Welcome to eCommerce on Shopify. It is vital to know about Shopify before starting your business on Shopify. There are a few nuances that many of us miss while starting the business. I am going to discuss one such benefits in this article today – the benefits of blogging within Shopify itself.
Table of contents
The main blog benefits
The ultimate aim of having a blog is to promote your content and business. If your business is on Shopify, you must be trying to get more traffic to your Shopify store to sell more. Content marketing is the main reason why most of us take up blogging. I must agree that this is a very significant step that most of the Shopify store owners should do to try and gather more traffic. Blogging rocks!
Brand awareness
Millions of blogs are written and published daily. Most of these direct towards promoting some business or the other. Content marketing is going to help any digital product, and our Shopify store is no different.
Blogging is how we try to market our content and reach out to more probable buyers. However, our blogs need to be directed towards our business to be most effective.
Free traffic through organic search and social media
Paid ads can be very costly, mainly for startups with low budgets, and blogging remain one of the best ways to drive free traffic
If you theme is SEO friendly, and you know how to write articles that grab the reader attention and technically organized, there is no doubt that you will start seeing traffic coming form search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, …
In addition to that, high quality articles will have an impact for some readers who will share the article in social media with their friends and family, which will let you gain more backlinks and more esposure.
Why should I blog on Shopify?
When we want to promote our Shopify store through blogging, we have quite a few choices, like WordPress, Blogger, and a few other platforms. Most of the fellow Shopify business owners are using one of these platforms to write their blogs on and are trying to promote their store on them. A few are also successfully doing that.
However, the biggest drawback that these websites or blogging platforms have is that they are not precisely made for showcasing or promoting either your Shopify store or your Shopify products. The best you can do on WordPress is to install a plugin and try to manage your Shopify store and products through those plugins. That help, no doubt but are still not indigenous. These external websites fail to focus on Shopify entirely.
So, what is the way out? The solution to this problem is to blog on Shopify itself. Shopify has a blogging capability within itself, and that eradicates the need of using an external platform to blog for your Shopify store. Let’s now look into the various features that a Shopify blog has and later in this article we will talk about the benefits of blogging within Shopify itself.
Blogging competences of Shopify
To start to blog on Shopify and check the capabilities a Shopify blog has, you must enable your Shopify store’s blog. To do that, please perform the following as instructed:
- Go to your Shopify admin area.
- Click Online Store in the left menu bar.
- In the sub-menu, click Blog Posts.
- At the top, click on Manage Blogs.
- In the top right, click the button Add Blog.
- Choose a relevant name for your blog.
- Add the blog to your Shopify store’s navigation menu.
After doing the above, you will now have a blog on your Shopify store where you can start blogging.
The text editor on the Shopify blog is breathtaking with many content formatting options. You can add images, videos, external links and also format the text in a variety of ways. The editor can be compared to any other text editor that other blogging platforms have.
You can also supervise the comments on your blog posts with the Shopify blog comment moderation capabilities. You can let the comments publish automatically too or even stop readers from commenting totally. It all depends on how you want to interact on your Shopify blog. You must publish at least one post before you can enable comment moderation.
One of the pro elements in your Shopify blog is that you can show only an excerpt of your entire blog and put a link so that the interested reader can click on it to read the whole blogpost. It will enable you to put many posts on one page of your blog and also let the reader choose what he wants to read and browse only to that particular post. It is an advanced feature which many blogging platforms do not have by default.
Benefits of blogging within Shopify
Having the blog on Shopify is easy for both you and your customers. It is easy to handle one platform rather than multiple platforms, and hence, you have less in your plate to manage every single day. For your customers too, it is easy as they can get everything in one platform. There is no need to click on links put on one platform (a WordPress site, for example) to land on your Shopify store or the product page. I think this is the biggest benefit of all.
Apart from this, you can promote only one domain on social media. You do not need to endorse two different domains which can create confusion in your buyers.
When someone lands on your blog and spends time on it, it is as good as having that person on your Shopify store. The longer one stays reading your blog, the better it is for your blog and your Shopify store’s ranking. Now, customers do not come to your store only to buy products, but to also read your content. It is a direct value addition which the customers love and enjoy.
Showcase your products on your blog
Selling products or services is the main activity for any eCommerce business, and one for the main benefits of blogging on Shopify is the ability to showcase your products either by :
Anchor link
An anchor is a piece of text which marks the beginning and/or the end of a hypertext link. When writing your article in Shopify blog, you can add a link to your collection page, product page or any link you desire to redirect the readers who clicks the link.
Anchor links is one of the oldest and one of the greatest ways to redirect the traffic from your articles to your products on Shopify
Buy it now button
Buy Buttons help you add your products to your external website and blog posts. They also make purchasing the products easier for customers by removing the need to go to a separate page to finalize their order. You can embed the buy now button HTLM code directly to your articles, preferably between your paragraphs.
Learn more about the buy it now button on Shopify
Featured products in the sidebar
A sidebar in your blog articles, let you featured your recent articles, recent comments, search bar, embed a custom HTML code, add the newsletter subscribe box and most important for your eCommerce store, featuring your best products.
But do you need coding knowledge to showcase your best sellers in the blog sidebar ? Some themes like Plak and Grass have this features built-in, if your theme doesn’t have this feature out of the box, you will need to hire a developer
Conclusion
I hope this helps you in understanding the benefits of blogging within Shopify. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch. Hit the comment section and I will reply to you without fail.
[yasr_visitor_votes]
Thanks for the tip, I really love your Plak Theme blog template
thank you Cathy, we strive to make the best templates for Shopify store owners to get the maximum visitors possible and to increase conversion rate 🙂
I completely forgot about adding blog posts to my Shopify, thanks for sharing this article
you’re welcome Laila 🙂