Web In A Shell

It’s always nice to have a human face behind a brand or company. The same concept applies for an online retail store. If you have a store that is selling something you need to communicate to your customers. The best way to communicate and relate to them is through a retail blog. 

Communication – in the right way
It’s unfortunate that even to this day blogs are largely perceived as a personal log or diary online. This is far from the truth. A blog can be a powerful way to influence the minds of your customers. Besides this it helps position your brand in a much better manner. Plus with a blog you seem more approachable instead of just another website on the web. Customers are more assured that there is a human element involved and they tend to trust your brand more. 

Any niche
No matter what industry vertical or niche you belong to you can talk about everything under the sun through your blog. Blogs allow you to discuss opinions, trends and concepts as well as ideas with your customers. If your predictions about future trends are correct then customers will visit your blog more often – just to check out what’s new on the blog! Let’s say you own a clothing brand store online. You could talk about the latest trends in summer or spring fashion. Then subtly tie in your products with the trends. That way you are influencing the customer’s mind and soft selling your products as well. Your sales are more likely to improve through a blog. Customers hate to be told what to do. With a blog you are merely suggesting latest fashion trends and this is a powerful way to get a customer to like your products.

Personal touch – with professionalism
A blog is important for any online retail store in order to relate to the customer. Basically you want to appear to be just like your customer. However, at the same time your blog is representative of your brand so you need to keep that in mind while creating a blog. So while you will have a personal touch to your blog to appeal to the consumer you also need to maintain that element of professionalism and elusiveness to gain respect and credibility for your brand. Not having your bio posted on the retail blog is a critical mistake. Customers would like to know about you and your interests to connect at a human level. By not having a bio you appear as a faceless entity which makes a human connection difficult. Not sticking to your niche segment is another mistake because you are distracting the customer’s attention this way.

You maybe having a great looking blog but if you do not maintain it well enough it could well slip up on its success factor. Here are a couple of mistakes you need to avoid if you want your blog to really reach out to the audience.

Not including a biography
Most business blogs will typically have an ‘about us’ included in their site. However, if yours is more of a personal blog then there is no need to have such a section. But you still need to have a section that talks about yourself. The Internet has so much scope for anonymity that many users are skeptical when they see a blog without any author biography. Most visitors to your blog will definitely want to know more about you, your experience in the domain you are writing about etc. Not having a biography therefore can reduce your chances at getting more visitors into the blog.

Not having headlines
This is another common mistake that many blog owners do. They write pages after pages of text without including relevant headers along with it. Often your blog’s content headline can get you listed on search engine results and therefore it deserves the due amount of importance. Many blogs which are of a personal nature tend to use ambiguous and vague headings which are not as per the context of the subject. This might seem like a cool thing to do but it does not get you too many readers at the end. Readers do not have the time to go through the entire text to grasp its meaning. Having relevant and effective headings improves readability and page rankings to a large extent.

Using ambiguous links
Many blogs use anchor texts for their hyperlinks which are totally out of sync with the content. If you are leading your visitor to a particular section of your blog you need to mention what the section is about in the link. People hate to visit links which do not tell them where they are headed. They will just abandon your link and your blog – for good. Try using concise and relevant anchor text that describes the targeted page’s content well enough.

Highly detailed categories
Categories are meant to provide a broad based view of your products or listings. Many blogs make the mistake of making these categories too detailed. Doing so then makes the listings of categories too lengthy. Instead of doing that follow the structured approach of highlighting only the main product categories and using sub links to help users get to sub-categories.

Not sticking with the theme
Your blog has sustained the interest of readers simply because it deals with a particular theme and subject matter. If you start deviating from it on a regular basis and write on miscellaneous topics it will surely take away from your popularity. Try and write on as many related topics as you can about the central theme of your blog’s content.

You have just started a new blog and as the days go by you hope the traffic will too. However, weeks pass by and still traffic is down to a mere trickle. Anxious and worried your blog may never see the light of day? Here are some tricks to help get the traffic to your blog – quickly!

Content
If your blog is about a relevant topic then make sure the content on your blog gets updated ever so often. Else you risk having a stale blog that never gets read anyways. If you find it difficult to manually search for relevant content and update it on your site try using aggregators like RSS feeds etc. These use aggregator software to club highly relevant content from multiple sources and feeding it into your blog.

Link building
The next critical aspect of your blog is the page ranking it currently enjoys. A high page ranking will ensure a greater influx of visitors. The page ranking is directly proportional to the density of links on your blog. Make sure to invest time and money in link building activities. Procuring links from link farms is not a very good idea as most of the time this gets rejected as spam by the search engines.

Using channels
Channels are a great way to include link backs into your blog. There are plenty of channels available these days such as technorati, blogcatalog.com, mix, digg, propeller etc. These all facilitate comments from other users and also include backlinks to your blog.

Useful information
Instead of trying to promote something a useful article that talks about how-tos etc. will sustain more interest from customers. This way your blog has a better chance of being linked to sites like del.icio.us which is of much better standard compared to channels like digg.com etc.

SEO
SEO is another important aspect you need to consider if you ever want to receive traffic into your blog. Right from analyzing popular keywords searched by users, to using them adequately in the right density you need to make sure your blog is in the spotlight – always. Make sure the meta and title tags also have the keywords in them so as to facilitate easy searching and indexing by robots. You could either perform the SEO by yourself if you have the experience or else get it done through it a professional.

Installing widgets
Installing widgets is a great way track people visiting your blog. You could even post comments on your blogs to facilitate easier monitoring.

Translator plug-ins
Installation of such translator plug-ins can actually attract customers from other countries which will automatically increase the volume of traffic to your blog. Although the quality of translation is not that great the traffic inflows are very good.

Being active pays
It is most important to be proactive if you are the owner of a blog. Right from posting comments on other similar blogs to leaving link backs to your blog to spreading the word – it has to be done by you!