Media » Ecommerce Blog

Greetings from the Rocky Mountains! I’m away this week in beautiful Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada for the CWC/Corus Digital Media Career Accelerator workshop.

This morning I will be presenting to a select group of women in the broadcasting industry a session on blog promotion through new media. I thought I’d give you a peek at the slide deck anyhow as the ideas can apply to ecommerce blogs also. (You may also download it from Slide Share)

They’re not the sexiest slides but I made them a bit more textual so the deck is somewhat understandable on its own.

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Blog Promo and Social Media For Ecommerce

I’d like to go into a bit more detail here on Get Elastic with an ecommerce focus:

Why Blog?

Open up for conversation with your customers, gather feedback and attend to reputation management concerns
Establish a personality for your company, employees or brands
Attract long-tail search traffic and pre-sell your company or products
Build backlinks to boost your overall link profile (if the blog is a sub-folder or sub-domain)
Landing page for contests and promotions
Information resource for customers, employees, partners, investors and affiliates

Blog Traffic Sources

Offline awareness (your brick-and-mortar stores, print or TV/radio advertising, word-of-mouth)
Link from your estore
Links from other websites and blogs
Search engines
Blog search engines
Social networks
Email campaigns with blog call-outs

Basic Search Engine Optimization

Keywords in the right places
Links from relevant sites
Blog plug-ins
Good content / more content

Where to Place Keywords

Title tag
Page title
Body text
Link text (on your site and when others link to you)
Post tags
Alt attributes (images, video)
Headings / bolded text
URLs (keyword relevance in search engine and when people link to you)

Why Links Matter

Search engines need a measure of authority or popularity
Blogs are more “linkable” than static business sites
Deep links look more “natural” to search engines (don’t look purchased or bartered for)
Links send traffic and help branding

Examples of Link-Baity Content

Humor: Jockey Stop Squirming
Controversy: Dove Evolution campaign
Contest: Target dormroom contest in Facebook
Amazing: Ray-ban sunglasses
Emotional: 1-800-Flowers mother’s day
Informative: Sephora makeup how-to’s
Timely: Ice.com - Mr. Cupid
Ongoing: Blogs (Ecommerce Blogs of the Top Online Retailers)

SEO Plugins

SEO Plugins for Wordpress from Michael Gray
Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress from The Blog Joint

Other “Search Engines”

Video sharing: YouTube, Google Video etc.
Google / Yahoo News (Tips for getting into Google News from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Guide)
Blog search: Google / Technorati / Ice Rocket & more

Why StumbleUpon Rules

Because this is a fairly short session (45 minutes) and there are so many things I could say about the subject, I only had time to address one social network - StumbleUpon. In my opinion, if you do no other social media sharing, you should at least be on StumbleUpon. It’s a good entry-level social network for a number of reasons:

Drives a ton of traffic (often more than Google)
Don’t have to be a “power user” to get results (according to Dosh Dosh)
Drives traffic long-term (as opposed to Digg-style sites where stories are hot for a day)
General site but you can get very targeted (specific tags, groups etc)
Toolbar makes submission easy
Tech-savvy users often have their own blogs (link opportunity)
You can discover things to blog about

StumbleUpon is a social network where members can surf tags related to their interests to discover sites, photos, videos and articles relevant to them. Rather than using a search engine and letting a machine decide what’s good content, StumbleUpon shows you sites others thought were cool. You can also follow members interested in your topic/industry and when you log in, you see a feed of relevant recently “thumbed” content that you can start checking out yourself. If you like it you thumb up, if you don’t like it you thumb down or hit the “Stumble” button again. Simple.

You can also share items with your network. This can be powerful when you have a network of like minded people who will thumb up content you share with them. Their recent thumbs may appear in Facebook profiles and newsfeeds as well as their StumbleUpon profile page and friends’ feeds. Here’s a StumbleUpon Networking Guide with screenshots for further reading.

You can friend a maximum of 200 people on StumbleUpon (but more than that can subscribe to your Stumble feed). Neil Patel gave us a tip back in October when he joined us for a webinar on social media marketing strategies: friend as many people as you can initially, and if they don’t friend back within a week, move on and friend some more.

I suggest looking for a group on a niche topic and adding friends from within that group or looking for people who have indicated their interest in a certain topic by tag. You can find niche groups by browsing http://group.stumbleupon.com or typing a tag keyword in the search box.

StumbleUpon users are techsavvy and are often bloggers themselves. They may be using their SU account to discover blog fodder and your content can reach more people (the blog’s RSS subscribers and search engine traffic). The back links also benefit you.

SU is also a social bookmarking tool. When people Stumble your content there’s a good chance they’ll come back later to view it again.

Other social media sites like Digg have algorithms that skew towards “power users” that submit topics that go popular. It takes a lot of work to build up your Digg history and friend following. StumbleUpon takes less effort – you can get traffic just for submitting stories to the StumbleUpon system. But you can get more mileage if you make use of the social features available to you: friending, joining groups, tagging and reviewing sites and members.