogs on how dumbells might be used by a niche part of their market, blogs categorised according to keyword research and linked to related products

The key benefits of this approach include:

• The more frequently you update your content, the more often search engines index your website, improving SEO
• Use of social media share buttons on your posts (as on products) means your visitors can share your content and push your content far into new audiences
• Smart use of blog content creates multiple pages per post, all of which will be indexed, cross referenced and positively impact SEO and traffic
• Use of 'reviews' and comments on blog posts will enable you to create communities within your own blog, which link to communities outside your blog and drive more new, and returning traffic
• Building a reputation as a thought leader in your industry instead of a 'shop' builds trust amongst your current and potential customers