How can someone leverage their sales with a blog?
Krystyn Heide
8 Comments
Excerpted from my contribution to Blog Design Fatalities by author Ryan Jackson.
It depends on how the blog interacts with your sales, I suppose. Say you are an online retailer of Sci Fi DVDs. You could include an “Ask the Expert” type blog, and perhaps a news blog. Within these blogs, you could create direct links to pages where related merchandise could be purchased. For example, if you are announcing a new cast addition to Battlestar Galactica, you could link the words “Battlestar Galactica” to a page of DVDs from previous seasons. Or, if you are answering a question regarding Firefly, within your answer you could link key terms like character names, or references to specific episodes, to the DVDs they appear in.
Design wise, you could emphasize these links in a bold color, and perhaps add a hover style that changes the color of the background, so it is very obvious to a user that the word is a link.
If you are using your blog to sell items (and don’t have a separate store) the best advice I’d have is to create a purchase button. Make it obvious that this is what needs to be clicked to buy, and have it go directly to a screen where you can make a purchase. Confusing graphics, bad placement and/or too many clicks can lose a sale. Don’t be afraid to experiment — on our front page, we actually experimented with several locations for our sign up button before determining the best conversions in terms of placement.
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Reader Comments (8)
Most people are pressed for time, if they to "you" for the blog they are not buyers, and if they come to buy they are not interested in reading the blog, and leave comments.
If your business isn't blogging... it should be.
Because I run three separate online stores (one for museum-quality art prints, one for budget art prints, and one for apparel & other merchandise), my blog allows me to have one central focal point for all my stores. Often the merchandise for sale in the 3 different stores is related, so this works particularly well. People can read about the new designs on offer, and then decide whether they want to shop for fine art prints, budget prints or apparel featuring the new designs...it works well this way.
I make a special effort to ensure my blog always looks exciting and attractive, with lots of product images and renditions of new designs etc...
My greatest challenge is finding the time to constantly update my blog - there always seems to be so much to do and too little time to do it! But I do know how crucial my blog is to my sales strategy, and therefore I do consider it to be a priority.
Neil