Start a blog to set yourself above the rest

The eternal struggle with ecommerce is getting potential customers to visit your store.

Get more visitors and you'll get more sales.

The 1,000s of different marketing tactics are just different ways to attract attention, visits, and (hopefully) sales. The problem is that most of them require getting over an effort hill.

Social media is easy, once you have a following.

Email marketing is easy, once you have a list.

SEO is easy, once you have links.

Advertising is easy, once you have good creatives and a targeting list.

But when you're just getting started (or rebuilding a broken channel) it can be a huge hurdle to get going. Not impossible, just difficult.

That's why I recommend starting a blog for every Shopify store. Blogs also have a hill to get over but they come with a lot of benefits that show up on day 1.

Authority

Blogs give you a place to build authority that you control.

It's easy to make claims on your homepage or product page about your products, however most customers will see those as empty without evidence. You can (and should) get 3rd party reviews and endorsements but those take time and you are limited by how many you can get.

On the other hand if you have dozens of blog posts written on the topic from a variety of angles, that can help prove your expertise. Expertise that can be carried to every new product.

For example, if you've written about headphones and their sound, your headphone products would benefit from that authority. Then when you introduce a new speaker product, it immediately borrows much of that authority.

Findability

Blogs act as a way for people and bots (search, LLMs) to find your content.

I'm not going to sugar coat it. Getting found is increasingly difficult. On some platforms you'll have to struggle for years, just waiting for Lady Fortune to smile on you.

Write a halfway decent blog and over time you'll start to collect attention. Google for example, can't help itself when it comes across blogs. It loves fresh content, especially helpful content written by humans.

It'll still take time to make it big, but while that's happening you won't suffer in obscurity.

Attention focus

Even when the blog is small, you can use it as a way to focus attention.

Many stores forget to share their blog posts on social media which is a great way to get engagement.

Posting to social media has more of an impact when that attention is redirected somewhere through a link. Not everyone will click but some will and those people are the ones who are more interested in what you have to say.

Sending that attention to a specific place you control (your blog post) can help those people become more interested and engage with you more. Depending on the blog post, that could result in an email subscription or even a purchase.

Show you're real

It's getting harder and harder to tell the real people from the scammers from the bots. Something AI is only making worse.

You can prove you're real with a blog, with posts going back over-time, and a distinct style.

Some customers may never read any of your blog posts and that's ok. Just being able to see them and skim them can help them feel comfortable ordering. I know my scam-radar goes off when I see a generic-looking Shopify store, selling at low prices, and no content on their pages or blog.

Plus everything else about blogs

Then we can add in all the regular reasons people create blogs and do content marketing in general. You should be able to see why they are powerful tools for those stores who make them a part of their marketing plan.

Plus every Shopify store has the blog component built in. So it doesn't cost you anything, you just have to start using it.