Any online enterprise needs all the traffic it can get. Quality targeted traffic is the mainstay of all e-commerce businesses. Therefore adding a regular, content rich and highly relevant blog to your existing website will, over a period of time, undoubtedly increase your visitor numbers and probably your page rank. Google simply loves to see fresh content on a website, particularly if that content contains plenty of internal site links and it appears on a daily or even weekly basis.
Blogging is also an easy and foolproof way to promote your brand or your products. Blogging costs from nothing to very little – nor is it that time consuming. Blogs are also relatively easy to set up and you don’t have to be a professional writer to make them successful, just write about what you know best but avoid making your blog too personal or ‘folksy’.
A blog can be created almost instantly, and there are plenty of resources that not only get blogs free and immediate traffic, but can help them look properly designed as well. They also have the potential to become lucrative in their own right.
One of the easiest, and indeed fastest, ways to make some extra money from the blog on your site is to add a few affiliate links that sit well with the style and content of your main site. If you can set up a niche blog, using specialist blogging software and regularly fill it with well-written, entertaining and informative copy you stand a good chance of improving your customer base and even earning a useful additional income.
Blogs can even be used as a convenient way to test your e-commerce potential on the internet. Blogs are easy to set up, easy to manage, and take very little time or effort and Google loves blogs. You may even start with a blog to get a page rank then add your main e-commerce software in due course when you have a good page rank and plenty of visitors.
It is much easier and quicker to get listed with a specialist subject blog than with a standard website. In addition you can soon get your blogs read worldwide, by registering with Feedburner, who will distribute your blogs by daily RSS feeds.
One of the easiest ways to set up your own blog is with a dedicated blogging software package called “Wordpress”. This software is free and can be downloaded but to do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements. WordPress is completely customisable and can be used for almost anything from a simple blog to a mini-portal.
WordPress features include:
Plenty of professionally designed templates and themes to choose from
Control Panel for you to fully control your site configuration and content
Allows users to comment on articles
Spam protection
Hundreds of plug-ins to choose from, developed by a large community of developers and extremely easy to install
A forum to help you get used to WordPress and to swap ideas with other bloggers
Blogging has been shown to be such a highly effective marketing tool that almost every large company with a web presence now has a blog; often used in conjunction with social networking sites. So don’t get left behind – start blogging
