Today, we have a special guest blogger from our Professional Services team, Chad Austin. He is going to give you some behind-the-scenes advice on blogging from an e-Commerce Account Manager’s perspective.
Here are some quick and simple features to add to your blog which can potentially promote a social experience. After all, blogging is about connecting with your fan or customer base, in order to promote your products and services, and potentially turning those visitors into buyers. These additions are best utilized using WordPress as a platform to manage your content. Here are a couple of additions that I can’t live without:
1. Facebook Comments – Facebook comments are an easy way to encourage feedback from your visitors. A Facebook comment promotes recognition by the amount of visitors to your site, and comments are designed to encourage feedback from these visitors. The benefit comes from what happens after they write their comment. The comment is automatically published to their wall, providing free marketing over social networks. Facebook allows users to not only comment using Facebook, but a variety of social networking communities. It’s also going to provide you with some SEO unique content for robots to notice.
You can read more about Facebook Comments by visiting: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/”>
2. Social Media Buttons – Your products are social, so why shouldn’t your content be as well? Social buttons allow for visitors to share information that they have found on your website with others who may be interested through social networking. Much like Facebook comments this is a great way to increase organic traffic to your site through social media. This can help to establish brand recognition.
I personally recommend AddToAny by Lockerz, due to its extensive database connectivity among social networks.
3. Social Network Integration – This could just be me being lazy, but signing up for new accounts makes me cringe and quite frankly demotivates me. I tend to buy items from websites who let me integrate my social networking accounts into their stores. Thanks to Open Graph technology from Facebook, storefronts can make signing up for their services virtually one click. I don’t know about everyone else, but I always appreciate the quickest and most painless way to spend my money.
You can read more about Facebook Login by visiting: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/login/”>
You can read more about Facebook Registration by visiting: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/registration/”>
4. Bring products into your blog – Blogs can be a great place to feature specific products. Much like the homepage, category page and product page, the “add-to-basket” button should be the most prominent call to action on this page. This will raise awareness that you are an E-Commerce store for visitors who may have landed on your blog through a search query. Also, it’s a great benchmark for A/B testing.
This is done using Mivascript and some good ol’ magic. I’d suggest talking to your Account Manager about this one.
5. Gravatar Integration – Everyone loves a familiar face. Recognition is a powerful tool as it helps to personalize the visitors experience. It would be wise to make sure that you are using gravatar technology to display a photo on all of your posts. You can get a free gravatar ID, that works across any blogging site, from gravatar.com. Secondly, when you participate in blog networking to increase your branding, gravatars make it easy to present a “digital business card.”
You can read more about Gravatars and sign up for one at:https://en.gravatar.com/
By Chad Austin, Account Manager, Miva Merchant
Miva