Blogging To Build Your Brand

The faceless eCommerce store is dying. You can no longer just list products for sale. You need to create a brand around your business. You need to add some kind of value to your business beyond just the products you list on your store. This is the missing piece of the eCommerce puzzle.

Most website owners understand they need traffic and conversion. But, they stop there. They keep going after more traffic but skip this third piece of the eCommerce puzzle which is called repeat business.

If you can create a relationship with your customers and provide an experience for them that they enjoy, they’ll come back and do business with you in the future and tell their friends about you. It’s the biggest opportunity for growth for most ecommerce businesses.

Creating this relationship is what I want to talk about and how to do it. The best way is through video, text and audio content. As I’ve said many times, people prefer to purchase from companies they know, like and trust. And when you establish yourself as more than just a company peddling a product, you give consumers more reason to purchase from you rather than your faceless competitors. This is the basic principal behind ecommerce branding.

Now, you might ask what exactly what is branding? Is it a particular color scheme, is it a logo, is it a name? It’s more than a sum of its parts. Its a feeling customers get when they associate with your store. And, that feeling is shaped by all the interactions they have with you in every facet of your business.

Some of the benefits of branding is that it fortifies you against the ever changing search engines or being dependent on one particular channel for business. If you build your brand and community and email list of customers and potential customers, you can drive your own sales.

You want people to get to the point where they are typing your brand or web address in their browser rather than searching for you in the search engines.

You will find that if you get people commenting on your blog posts or Facebook posts or following you on Twitter or Pinterest, you will get more sales when you send out an email.

Ok, now you know that building a brand is very important. But how do we do it, and what are the strategies we are using to engage the community and spread our brand across that market?

So, we are using a video blog and here are some of the benefits of video blogging. You get more face time with your community. The goal is to create a relationship with your customers and become more to them than just a store where they go to buy products. Become their friends.

Business is going more social. There are so many ways to communicate with people now and people expect it. If you aren’t doing this, they will buy from someone who is.

You have a chance to become so much more to people than just a place to buy self defense products. You have the opportunity to become part of their lives and world. Something they talk to their friends about and maybe share your videos and things you’ve said.

We’ll get into what kind of content to create in a little bit, but the point is you have an opportunity to connect with people and if you want to build an asset and make an impact on people’s lives then blogging for your store is the way to do it. And one other thing. Relationships are built by consistent relating. You become friends with people you consistently see and consistently relate with in your life. Right? So, consistency is key for blogs. Consistency is key for relationship building.

Now another reason blogging is so good for your store is because it helps with SEO. Each video blog post gives you at least four new links to your website and four new channels to rank in the search engines

Google is all about providing the best possible value to their users and they want the sites that they display in their search results to be up to date and have relevant products for what people are searching for.

Doing a weekly video blog helps with your overall SEO because it brings freshness to your site which is a factor in ranking. Freshness is definitely a part of Google’s algorithm.

Another thing is that you will get social signals. Social signals are another ranking factor. They are something that boosts you higher in the search engines. When Google is going through and trying to decide which pages are most relevant for which queries, it looks at all these things: off site, on site, freshness, social signals and you get those from blogging.

When you share your content on the social networks, people reshare it, they like it, they Tweet it, and they pin it. All this helps the overall SEO of your site.

Another thing is this medium – video – it can be easily transformed into other mediums. It can be transcribed and posted on your blog, the audio can be stripped out and uploaded to iTunes, and I will get to syndication in a second, but the thing to remember is that different people prefer to consume content in different ways. Some like to watch it, some like to read it and some prefer to listen to it.

Videos will also help you make sales. Blogs don’t seem like a sales pitch and people are comfortable with them. It makes it easy to give information about your products without seeming like you trying to sell them something. People will be happy and thankful to receive your content and you’re also able to sell them.