Every single day, over 2.8 million blog posts are written and published. That’s a lot of content, and the numbers are steadily increasing. One could definitely say that we are in the middle of a 'content marketing era'.

All businesses need to constantly and consistently find innovative ways to stay ahead of their competitors. They also need to focus on a strategy to drive traffic and sales. Blogging is a vital part of any ecommerce marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, most people don’t realise that every Shopify site includes a blog.

You may already be using WordPress or another platform for blogging. Unfortunately, those external platforms weren’t developed to work with Shopify. Featuring a product on another blog with the goal to drive readers to convert a sale, therefore, is not a seamless process.

So, let’s take a look at how a Shopify Blog works, the functionality it offers, and how it can integrate your blogging with your ecommerce store.

Blogging with Shopify: The Basics

Most people find that Shopify's embedded capabilities are sufficient for them to meet their ecommerce blog needs. Not only is it free, quick and easy to get started with, it also covers all the basics a blogger needs: inserting images and videos, a visual editor tool, an automatic SEO for title and description and the ability to schedule future posts, comments and add tags. Although it is not as powerful as dedicated blog systems like Wordpress, many people do not require that level of functionality.

Benefits of using a Shopify Blog

Using a Shopify Blog makes it easy to:

• Start readers on your online shop and keep them there;
• Maintain a cohesive feel between your shop and blog (they’re just different pages on the same site, with the same look and feel); and
• Manage and maintain content, with only one admin tool needed to update your shop and blog.

Easy for you. Easy for your customers.

How to activate your Shopify Blog

To activate your Shopify site’s blog, Follow the following steps:

1. Firstly, go to your Shopify admin area and click 'Online Store' on the left bar;
2. In the sub-menu, click 'Blog Posts';
3. At the top, click 'Manage Posts';
4. Then, at the top right, click on the button 'Add Blog'; and
5. Finally, give your blog a name and add it to your site's navigation menu.

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The blog design is part of your Shopify site’s design theme, and can be customised by editing the Liquid code.

It is possible to setup and run multiple blogs on a single Shopify site. This allows you to segment the type of information you distribute based on customer interests. This could mean putting company news on one blog, inspiration or entertainment content on another blog, and information dealing with promotions and deals on a third blog.

Run Multiple Blogs for One Shopify Site

Shopify’s Content Management Capabilities

Blogging is all about the content: what topics you cover, what your readers are interested in, and how far and wide your content is shared. Just like other blogging platforms, Shopify has the functionality to help people explore and share your content. Shopify apps can also integrate with your blog and offer additional features.

Manage Comments

Shopify asks you to determine how comments will be managed on your blog posts:

• Disable Comments: This can make it difficult to build community and get feedback from readers and customers but keeps your time investment to a minimum;
• Comments with Moderation: You have a lot of control over what types of comments show up on your site, but this can be a time-intensive process, depending on how many readers you have; and
• Comments Automatically Published: This supports an active community and requires minimal time to manage, but inappropriate comments can potentially be a risk for your brand image. This must be monitored regularly and if necessary, it is possible to remove unwanted comments.

Note: Before you can enable comments for a blog, at least one post must be published on it.

Schedule a Publish Date

You can set specific dates for your blog posts to be published in advance. This assists in the creation of posts that align with specific promotions or events. It is also a helpful way to ensure that all content work is streamlined. This also allows you to streamline your content work. Many people will decide to schedule multiple posts at once that will each be posted on a weekly basis, for example. Posts can also be backdated.

Display an Excerpt from a Blog Post

On your blog’s main page, you can feature an excerpt from a pos. This can include images, text formatting and links.

To add an excerpt, go into one of your blog posts and under the text box, click “Add Excerpt”.

Organise Posts Using Tags

Assign one or more tags to a blog post. This will mean that customers can easily find blog posts within that specific category. When a customer searches for a tag in your online store, matching blog posts will appear in the search results.

Social Media Buttons

Many Shopify themes include social media buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other platforms. If your theme doesn’t include these buttons, they can be added using an app or code (although coding requires knowledge of web design languages such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and Liquid, and may require expert help).

Invite Customers to Subscribe

Shopify automatically produces an RSS feed for every blog that you create, so customers can subscribe to it and receive notifications when a new post is published. The feed URL is the blog page URL with .atom appended. For example, http://store.myshopify.com/blogs/blogname.atom. Customers can also subscribe to your blog feed using FeedBurner.

Promote Featured Posts

Once you have a post that performs better than the rest of your blog content — either it brings in a lot of traffic, or is really successful at driving sales — you want to make it super easy for people to access. A featured blog post can be showcased on your store's homepage.

Shopify blogs can also integrate other standard content management functionality as well. Chances are high that if you do need it, your Shopify blog can make it happen.

Grow Your Reach with SEO

In order to grow your audience and sales, you need Google to easily find and approve of your posts. The basics of SEO (search engine optimisation) for your site are automatically delivered through Shopify. It is also possible to add to the built-in SEO functionality in the blogging tool which will allow you to edit the SEO content — page title, meta description, and URL — for each individual blog post.

Within a blog post, below the text box, is a section titled, “Search Engine Listing Preview”. Here, you can see the auto-generated content. This will appear in a search engine like Google and the text can be edited manually. Using keywords and enticing language will help people find the link and click on it.

The page title and meta description have set character limits. If you enter more text beyond the character limit, then your page title and description will be shortened in search engine results. You can see how this will look in the search engine preview.

Add Apps for Custom Blog Functionality

Just as you can add apps to your Shopify ecommerce shop to customise its functionality (for you and your customers), you can also add apps that will make your blog function specifically the way you want it to.

Two of the most popular apps to add to a Shopify blog are:

Disqus

Disqus is a comment-sharing app which helps to create an environment that encourages discussion and engagement on your blog. You will recognise it’s clean design from many of the world’s largest blogs and websites.

Disqus offers Shopify users a free seven-day trial to try it out, after which it will cost $4 per month.

AddThis

AddThis makes it easy for your customers to share your content over the web through adding social icons to your blog. There are over 300 social networks to choose from and appearance of each icon can be changed. Embedded analytics offer insight into your blog readers’ sharing patterns, follows and other valuable statistics.

Related Posts

Related Posts: Suggesting other similar blog posts that your readers will enjoy is a great way to end your blog posts. It gives readers a reason to stay on your site, subsequently increasing engagement. This will be beneficial to your SEO.

There are more than 1,800 apps in the Shopify app store. If you’re interested in doing something new with your blog or want to set one up with specific elements, there’s probably an app for that.

If you’re already using WordPress (or another platform like Medium or Tumblr) for your blog, you can integrate your external blog into your Shopify store. However, there are a few important considerations you should take note of regarding this set-up:

• SEO Impact: A blog on other platforms must be installed as a subdomain within Shopify; it cannot be added as a subdirectory. (The blog URL will be blog.mywebsite.com, instead of mywebsite.com/blog). There may be SEO implications on this difference;
• Extra Effort: The two platforms (Shopify and your blog) will have dual logins and separate hosting. The differences in design can be quite confusing. Your blog platform will have a completely different website design than Shopify as the two themes are developed from completely different languages. One option is to find a relatively similar theme and customize the colors to match your Shopify site, however, customers may become confused by subtle differences. For the interface to feel completely seamless, you will need to have a custom theme created. In this case, anytime you want to make a change to one theme, you would need to change the other too;
• ‍Complex Analytics: Using Google analytics for cross-domain tracking (Shopify store to external blog) requires a specific configuration. If you want to understand and make sense of how your customers are interacting with both domains, your analytics account will need to be tweaked; and
• Difficulty Preserving Cart Info: When working across two platforms, it can become tricky preserving cart information from a mini-cart and syncing it with the site’s shopping cart. To resolve this, some coding may be needed.

If you’ve already built a blog on another platform, you can migrate content from that platform over to your Shopify blog. This will improve your store’s conversions and SEO as your blog will be on the same domain as your store. A great tool for this process is BlogFeeder, which makes it quick and easy to import existing blog posts into Shopify.

WordPress’s ecommerce platform, WooCommerce, is another option to establish a seamless integration between a blog and an ecommerce site. The consideration to make here is whether WooCommerce or Shopify will work better for your ecommerce business. While WooCommerce is very popular, it doesn’t scale well.

Get Advice. If you need assistance, give us a call or send us an email for personalised support. We are proud Shopify Experts & Shopify Partners. Tell us about your goals, and we’ll help you figure out the rest.

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SOURCE: Growth Spark is an award-winning, nationwide team that helps e-commerce companies grow by building unique web experiences that convert visitors into customers.