I talk with lots of different potential clients about adding weblogs to their online mix and am happy to roll out the usual list of benefits, including establishing a dialog with customers, offering up a 24×7 focus group, garnering feedback on potential product plans, and even featuring specific products or services to a dedicated subset of your community.
This time, however, I’ve received an email from a large ecommerce retailer with a slick Web presence but no “face” to the firm and sporadic problems with customer service and quality control. They ask:
“what you would do with a blog or two and what the benefits would be for us?”
Before I start free-associating my answer, I thought perhaps you, dear reader, might have some interesting or innovative ideas about how to leverage a blog to make an ecommerce company better in the online world?
Great question Dave.
A blog for an ecommerce site has the value of creating themed, fresh content for a site that might otherwise be void of significant text as is the case with many ecommerce sites. Also, a blog can be a link magnet from other blogs and web sites as well as internal links from blog posts to relevant product pages. Such deep links can drive traffic and rankings on more specific queries.
One ecommerce client of ours that implemented a blog to their discount fabric store generated enough increased traffic and sales to justify the hire of a dedicated writer for the blog. Starting out skeptical, the company is now an evangelist for ecommerce blogging.
On top of the SEO value, there are the benefits of providing “a face” to the company as well as offering product support information, updates and answering common customer service questions.
Comment by Lee Odden — July 16, 2006 @ 8:36 pm