Considered to be an indispensable factor in an E-Commerce business, website traffic has to have a constant flow of customers.  One of the most effective ways to maintain a dependable and steadfast flow of customers is through a search engine optimized E-Commerce blog.  Not just for jest, but truly Google loves blogs since most visitors do not look out for products, on the contrary, they search for solutions. Writing articles that are customized to popular trending search terms, guides people to get your store; who need your products but are not aware of their existence.

The study has revealed:

• Over 50 %, and growing, of blog readers, regularly shop online
• The average company blog generate 60% more traffic to its site
• 435% more indexed pages are essential to help you rank in Google.

Maintaining a high-quality with a regularly updated blog could be a challenge. Surprisingly the most creative writer can sometimes run out of ideas. Luckily, you need not to have to rely completely on fresh inspiration to get your content ideas. There are systematic techniques in place that you can put to use for generating ideas perpetually for your E-Commerce blog. Go through them:

1) Extend Your Scope of E-Commerce Blog Ideas:

Essentially, you need to strike a balance between blogging about products and more general topics related to your strength that is your profile. You will find two benefits; first, your visitors will appreciate your unbiased information on the issues and assume that your product blog postings are reasonably fair-minded. Second, broadening your topics beyond your products gives you more scope to elaborate the subject matter for writing which significantly simplifies the problem of finding fresh content ideas.

By broadening your topics, that throws open complete SEO net, to get inward traffic which, however, may not know about your products, but yet continuing to research on the topics closely that is related to your offerings of products or services is a positive sign of development. These newcomers are noteworthy in terms of expanding and determining your customer base. The broader subjects also increase your brand’s appeal to your repeat customers as well as leads.

While writing about your products, ideally leave the heavy promotion to your sales and listing pages. Your blog posts should help readers realize how your products meet their needs. For instance, you could even write about underused features of your products and their benefits. Alternatively, you could even write about creativity and new uses for your products or about more effective ways of using them. Think over it. Another approach is writing a “how to” post about an interest of your visitors that shows by using your products making the process more efficient or convenient

Action Taken

• Brainstorm at least a dozen blog ideas, spontaneously.
• Use a keyword search tool to check if any of them have any search traffic.
• Integrate and categorize the ideas with the highest search volume and low to medium competition to your editorial calendar, in that order.

2) Use Customer Reader Feedback

Make a note of commonly asked questions in E-Mail correspondence from your E-Mail contact list of members and prospective customers. Owing to their extreme relevance to your readership, blog posts directly addressing these issues can become hugely popular. By the same token, look for questions commonly discussed or FAQs in your blog comments. Thus ideally, create customized content to their feedback would be an easy way to keep them engaged with your site.

Action Steps

Here are some of the steps to efficiently generate E-Commerce blog ideas from customer feedback:

• Put all of your blog contents into a spreadsheet, depending on how much engagement you get on a weekly or monthly basis.
• Comments that are irrelevant (like self-promotions and debates between customers that are not related to the article) can be deleted.
• To categorize the remaining comments, use a drop-down list with your blog sections.
• If you are running out of blog ideas, choose a piece of feedback from the spreadsheet to write about the topics.

3) Examine Unanswered Questions on Your Competitor’s Blog

Seek out and examine minutely whether there are any common issues with your competitor’s readership that are unanswered yet. Make a list of these questions which are in the comments on your competitor’s posts. These can be published in your blog posts. It is a good idea to leave a comment on your competitor’s blog posts where these questions are raised with a link back to your answers.

Action Steps

The following action to generate E-Commerce blog ideas from your competitors would work out well:

• Identify your top competitors for web traffic as they are likely to be different from your business’s direct competitors.
• Research and Google several keyword phrases that you are targeting and then look for the websites that appear the most on the first ranking pages.
• Conduct a detailed review of the sections of the competitors’ blog that you also write about. Then add questioning and critical comments to the spreadsheet that we stated in the earlier section above.
• Check for any other specific flaws in their content.

Any time it is an effective method to develop a marketing strategy based on your competitors’ weaknesses; which will give more leads to your E-Commerce blog and outrank them in search, eventually.

4) Develop Tips, Hints & Subheadings of Your Earlier Posts

Look for more content within the content; the seeds will germinate into better content than your previous one. Browse through your past tips, lists, and posts for turning a specific tip or list item into a new E-Commerce blog idea of design. Continue this with sub-headers where each can serve as the topic of a new article. You can even do a précis, paraphrase or reword sentence by sentence to find the seed for yet another fresh blog topic that makes interesting reading.

Benefits of Creating New Posts from Existing Posts

Scores of benefits can be experienced when you take a cue from your existing post.  They are:

• There is a provision to add more internal links between similar articles. Typically, internal links are links to other content on your site. Internal links reduce your bounce rate by giving visitors more options to explore by improving your website’s overall search engine optimization process.
• Blog posts enhance the possibility on smaller elements such as boosting the morale of diffident customers by providing additional information which would be required to instill confidence for making a purchase.
• Publishing content that explores the various features of your topic can be of great help in making your blog a reliable source for consumers who want to learn more about your niche benchmark product or overall profile.

Action Steps

• Analytics can be used to find your most popular blog posts.
• For being concise and crisp, you can even sub-divide those blog posts into at least 2-3 additional ones.
• Advancing further, when you come up with comprehensive broad content ideas, split into several posts that would focus primarily on a couple of elements of the larger idea.

5) Giving Importance to User Contents

Try to include user created contents.  If you have an active E-Mail newsletter, ask your users to submit useful tips about a topic of interest, obviously via E-Mail. Keep them in the loop and let them be aware in advance that you will make a blog post featuring the tips received from them. What more, be generous to give them credit for their contributions; suggestions and tips. Additionally, you can base blogs on questions solicited from your readers. Make it interesting by starting a blog with: “One of our readers, Mr. Sean Connery, asks, can the shipment lead time be improved” and then continue with your answer to the question. Make the story readable.

While over 92% of customers are more influenced and get converted by user-generated content than by company advertisements or promotions, but it would be ethical to be as transparent or truthful as possible. It is the general propensity of people to think that companies will talk about anything to market their products, legally; there is little reason to be concerned about anyway.

Action Steps

Here are some simple but great ideas to gather user-generated content:

• Ask your E-Mail list for testimonials and to explain how they use your products.
• Invite your E-Mail list and social media group to submit pictures of them using your products.
• Create a hashtag for your most popular and benchmark item in your product line and encourage social media followers to tag themselves using your product. It could be in the form of a contest to make it exciting and give away free products to the person who gets the most engagement.

These tips can be used to keep your E-Commerce blog fresh with new and useful content. But remember that engaged visitors are the key to keep your E-Commerce business successful and alive. Ensure to keep a good-sized list of topics ready even before you need them. Whenever an idea strikes, jot it down briefly on your topic list, lest you may forget it.