Business Calcium Blog

There is this enduring myth about eCommerce that all it takes to get an online business going is a webpage and products to sell. In other words, it should be easy money. Anyone who’s toiled for an eCommerce company knows the reality.

Online business is no different than business in person. It commands about the same resources, manpower and facilities to run even a modest-sized operation online as it does with a storefront. And this says nothing of the long hours, endless work and blood, sweat and tears that it takes to produce any sales over the Internet. In fact, eCommerce is often more work for less pay, especially starting out.

With resources stretched thin, there may be a certain temptation for an eCommerce firm, particularly a start-up, to be as austere as possible, to forego any activities that appear unnecessary to the immediate fiscal good of the company. But if there’s one thing any online business should be sure to keep off the chopping block, it’s blogging.

Blogging matters
Any company can benefit from having an engaging, well-written blog, and the basic benefits are the same for any firm, be it eCommerce or not.

Essentially, a company’s blog is its calling card to the online world, an instant channel of communication.

Done well, a blog can generate significant traffic, interest in a company and, ultimately, conversions and sales. It shows transparency, intelligence and availability and a blog is a powerful tool for a business to engage new customers, build a brand and, most importantly, increase revenue. It also has tremendous SEO value, helping your website appear higher in organic searches.

For a company attempting to sell products over the Web, the stakes with having a blog become higher. So much of whether or not a company can sell online hinges on it creating credibility with visitors to its site. No one wants to buy from what they judge to be a shady website that may or may not deliver products. A blog helps an eCommerce company show it has knowledgeable employees, not just some phantom site and a warehouse of goods. A blog is far from the only method for creating trust for sales, but it goes a long way.

How to start blogging
It’s easy to get started. An excellent Blogsessive article from October 2009 offers critical questions prior to launch. On the technical end, consider setting up the blog as a sub-domain of your site, rather than a page of it or on a third-party site like Blogspot.com (which will instantly kill that desired credibility.) A sub-domain works best for SEO.

There are a lot of challenges with blogging starting out, probably more to remember than can be listed here. The truth is, some lessons are best learned through experience. With that said, here are five basic tips:

1. Write the blog originally and well. If this is cumbersome, hire a writer or outside company to manage the blog. Original, compelling content is perhaps the single biggest determinant of telling if a blog is successful.
2. Commit to posting every weekday for the foreseeable future. The posts don’t need to be more than a few hundred words long, but fresh material every weekday will keep readers coming back and more and more new readers finding the blog.
3. Along with writing, utilize social media like Twitter or Facebook to promote the blog and strive to get other sites to link to posts. All of this is about generating referral traffic, which provides bigger spikes in activity early on than search engines or direct traffic.
4. Read other bloggers in your niche and comment on their work. They’ll do the same for you. Building relationships with other bloggers may be the most important factor in creating a successful blog.
5. Be patient. It may take months to get ranked by Google and attract readers. But if you’re doing everything above, you should be on your way to good things.

Happy blogging!