Holiday Blogging

Blogging in general is a great way to attract new online audience. Blogging about things that people actually want to know about, especially around holidays, and leveraging your blog to drive people to your store is even better. That creates an opportunity for you for converting your readers into your buyers.

Many of you already have your own external blogs. If not, or in addition to that, you can post to our Blog Central https://icraftgifts.com/blog/. (any iCraft member has access to it)
Posting on iCraft blog has its advantages, as it places your buyers a bit closer to your products.

So do you use your blogs now for improving traffic to your store?
How do you choose topics for your blog posts?
Do you have a strategy for choosing topics that will bring you the most readers?
Do you consider seasonality?
Do you think about your target audience and their interests at this moment?

I’ll probably have to write a few posts to answer all those questions. Stay tuned for more.

So the first question...

How to use Blogs (yours and others) to drive traffic to your store?

• The Soft Sell

If you simply keep selling your products to readers in every blog post, you’ll notice pretty quickly, you have less and less readers to write for.
Self-promotion is good, but it’s harder to sell things to people, who didn’t come to buy anything in the first place.

A better way of introducing your products in your blog posts would be through a story about something related to your products, where your products are mentioned by the way and not is an obvious salesy way.

People visit blogs in search of information. They want to learn something new. They want to find an answer to a question.
Offer them something of value for free – share your own knowledge and experience, help them solve their problems and they’ll keep coming back for more. They’ll also forward links to their friends, tweet about your blog and help you attract even more readers, but only if they like what you have to offer.

If you create jewelry, write an article about your subject matter.
Examples: write about best ways of storing, cleaning, buying (especially for others, as Christmas presents) or wearing handmade jewelry; post a video tutorial on how to create a necklace out of beads; post pictures of your unfinished projects and show the process of making something step by step etc. Incorporate references in your story to your own jewelry pieces, as illustrations of what you are talking about and include links on images back to your product pages.

Just make sure you focus on producing great content and not on selling something to your readers.

• Community Outreach

Don’t think you need to do all the blogging yourself.

Ask popular sites, related to your product line, or influential bloggers in the crafting community what it takes to be featured on their website or a blog.

Monitor conversations on blogs to see who is talking about products similar to yours.
Use blog search engine Technorati - http://technorati.com and Google Blogs Search - http://blogsearch.google.com
On the Technorati site you can see authority score (higher is better) for each blog, so you don’t waste time checking out low-quality blogs. Here is the result for "Handmade Jewelry" http://technorati.com/search?return=posts&authority=high&q=handmade+jewelry&x=17&y=12

Suggest to other bloggers your products and provide specifics. So if other bloggers talk about buying silver jewelry for Christmas, mention to them that your silver jewelry pieces make for great holiday gifts and specify why. Make sure your products fit their content perfectly. You might not even need to convince them to write about you. They’d be happy to do it as well.

Ask other bloggers if they’d write a quick review about your products with a link back to your store or a product page, if you send them a free sample of your products. Online reviews from prominent sites and trusted bloggers can do wonders for your sales. However, you’d have to be ok with reviewers’ honest opinion of your products. You can’t ask them for only positive reviews.

• Inbound Links

The number of inbound links (those pointing back to your pages) are critical in improving your page rankings. What’s also important is that you (or whoever is mentioning your products in their posts) are placing the right anchor text (Keywords) on your product photos and links, pointing back to your store. For that, you need to do the Keyword Research and know which Keywords you need to use to optimize each of your product pages.

Example: If your Product Title reads “Paradiso Multi Chains Necklace - Art Nouveau Series”, but the Key Phrase that you chose to optimise you page for is “Art Nouveau Necklace” – use this exact Key Phrase to link back to your product page. Also, provide this info to others, who are going to write about that specific product. So in their post reference to your product would look like “I really love this Art Nouveau Necklace from...”

Read more on Inbound Links, Keyword Research and Blogging SEO

More on Holiday Blogging in my next post.