Blogging is a great way to supplement paid ecommerce marketing methods like ads and influencer marketing, because the articles you publish should have the ability to attract an audience over the long term.
Blogging might work out to be cheaper than paid methods, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It requires a bit of effort, as in the past few years, blogging and content marketing have become extremely competitive. It is expected that this year businesses will invest over $300 billion into their content marketing efforts.
This is why if you want to outdo the competition, you need to create better blog posts that drive more traffic and sales. You also need to modify these posts so that they promote your products better.
Here’s a four-step strategy to optimize your WordPress blog for driving more ecommerce sales.
Publish content that attracts traffic by answering questions
The first thing you must do is write posts on topics containing keywords with high search volume. The best way is to choose topics that answer questions your audience needs cleared most (and that are relevant to the products you want to sell, of course). For example, let’s take a look at Food52.
This website sells kitchen and home equipment. Their ideal audience consists of people who want to buy products like aprons, spatulas, pans, side tables, mats and bedding. So, they create content like this post on the “Essential Tools for an Office Kitchen.”
This article topic makes sense, because they know that their audience might want to set up or modify their office kitchens, so they will likely be interested in reading posts like these. Also, the keyword “office kitchen” has good search volume. Therefore, if they can build some quality links to this post, they should be able to see good long-term traffic from Google.
So, you too should find out the questions your target audience wants answered, then check the keyword volume of those questions and write top quality posts containing those keywords.
Diversify with sales-optimized content
Writing posts like the above will get you some traffic, but they aren’t the most effective for driving sales, as not all people who visit the page will have a purchase intent. Some of them will only be browsing, as they might just be thinking about something they want to do way ahead in the future.
This is why along with writing posts on topics like the above, you should write posts that attract visitors who are ready to buy.
For this, a post like “How Much Does It Cost to Set Up an Office Kitchen?” would work better. When someone visits this post, you know that they likely intend to invest in an office kitchen in the near future. They have probably done the research and know that they definitely need an office kitchen along with all the basic equipment. Therefore, more of the visitors who land on this article will convert to sales.
But these topics tend to have less search volume and get less social media shares. This is why you should promote them with calls-to-action in the posts like the above one and drive internal traffic.
So, write several posts that have high search volume and link them out to these types of highly targeted posts. If you want to get the most sales from posts like these, you should make sure they are of the best quality. You need to include unique information like the cost to set up, how much time it takes, maintenance costs, etc. that no one else is writing about.
Advertise products in the post
To drive more sales from your blog posts, you need drive the attention of the people who visit your posts to the products you sell. This is why you should embed advertisements promoting products related to the topic of the post.
Continuing with the above example post on the Food52 blog, you might notice that they have a slideshow of advertisements in the middle of the post. Here they promote some relevant products from their ecommerce store.
Finding and adding these products shouldn’t be hard, as there are several ecommerce WordPress plugins that can simplify this process.
Retarget blog traffic with ads
Even if you publish the best blog posts and promote highly relevant products in them, only a small percentage of the traffic will convert to customers. This is why you should optimize your posts with ad pixels for top platforms like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
You can then serve the page visitors with highly specific ads that promote products they might like.
They might have not made the purchase in their first visit for a multitude of reasons, ranging from missing the ads in your blog posts to not being interested at that moment. This is why you should target them with off-site ads that will remind them that you have the solutions to their problems.
Conclusion
These are the four steps you should follow to optimize your WordPress blog to drive more sales. Begin implementing them today.
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