Blog?? Help!

[naturalwoof]

Hello-
I am new to this site and new to e-commerce. Just started a yahoo store called naturalwoof and am focusing on marketing. Started a blog, but really have no idea what to do with it. Where do I start?
Thanks!!!

[cactus_joe]

Hello...

Blogs are really great for SEO. You should not turn your blog into a sales piece. You should provide useful content, that people would want to read. You should write about things that would potentially be of interest to your readers.

Think like a customer. If you provide useful content, that would be of interest to your readers, search engines will begin to index your blog as useful - and that should cause more internet users to find your blog, and hopefully some of these readers will become potential customers.

You may want to write about things like dog health, why dogs need natural foods, and maybe how a natural diet contributes to better coat, etc.

You dont want the blog to be about products in your store. If it is too salesy, it wont have value, and that will be a detriment to building up new users.

Then, you want to take the articles you write, and try to submit them to different social networking websites by using something like "addtoany.com".

Hope this helps.

[candypam]

Ok Joe what am I missing here? You state "You dont want the blog to be about products in your store" ..
huh.. that's all I blog about... is that hurting me instead of helping? Now I'm really confused
Pam

[john.dawe]

Pam -

You don't want your blog to be about your products. You want your blog to be about your industry.

There are some blogs out there that sell, for example, digital cameras. The wrong thing for them would be to post "Hey check out the new Canon XYZ camera we have on our site, it's 8 Megapixels and takes great pictures!"

On the other hand, I could post that I went on vacation to the bahamas and took all these great pictures with my Canon XYZ.

In your instance, you should post about candy. Tell candy stories, about kids. Post pictures of your workers picking and packing candy, talk about cool things people are doing with candy. Post a recipe once a week about cooking with candy.

Keep people engaged. There's a balance between being useful vs. salesy. To use my example, if you put your recipe on your blog you could create a special bundle using our Multi Add to Cart for Yahoo Store service to order all ingredients from your store. Provide a link but not in a pushy way something like, "Click Here to order all the candy you'll need to make this project at blaircandy.com"

See how I did that? I provided useful information in this post, complete with a link to promote our Service to add multiple items from one page in a Yahoo Store service (see I did it again, good for link-building) but it's not pushy.... too much!