Your ecommerce blog content isn’t just useful for improving your search engine ranking. It can also inform and educate your prospective customers. This engages them and helps them make informed purchase decisions. So if you’re still struggling to engage your site visitors through your ecommerce blog, here’s how you can create more engaging content:
1. Analyze Your Competition
What kind of content are they creating? Which topics seem to drive the most engagement? Are they using lots of studies and stats to support their claims? Or are they creating lots of visuals to engage their readers? Are they being promotional or more informational? You need to be able to answer all these questions when analyzing your competitors’ content strategy.
Use tools like BuzzSumo to analyze the top-performing content of your top competitors. You can enter the domain name of your competitor in the search bar and then discover their most shared blog posts. It’s best if you run a search only on competitors who have a blog, since the goal is to analyze their blog content.
The tool lets you see the number of engagements across various social networking channels and the total content shares for each blog post. Based on your findings, you should have a clearer idea what kind of topics you should cover and how you can create more engaging blog posts.
In the example above, you can see that the Ulta Beauty blog’s top-shared content is a guide on using color correcting concealer. This suggests that the blog readers engage better with educational and informational content. So a competitor brand could try creating educational and informational blog posts to engage a similar type of audience.
2. Create Original Featured Photos
Visuals can be engaging. They can also immediately attract your blog readers and compel them to read more. That’s why you need original and high-quality featured photos on your blog posts to engage your readers. You don’t necessarily have to hire an in-house graphic designer to help you with this. There are several tools you can use to create original graphics or edit relevant images for your blog post featured photo.
- Canva – Canva is an easy-to-use tool that helps you create original graphics and images for blog posts and socialmedia posts. There are tons of pre-designed templates that you can easily edit for your posts. But you can also create a new design from scratch using the abundance of backgrounds, icons, and fonts.
- PicMonkey – You can also use tools like PicMonkey to edit your photos and turn them into featured blog post images. PicMonkey lets you upload the photo you wish to edit and then use basic editing features like cropping, exposure adjustment, color correction, etc. You can then add a text to the image and choose from a wide range of fonts to complete the featured image.
- Snappa – There’s also Snappa, which offers extensive design options, but is a bit limited in terms of free usage. You can only download five designs in a month under the free plan. The good news is that even the paid plans aren’t expensive, starting from $10 a month. You can access more than 50,000 photos and 3,500 graphics as well as hundreds of fonts to design your featured image.
Aside from these three tools, you can also check out this list of image-creation tools compiled by BigCommerce. Before you start creating your blog post featured images, you need to remember a few things. First of all, make sure the photo or graphic is relevant to the topic. You should also use simple and clean images that won’t obstruct the text. It’s crucial that you keep the font style consistent to maintain a uniform look throughout your blog posts.
3. Use Lots of Images
Adding plenty of images to your blog posts can significantly engage your audience and encourage them to share the post. In fact, BuzzSumo conducted a study on more than a million articles in 2015. They found that articles that had an image every 75-100 words were shared twice the amount of times articles with fewer images were shared.
This means that if you want to create more engaging content for your ecommerce blog, you need to add as many relevant images as possible to every article. If you’re writing an article on a list of products for a certain purpose, for instance, make sure you include high-quality images of all the products in the list. And if you’re publishing guides or tutorials, make sure you include photos, illustrations, or screenshots to depict the different steps.
The Hobby Lobby blog posts are excellent examples of this tactic in action. Since their posts are mostly DIY-related, there are a lot of vivid, high-quality images in between small blocks of text. The texts are also easy to read, neatly organized in bulleted lists to get the instructions across clearer.
4. Create Infographics
Infographics are a must for any type of blog. They can help relay information in a format that’s easier to process, driving engagement along the way. In fact, Venngage interviewed more than 300 marketers and found that infographics and other original graphics seem to be the most engaging even among other types of visuals. 41.5% of respondents said that these types of visuals are the most engaging.
Again you don’t need to hire an in-house graphic designer for this. Here are some tools you can use for creating high-quality infographics even without any experience:
- Piktochart – Piktochart is an online infographic creator and is very easy to use. You can choose from hundreds of pre-designed templates, which you can then customize to create original infographics. There are tons of charts, maps, icons, and photos that you can use for customizing your design.
- Infogram – You can also use Infogram, which has a drag-and-drop editor that’s fairly simple to use. You can choose from a wide variety of interactive charts and maps to visualize your data and turn it into something engaging.
- Venngage – Venngage is also another good option. It lets you create infographics in only a few steps. You just need to select a template, add charts and visuals to it, and then customize the design. You can customize the fonts and change colors to come up with something completely original.
5. Interview Influencers
People trust recommendations from influencers almost as much as those from their friends. Which is why influencer marketing has become a popular marketing tactic for businesses across all sectors.
In addition to having influential bloggers and social media personalities promote your products on social networks and blogs, you can also leverage their influence to engage your own blog audience.
Interview relevant influencers or feature their expertise in your future blog posts. Since people look up to influencers as experts, this can add a lot of value to your blog post. You will be able to engage your existing readers. Plus, you can also drive the influencers’ audiences to your blog when the influencers share the news of the interview or feature with their followers.
Ulta Beauty sets a fine example by creating a roundup post of beauty influencers, who share their tricks to maintain curly hair using one of the brand’s products. Micro-influencers like Jasmine Rutledge and India Batson were part of the roundup post.
You already know that influencers can effectively improve your ecommerce ROI. So featuring them in your content can do an excellent job of engaging your audience.
You can then add these images on your Instagram, where users can view the details of each product featured in the photo with micro-influencers and directly visit the product page. This will help boost ecommerce engagement and conversion.
6. Accept Guest Posts
Sometimes you don’t even have to create engaging blog posts yourself; you can let others create them for you. Start accepting blog post contributions from guest writers and bloggers and you should be able to supply your readers with fresh, engaging content on a regular basis. This is especially important since it’s not always easy to brainstorm topic ideas and spend several hours creating a unique blog post.
Many of the blog posts you find on the Home Depot blog were written by contributors. They’re all high-quality pieces with useful guides and instructions that the blog’s readers will value. It’s easy to see that the company takes their time in carefully vetting people who wish to contribute to their blog.
Conclusion
These tips should be able to help you in optimizing your current blog post strategy and create more engaging content for your ecommerce blog. It’s important to make sure that each piece is as informational as possible so that your readers thoroughly engage with it. Avoid publishing new posts just for the sake of it. Each post should have a clear purpose and be of some value to your target audience – whether it helps them use a hair care product more effectively or gain better decorating ideas.
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