I recently got this interesting question from a client: "I have an ecommerce site. Should I blog? If yes, what can I write about?" Here are some interesting tips about blogging for ecommerce etailers:

By now, it is clear that I recommend blogging for people who own ecommerce sites. A client owns multiple blogs which act as the funnel to his main site and he has been very successful in increasing his online sales with blogs. Let us see what you can write about on your blog.

• You can make a blog post if you have introduced a new range of items on your site. Discuss why you introduced this range (there was a popular demand, customers frequently asked me to carry this range etc), what is the special feature of this range and who can buy and how will they benefit.
• You can announce your periodic promotions through your blog.
• You can answer important and frequent customer service questions on your blog. Of course, you should also include them in the FAQ section.
• You can highlight some recent testimonials received from satisfied customers. This is a powerful social proof (others are liking this range, so it must be good).
• You can blog about how to use a complicated or uncommon aspect of your products. Some of your customers might not be able to take maximum advantage of your products because they cannot use a particular feature easily. You can create a short video or carry some snap-shots that will show how to use that feature.
• You can publish important industry news with your take on it. This positions you as an industry expert. You may comment on some government policies affecting your trade. Generally you should add your opinion and not just report the news.
• The ecommerce sites are quite mechanical generally without much human element. As you might know, "people do business with people and not companies." If you talk about a few key people of your company, post their photographs, highlight some personality traits (don’t get too personal, just talk about how he serves insistent customers with a smile, how he solves complicated service problems in a few minutes), some prospects and customers may find an increased traction towards your company.
• You can highlight any awards or recognition you got recently. This will increase the brand value and increase customer confidence.
• People love stories. Why don’t you make some posts about how a customer averted a major crisis in his life (personal or business) by using your products or because you shipped same day despite receiving the order late in the evening?
• You can run periodic customer surveys and ask them what part of your products and company they like most or use most. You will be surprised at the answers you get - it may not be what you thought and will give you an entirely new aspect to highlight in your marketing.

With a little bit of publicity like a link from your main site home page and submission to some top blog directories, you can stake your claim on another ranking position in the search engine results page. I strongly recommend you to link to your internal and most relevant pages rather than link to the home page always.

If you want to get some help in setting up an optimized blog for your site, please check this out.

Jeff Johnson, a reputed marketer and SEO specialist has released a customized copy of SEO enhanced Wordpress blog software, wherein he has included some nice plugins and settings for getting together a SEO optimized blog so that you can make money while writing about your favorite industry and products. The blog should get good rankings and traffic quickly.

While he does include easy to understand instructions, we appreciate that you may not be feeling adventerous and excited about doing all that work. If so, you can take advantage of our hands-free setup service for a nominal $40 per blog. You just need to send us the details of your domain name and hosting account and we will setup your blog exactly as Jeff recommends. Write to me at arun AT ebizindia DOT com (you know how to write that address in your email) and I will send you instructions for payment.

I came across this interesting concept while going through the new book by David Meerman Scott - The New Rules of Viral Marketing. While most of the job seekers are writing the resumes where they are talking about what degrees thay have, the recruiters are looking for real world experiences, domain expertise and are analysing how you can help their organisation.

If you setup a blog where you share your experiences with handling complicated situations, demanding customers, technical challenges and whatever else that matters for your position, your prospective employers will definitely treat you in an entirely different way. You will quickly stand out from the crowd with the polished resumes. Yes, you need to have your resume too but include the vital details and refer prominently to your blog - and see the jobs rain on you. Stop looking for that job and start posting on your blog. The jobs will start looking for you!

If you are at a loss about how to setup that blog, you can contact Rentablogger, the blog setup professionals.

Clickbank, a very famous Internet marketplace carrying 100,000+ products for sale and more than 10,000 affiliates promoting them, finally gets a blog. They plan to communicate to the affiliates and customers about the various policies and upcoming things through this blog.

They opted for Wordpress, a highly popular and free blogging platform for this blog. I noticed that they have turned off the ‘URL of the poster’ feature to discourage users who just post comments to get a valuable back link to their own sites. This should help them in cutting down on spammy comments. At the same time, I was surprised to see links to some other blogs and sites from the sidebar. I am not sure if they have linked to them because of their blog quality or any other criteria.

If you have been blogging with Wordpress, you might be aware that Wordpress 2.5 has been released. Seeing the large number of new features, you are drooling to get your blog upgraded to the latest version but do not want to get your hands dirty with all the FTP and other related hassles. Here’s help!

We can upgrade your Wordpress blogs to the latest version (currently version 2.5) for a nominal $25 per blog. We refund 100% of the payment if the blog upgrade cannot be carried out for any reason. You can pay the fee by Paypal to arun AT ebizindia DOT com and send me the FTP information. The blog upgrade will be carried out within 1 business day (much sooner mostly).

Happy blogging!

You have just released a shiny new widget. Or launched a cool information product. Now you want to know what people think about it. Why not blog about it and invite feedback?

A blog is a cool way to talk about some uncommon uses for your products and increase consumption. Launched a new software that makes cool Flash videos? Why not make a blog post that explains how people can use it to increase their sales or tap new prospects? What do the people think about it? Are they liking it? Do they find a particular option confusing? Have they located a bug?

If you invite people to post comments about their opinion on your shiny new product or service, they may let you know what they find great about it or what needs fixing. Take the feedback openly. It is OK if they have discovered some bugs. As long as you fix the bugs promptly, it is not very bad to have problems. This is the cheapest way to get frank opinion and feedback from the market. Incredibly cheaper than appointing some survey agency to go out and interview users, compile a report and then send to you after may be, months. Try it!

If you want to add Blogrush to your Wordpress or Semiologic blog and enjoy all the FREE traffic this will bring, please follow the simple instructions here. I am assuming the you have hosted the Wordpress or Semiologic blog on your own doman in the home directory at www.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/blog or something similar.

1. Visit the Blogrush site and register for a FREE account.

2. Once you have logged in, click on the Get Code button.

3. You will get some Javascript code. It will look like this:

<script type="text/javascript"><!–
blogrush_feed = "13565253";
//–></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://widget.blogrush.com/show.js">
</script>

4. Click on the code on the Blogrush site (similar to the code displayed above - DO NOT select this code or I will get the credit) to select it. Copy it to the clipboard by pressing ctrl-C or right click and then choose Copy.

5. Now login to your Wordpress blog. After logging in, click on the Presentation menu and then Widgets under that.

6. You will see a sidebar and a few widgets listed there. Drag and drop the Text1 widget from the bottom pool into the sidebar (any one sidebar if you have multiple sidebars).

7. Now click on the small picture on the Text1 widget. This will make the whole screen gray and a small window pops up. Paste the code you had copied above by pressing ctrl-V or right click and then choose Paste.

8. Click anywhere outside of the text box and you will see the button labeled Save Changes. Click on this button to save your changes.

9. At the top, you will see the blog name and a link in brackets (view site). Click on this to see the Blogrush widget displayed on your site with some posts from other sites.

Bingo! You have done it.

John Reese, the master marketer and the guy who had the first of the famous million-dollar launches, has introduced a novel shared blog promotion concept - the Blogrush. This is very simple to implement (I took 1 minute to sign-up to Blogrush and 1 minute to add the Blogrush widget to this blog). Based on the erstwhile ad exchange concept but relying on content exchange instead of ads, this is set to create a big flutter in the blogosphere. Specially with the clout that John Reese enjoys.

Read the full details about Blogrush and then sign-up. It is going to be huge!

Seth Godin, in a recent interview posted on his blog, suggested that you should build your online reputation by b….. rather than hanging out on the social network sites. So what was he talking about? Check out the video and come back here because we can help you tap that medium.