3 Ways to Promote Your Ecommerce Store with a WordPress Blog

When marketing an ecommerce store, the most common methods people use are ads and influencer marketing. Both methods can be very effective in helping you gain customers quickly. But the problem with these methods is that they are expensive and will become more expensive.

You will only continue to gain sales from ads and influencers if you continue to spend more money on them.

This is why you should also look into long-term marketing strategies like blogging.

With blogging you won’t get instant results as you do with influencers or ads. Most blogs take about 3 to 6 months at least to start bringing results. But in the long run, blogging will help you gain customers for years and will work out a lot cheaper.

Therefore, in today’s article, I am going to show you how to promote your ecommerce store with a WordPress blog (does not matter on which eCommerce builder your site is set up). It could be Shopify, Woocommerce, or another Shopify alternative. This strategy will work even if you move from Shopify to WooCommerce or another platform.

I will also share with you my selections of the best tools and WordPress plugins you can use to simplify things and drive maximum business performance, just like the best ecommerce marketing agencies do.

Research and create blog posts your audience wants to read:

You’re only going to be able to promote your ecommerce store’s products with your blog if the right people are reading your posts. So, you should take great care in writing the right content and then optimizing it to attract people who want to read it.

You can easily find out the content your audience wants to read by researching keywords (relevant to your products) that people are typing in on search engines. (Or you can always hire an agency like OutreachMama who can help you with researching keywords, blogger outreach and promoting your content/products to ease your work and focus on sales)

For example, let’s say you run an ecommerce website where people can buy flowers, and you want to attract people who will buy more flowers for a wedding. You just use a keyword research tool such as SerpStat and look up words like ‘flowers for wedding’.

These tools will then show you the search volume for the keywords you typed in and keywords similar to these that are frequently searched. Browse through these keyword suggestions and pick the ones that you could write blog posts on.

Some of the suggestions that look good are ‘how much do flowers for weddings cost’, ‘type of flowers for weddings’ and ‘flower arrangements for weddings’.

You could work on these keywords and come up with titles like ‘X Best Flower Arrangements for Weddings’. After you come up with a title that has these keywords you can write a blog post on it. Make sure you place the keywords several times throughout the article in the right places as this can help it rank higher on search engines like Google. The post you write should be at least 1,700 words long as posts that are longer than this rank higher on Google.

And also get shared more.

So, writing longer posts will get you more traffic from both search and social media. If you want to get even more traffic from social media, you can use a tool like Buzzsumo to figure out what type of content gets shared more.

Just type in the keyword here and it will show you which articles got more shares and on which social networks. You can also click on each article and analyse them further.

After that you can follow the same tactics used on the posts that got more shares on your posts too. You can easily optimize your posts for social media sharing, by using a good plugin plugin.

For more tips on writing posts that are optimized for search and social, checkout my post on How to Write the Perfect Blog Posts.

You can also use tools like Clearscope to optimize your posts for SEO. It has a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to modify content directly on your blog if it runs on WordPress. This is highly beneficial for WooCommerce stores. If you want to take advantage of plugins like these you should think about moving your store from platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify to WooCommerce using a service like LiteExtension.

Advertise products on your blog:

Once you follow the above tips and write the posts, your blog will begin attracting people who will be interested in your products. Therefore, the next thing you must do is advertise your products in your posts.

While offering the solutions to your readers’ biggest problems, just link out and suggest relevant products they can purchase. The more relevant the products are to the topic of the post, the better they will convert.

An example of a company that does extremely well in using its blog to sell its products is Zappos.

Take a look at their post The Best Winter Running Gear.

Throughout the post you will find that they link out to products in their ecommerce store. This makes it easy for people reading the post to find products they could use.

So, every time you write a post go through your online product catalogue and promote relevant products in it. You can simply just link out to them or you can embed ads with call to action and copy too.

Capture leads who aren’t ready to purchase:

Even if you write the best blog posts and advertise the most relevant products in those posts, the number of people who buy your products will be very low.

This is because most of the website traffic you get will be composed of warm and cold traffic. Hot traffic, i.e. people who are ready to buy, will be at a minimum.

Traffic that’s less than hot consists of people who want to buy your product but are in no hurry. Many of these people will be interested in purchasing later. This is why you should take steps to stay in touch with them.

You can easily do this by converting them to email subscribers or social media followers. This way you can continue nurturing them with more content and then promote your products at the right time. And eventually, when they are ready to buy, they will do so from you and not your competitors.

This can have a massive positive impact on your blog’s conversion rate.

One ecommerce store that gets this right is Bed Bath and Beyond. If you visit their blog, you will notice that they have a newsletter sign up form at the bottom of every post.