5 Out of the Ordinary Blog Post Ideas for Your Ecommerce Store
Perhaps the biggest challenge any ecommerce store faces is trying to stand out from the crowd. Consumers these days are faced with nearly endless choices, and getting them to pick you is no small task. Luckily, there are many different ways you can stand out, such as offering loyalty programs, personalised discounts and strong branding. But the main way to distinguish yourself is to spend time creating informational and useful blog content for your users.
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This helps position you as more than just a store; you become a resource that people can use to better understand the products and services that make them curious.
The best way to do this is by maintaining a quality company blog – however, simply keeping a blog isn’t going to distinguish you from your competitors.
You should aim to establish your blog as a high-quality resource, with content that people care about. This means that you need to balance your “how to” and “X tips” articles with some blog posts that really stand out.
So, here are five ideas to help you create blog posts for your ecommerce store that are genuinely unique.
1. Graphs, Stats and Infographics
Anytime you can make your blog posts visual, do it. Check out the following graph to help show you why:
Source: Visme
Putting this graph in here demonstrates two things: 1) It helps prove that visual content such as infographics receives the most shares, and 2) It shows the power of presenting the information as a graph.
This is because visual aids such as these make us stop for a minute and think about what we’re looking at. Your audience, who may usually just flick through your content reading headlines and topic sentences, will instead be stopping for a moment to pour over an interesting graph, table or infographic you’ve created.
Not only does this help you improve your ‘time on page’ statistics, but it encourages engagement from your audience. Furthermore, it’s something they aren’t used to seeing, which should help to make your blog posts stand out.
2. Interviews/Profiles
Doing interviews with industry professionals or thought leaders helps you establish credibility. Your blog posts will no longer be just you saying something and hoping people accept your argument. Instead, they will be platforms for known entities to share their story, which helps make your content more authoritative.
These types of blog posts also offer a much needed human element to your blog content. It’s one thing to offer abstract, hypothetical examples to your audience, but it’s quite another to be able to present a real-life example of what you’re talking about.
Interviews also give you the chance to expand into new content areas. For example, you could conduct interviews as part of a podcast and post transcriptions to your blog.
3. Stories and Anecdotes
People love a good story, so don’t shy away from using your blog as a way of connecting with people through stories.
The stories you tell could be about anything, as long as you somehow connect it back to the business. For example, you could tell a story about how your products helped someone, or you could tell the stories of those currently working for the company (founders’ stories tend to play really well).
Another great way to do this is to ask your customers to help you out. Consider asking them to submit anecdotes about how your products have helped them or make their lives better. Once you have some ideas, follow up with people for more details to round off your story. This type of user-generated content is usually seen as highly-authentic and therefore credible.
4. Video Tutorials
Video content rushed onto the scene a few years ago, but it is now firmly entrenched as one of the most desired forms of content out there. Because of this, you need to be working to create some video content for your audiences.
However, video content can be expensive and time-consuming to produce, so you’ll want to be smart about what you do. A great option is to put together some tutorials for consumers. These could be about how to use your products – if such information is needed – or it could be about something relating to your brand or industry.
These types of post aren’t all that different from traditional “how to” posts, but they are unique if you present them in video format. Video will also help you further establish your brand and reputation online.
5. Maps
It’s tough to know exactly why, but people love maps. Maybe it’s our innate adventurous spirit, or perhaps it’s because maps are an easy way for people to understand the world. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Know that people love maps, and use this to help make your blog better.
A good way to catch people’s eye and bring them to your blog is to present information in the form of a map. Of course, you still need to offer something unique – offering ordinary information in the form of a map doesn’t automatically make your content extraordinary – but it does help make good information nice to look at.
Think about some of the information that might be useful to your audience, and then brainstorm how you could use maps to make your findings more presentable.
For example, if you run an ecommerce store that sells hiking and outdoor equipment, you could put together a map of some of the best places in the U.S. to go hiking.
Plus, as an added bonus, this type of content is highly-shareable, giving you a chance at reaching new groups and expanding your reach.
Be Unique
The best way to stand out from the crowd is to highlight that which makes you unique. Every business and every person involved in running it is different, and this is one of your primary strengths. You should have a way of showcasing this uniqueness. Hopefully, the blog post ideas mentioned above should help you do just that.