5 Guaranteed Ways to Write Better Blog Posts for Shopify, #3 will take your conversions to the moon

‍

‍

Whether you are new to writing content, or you’ve been at it for a while, you can never generate too much traffic. You will always have room for improvement, hence you are reading this blog. 

My crystal bowl tells me you have already Googled terms like “why to write blogs” or “why content is king”, and are therefore familiar with the basics. I’m not going to bore you to death with why content is important. Not in this blog anyways. 

I’m going to talk about how to take your content to the next level. Because just throwing your content out there, the content you poured your heart and soul into, and waiting for an organic traffic miracle to happen is not going to cut it. You need to keep experimenting with new tools and strategies, to either generate more traffic to your content, or to convert more readers to shoppers. Preferably both.

‍

If you’re stuck coming up with new ideas, here are 5 tried-and-tested tactics that have worked for me.

Let’s dig in.

‍

‍

1. It’s all about data

The 21st century. The time of technological revolution. What a time to be alive. Especially since this is the first time in history that every decision can be made while looking at the bigger picture. We no longer have to rely on our instincts alone, making decisions based upon assumptions. We gather data and truly see what needs to be done. And with all this knowledge available, still many people assume everywhere.

You can learn a lot about your content skills and readers by looking at data. Not just high level, like the time spent on your blog post (was it enough to read the entire article or just skim through it), but you can also get into detail. Using the acquisition funnel feature of Google Analytics for example, you can see where your blog places within the customer journey and see if the moment that people read your blogs correlates to actually buying your product. Another key metric to look out for is the demographic of your most enthusiastic readers, which helps you target an audience or adjust your tone of voice. 

‍

And my personal favorite, using Hotjar: monitoring on-screen behaviour to get an in-depth view of what people actually do on your site. You can understand which parts of your content are skimmed over, and which parts people engage with. 

The possibilities are simply endless. Just think about what would be relevant to know, and measure it.

‍

‍

2. Don’t wait for traffic, fetch it

‍

‍

A wise writer once said: “If you want more people reading your content, you should have more people visiting your blog page”. Okay, I’ll admit it. It might be a bit straight-forward. But there are still a lot of writers out there that just put their content out there and wait. Waiting for that sudden, impossible to explain spike in traffic to happen. I’m here to tell you that you can take matters back into your own hand, by fetching the traffic your content deserves.

• Write guest blogs
• Put up facebook ads and use the google remarketing tag
• E-mail automations for historical customers
• Look for relevant groups to post your content in
• Ask established content writers for backlinks to your content

3. Make your blogs shoppable

This is a big one. The future of e-commerce will be, and I’m almost certain of that, without the need for a webshop. Instagram has already made the first move in that regard. Direct shopping, on the feed. Soon enough shopping experiences will be optimized to channels only, because the less steps a customer has to take to buy a product, the better the conversion rate.

I know it sounds a bit weird, but hear me out. Chances are that you are not converting all your blog readers into buying customers. And you can do CRO until the cows come home, but needing multiple clicks to order the product you’re reading about is still a big conversion killer. However, there is a solution for this. Lucky us.

When your customer is reading your blog, there is a specific moment where their buying intent is the highest it’ll ever be. And at that specific moment, they need to be able to convert. Trying to have them click to a product page will be a conversion killer, it needs to be done there and then. Within the blog. And that’s where Philyra comes in.

Philyra is a Shopify app that makes blogs shoppable. It allows the reader to directly purchase the product they’re reading about within the blog, through a pop-up that pops up when the reader is hovering over the product name. You basically get the best of both worlds: a consumer purchasing a product, who can then continue reading.

‍

4. Write like a pro

Seems fairly obvious, but many don’t put enough emphasis on this. Talk about what people like to read. Well written, concise, and to the point. Grasping attention. Just try different angles and see what works. Try to get user feedback. Maybe even try out some tools such as copy.ai and use it to improve your writing.

Read books and other blogs, not just for the information they provide, but also to see why they convert and you don’t (yet anyway).

‍

‍

‍

5. Consistency is key

Creating content has a lot of benefits. SEO ranking, getting shoppers to return to your store, create buying intent which leads to conversion

A lot of time is spent on setting the formatting, the distribution strategy and thinking about what to write about. Can take an increasingly long time if you want to publish content regularly. Here are some tips on how to make life easier:

‍

‍

1. Write about well known topics: use google search trends to see the volume of searches in content categories, or use buzzsumo.com. Make use of the trends. 

2. Measure and decide based on data. I can’t stress this enough. Install hotjar on your blogs to view heatmaps and identify which parts of your content captured the most attention, and which parts need work.

3. Make your blogs shoppable. Make sure not to waste the traffic you direct to your site. Give them options to turn interest into action. One tool that can be used for this is Philyra. Philyra enables you to link products with keywords and creates product pop-ups directly in your blog when a reader hovers over an associated keyword. 

4. Attract an audience. Your blogs won’t just magically take off and be seen by thousands of people. You need to kickstart your growth. Check out this blog for in-depth instructions: https://www.rheia.dev/post/10x-more-engagement-on-facebook-ads-with-this-simple-growth-hack-no-extra-costs 

5. Consistency: the most important one. One blog post likely won’t bring you instant fame. The more you post, the more you learn, the more chance of success you’ll have. Try finding a format for yourself that works. Create a content calendar to keep track of your efforts and metrics associated with each piece.