How To Create A Blog On Your eCommerce Site

Before heading towards ‘Creating a blog’ I’ll let you know about what a ‘blog’ is and ‘why you need it’. Google loves content, they adore it in fact. But what’s the best way to store your content? Your Facebook page? Your Twitter profile? Well, they all have some sort of support but the best way to expose your quality content is through a blog. A blog is a platform or medium where you can share information, people ask queries through comments, etc. You are reading this information because of a blog we created years before. So like I said, Google loves content, thus, an additional way to promote and expose a website is by adding a blog along to it.

I think we are clear about a blog and why you they need one need one now. But, wait, what if I own an eCommerce site? Should I use a blog? Is it worth adding and maintaining it? Creating a blog on your eCommerce site is not hectic, it is in fact very simple

The answer is very simple – having a blog for your eCommerce site is mandatory! It’s an easy way to communicate with your customers, share tips/tricks with them, ask their feedback, provide quality information, etc. The pros are limitless! Apart from improving sales and traffic you can also make your customers believe that you care about them and it’ll at the end improve your overall brand image.

Majority of our clients, using PrestaShop eCommerce platform, asked me this question recently, “Should I have a blog for my eCommerce site?”, and here are my answers.

eCommerce Blogging – Why You Should Have A Blog?

1. Marketing: Write an interesting blog post or publish an awesome infographic, use some ads, then it could become a viral post. You can market it virally and build your brand.

2. They’ll Know Us Better: People usually don’t remember the names of the people behind an eCommerce site, do they? That will lack trust. But if you have a blog written by various people, they’ll know their names and they’ll feel like they are dealing with humans and not bots.

3. To Know More About Us: Sometimes a single “About Us” won’t work well with some customers, they want to know more about us, so a blog is the typical solution to see how we work and how we care about them.

Creating A Blog On Your eCommerce Site – Important Things To Keep In Mind

1. Blogging Software/Module: This is the backbone of your blogging platform, you should be wise enough to pick the best blogging software (like WordPress or Modules) to give your employees and customers an easy experience.

2. Blog Regularly: Having a blog alone isn’t the goal, you need to constantly update it with various quality information and trending topics. Talk about the eCommerce growth in your country, talk about why people prefer online shopping these days, etc.

3. Enable Comments & Respond To Them: You can use the default comment system or Disqus or even Facebook comments, but you should definitely have a Comments System to get feedback and queries directly from your potential customers. Don’t forget to respond to them.

4. Make It Social Media Friendly: Integrate your Social Media profiles into your blog, keep social sharing icons, official pages/profiles, etc.

5. Make It SEO friendly: Last but not least, this is a vital tip. Making your blog SEO friendly will generate you huge amount of traffic and a major part of that traffic might become your potential conversions.

Integrating A Blog In Your PrestaShop eCommerce Blog

As mentioned before, many of our clients are using PrestaShop when creating their own online store. I personally think PrestaShop is pretty awesome since it comes with tons of built in features, and most importantly its free to download and free to use. They also have a large selection of great looking templates, like you can see here, to help create the perfect ecommerce website. Having said that, if you want to improve your ecommerce site even more. having a blog to go with that awesome theme will make it your site stronger than ever. So lets proceed, shall we?

We can do this by two ways – Either you can use WordPress CMS software or you can try PrestaShop’s content management modules. Both have their own benefits.

Using WordPress

WordPress, as you would have probably known, is a popular Content Management System (CMS) used by majority of the top blogs out there.

If you want to have a WordPress blog for your eCommerce site then I would recommend you to have it on a subdomain, like blog.example.com, where example.com is your eCommerce site powered by PrestaShop.

You can follow WordPress’s Famous Five Minute Install guide to easily install WordPress on your subdomain within 5 minutes, more or less. WordPress will have essential plugins that will further power your eCommerce site and add more value to it. You can take “PrestaShop Integration” plugin, which helps you to integrate using shortcodes and plugins from a PrestaShop e-commerce to your blog. See how easy it is?

Using PrestaShop Content Management Modules

Just like WordPress, PrestaShop also has some Content Management Modules with which you can easily install a professional blog on your PrestaShop eCommerce site.

PrestaShop has more than 50 modules for you to pick the best one you like, they provide an optimized platform to publish your content and manage it. While configuring it I had some minor doubts whether this will be optimized well for search engines, but that doubt was cleared when I published few posts on it, they are perfectly search engine optimized.

You can try their Professional Blog Module to make it fully compatible with every language and to make it fit perfectly into your system. It has responsive themes, various plugins, categories, comment system, etc., everything that makes your eCommerce blog a resourceful material. But wait, what if I already have a WordPress blog, but I love this module thing? It’s very simple indeed, these modules have the option to import from WordPress easily!

Now it’s up to you to pick the right one, do check their features. If you want to build an eCommerce site then I would personally recommend PrestaShop eCommerce platform since majority of our clients have used it. And we further recommend you to have a blog on your eCommerce site, it is an additional value to your site.