Creating a blog on Shopify: How and Why?

The most obvious advantage of integrating a blog into your Shopify store is that it should encourage more sales. However, you may get some more happy surprises than just that.

A good blog helps business owners stay connected to their customers, encourages trust within their personal business community,  helps increase organic traffic and brand awareness, improves conversion rates, and lower bounce back rates.

Shopify's blog platform makes it fast and easy to create a collection of informative, high-quality posts to attract potential customers.

Why setting up a blog is good for business

Starting a blog can seem like an overwhelming task. There is so much to consider and many different factors that play into how your blog will be received by your customers. However, if done right, adding a blog to your Shopify store can have significant benefits such as improved brand awareness, increased traffic to your site, and more.

Shopify blogs are a great way to engage with customers, but they take time and effort to maintain. If you have the right tools in place and are committed to developing your store into an authority, users will be more likely to visit your store first when looking for related products.

Writing a blog yourself shows your customers you're serious about your business, and are willing to take the time to build a strong relationship with them. Twitter and Facebook may be great for keeping in touch on a more casual level, but having your own blog allows you to have deeper, more meaningful interactions with your customers. Long-form content is just as important as short-form social media posts.

When added to your homepage, Shopify's blogs provide extra value as it shows visitors that you care enough about your business to invest time by creating informative and interesting articles.

As well as all the great advantages above, websites that maintain their blogs tend to earn more revenue than websites that don’t. A blog gives you the opportunity to add new content and expand the ideas you have for your products, services and collections. Blogs also encourage trust, therefore increasing your conversion rates.

Having a way to communicate with your customers is essential to a successful brand—and engaging your audience by providing helpful information in the form of blogs is a great way to do it.

Writing a blog post

Now, you're probably thinking, "Shoot, blogging sure does sound hard". It's not! To set up your blog, go to the Shopify App Store and search for a blog template. They are super easy to install and should take less than 5 minutes. One that we recommend is ‘PageFly’ because there is a free plan available, plus you can change the design of more than just your blog posts, but your product pages, your homepage and your collection pages as you want.

Having said that, before you get started there are a couple of things to master - the type of content, making sure you’re using the right tone, and how to incorporate keywords.

Content type

Having a successful blog is highly dependent on the type of content that you’ll write.

Let’s say you’re running an e-commerce store selling your handmade jewellery. You’ll want your blog to follow this theme. Maybe you’ll write an article about how you personally create designs, and where your materials are sourced from. You could write about upcoming seasons, other designers you’re inspired by, or the general state of the jewellery-making industry with different trends.

If you’re selling a service, like a career coach, for example, then a blog is a great excuse to show off. You can talk about your past experiences, and add success stories from your past clients to encourage trust. Your blog can encourage someone to choose your business over another by how much commitment and knowledge you display on your website.

However, the best way to structure your blog content is to have a nice balance between serious articles and more lighthearted ones to show off your personality. By doing this you’re working on your personal branding which really sells these days. To do this, you can talk about your journey, what you’re looking forward to in the future, how you found your passion and why you decided to set up your store.

Remember: People like to purchase products or services from people they can relate to. Don’t be scared of showing off your personality!

Tone

Your blog is an area of your business for you to be yourself, and so blogs usually follow a friendly, down-to-earth tone of voice. Don’t be afraid of adding a joke here and there, or being a little tongue-in-cheek if it matches your personality.

You can, of course, have a more professional tone if you prefer, but each post should be consistent. Go with the style of voice you feel most comfortable with and stick with that. An inconsistent tone can sound a little jarring if someone is exploring several of your blog posts instead of reading just one.

Keyword planning and SEO

While you’re spending precious time planning and writing your blog you will want people to see your posts and click through to read them. One good way to gain organic traffic is to work on your rankings and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

There are many free keyword planning tools that you can use. Think about the subject of your blog post and think about some phrases that would be popular in that area.

Once you know how many people are generally looking up each of those keywords per month you can structure your blog post better and write about exactly what people are looking for. You can also get a tonne of different ideas from doing keyword research and a lot of the time those keywords will inspire more blog posts for the future.

Make sure that you’re not ‘keyword stuffing’ - this means writing a blog article only for the sake of adding keywords. Search engines will recognise you doing this and it might affect how often they display your blog posts to potential customers.

Take two or three of the keywords that you find and just make sure you’ve added each one into your post a few times each. Of course, this depends on how long your article will be, but you won’t want to repeat those keywords any more than five times.

Planning and being consistent

Another thing to think about when setting up your blog is consistency. Organic rankings for your blog, and therefore your store, will increase much faster if you’re posting often and consistently.

Don’t feel pressure to post something every day, or even every week. Think about how much time you can realistically spend writing, you could post an article once a month if it suits your schedule better, as long as you continue with it.

We think that posting once every week is a realistic timeline, while it will still give you the rankings and traffic results that you need.

Remember: Including a blog on your Shopify store will give you long-term results, it’s not a quick win. Stick with it!

Building a blog content strategy

One way to make writing and keeping your blog up to date is to create a Content Strategy.

A content strategy is basically a calendar for your articles. Being organised and knowing what’s coming up next will make it much easier to just sit down and write your article, instead of dealing with the stress of quickly and urgently having to make decisions and write a thousand words.

Come up with a list of potentially exciting blog article titles that would be appealing to both your target audience and to a search engine, as well as some subtitles and notes. Get your keyword research done before and all you’ll have to do is check your content strategy and get writing!

Steps of setting up your blog

Creating a blog on Shopify makes it easy to write and publish posts that can be featured in your homepage slider. With this in mind, you will want to create a blog within your store that is professional looking and offers interesting, relevant information.

When you first set up your Shopify Store you would have had a blog already set up called ‘News’. If you still have that, then you can use it and just change the name. If you no longer have your default blog, don’t panic, you can still set one up easily.

Firstly go to:

Online Store - Blog Posts - Add Blog

• You’ll then need to fill in your blog post title, and in the content field add the content for your post. Then in the Organisation section, select ‘Create a new Blog’ from the drop-down menu. In the Blog field add your Blogs Title and click save.

Tip: Enabling comments on your posts is another great way to engage with your audience, but remember that you’ll need to communicate and moderate those comments. If you think you have time to reply to one or two comments per post then definitely go for it.

Now we’ve created our first blog post we can add it to our home page and navigation menu so we maximize the amount of people that will see it.

In Shopify Admin you can go to the Navigation section and then decide where you’d prefer your Blog to display.

Ideally it will be in the main menu of your store in the header somewhere. You can also display your most recent posts on your homepage slider.

Best practices

In short, here are the things you should remember when setting up your Shopify Store Blog:

• Communicate and have fun with your audience, keep it light and friendly.
• Show off your personality, and see your blog as your personal brand.
• Don’t be spammy with your keywords, just include them a few times.
• Plan your posts and write consistently.
• Write content that your audience will learn from and find fun.

To sum up, have fun with your blog and explore how it will fit into your Store’s and personal branding. Writing a successful blog that will bring you high-quality organic traffic is easy, as long as you plan and include new posts a few times every month.