Is having a WordPress blog useful for your Magento store?

Inchoo asked “How much do you really blog on your Magento shop?”. We have a take on this too.

First let’s look at one option available from Magento Connect: Blog Extension by aheadWorks.

Pros: This popular extension is good if you need to publish news update occasionally for your Magento store. It’s free, easy to install, tightly integrated to your store and you publish your article directly from your Magento admin.

Cons: It creates a table in your Magento’s database, over time it may overloads your store’s database, and if in the future should you decided to have a WordPress blog, you will have difficult to migrate your blog’s articles. On top of that, social networking features may not be as widely available as WordPress.

Should you use WordPress or other blogging CMS for your blog instead?

The answer depends. First you must ask how useful it’s to having a blog for your online store, and how much commitment are you going to make.

We develop 3-in-1 Magento and WordPress matching themes, so we will focus on the pros to having a WordPress blog and show you how you can use a blog to help with your store’s search engine marketing.

Let’s assume you have decided to go with WordPress blog, still there is one more thing you have to decide: should you have WordPress installed as a sub-directory in the same domain for your store (example: yourstore.com/blog) or use a different domain for your blog. Both are viable options however the result maybe significantly varies. How so?

Keep the WordPress blog in your store’s domain

The whole effort will be solely focus on one domain, which is, your store: you write articles, draw traffic to your store and blog, build subscription list.

Use a separate domain for your blog

You can use this to enhance your linking strategy, and from SEM point of view, it offers a lucrative marketing incentive. We will skip all SEO jargons and dive into the practicality aspect.

  • Build external links, promote your store.

    Write useful articles for your products, link them to the product pages in your store. You can also syndicate your Magento product feed to your WordPress blog using RSS widget.

    For a more aggressive marketing strategy, you can syndicate Magento product feed to WordPress blog using a more advanced RSS syndication tool that allows you to make each product as a blog entry and allow your readers to leave comment – this could be make to a good product review feature. You can also use it to run promotion by syndicating a (sales) category feed; we have just completed a new premium Magento/WordPress matching theme which offers this feature.

  • Build trust and authority

    That say, trusted sites rank well in Google. Trusted sites are those that offer quality, relevant contents. Having a trusted site links to your store, speaks volumes.

    Work on your blog, make it a trusted site.

  • Make money from Google AdSense and banner ads

    You can have Google AdSense for your store too, but this may not look good to your potential customers, because after all, your store should be presented as a serious, professional and legitimate online business that sells products, not a money maker for Google AdSense and banner ads.

  • Build a reputation for your blog too

    Don’t just use the blog to promote your store, work on building a reputation for your blog that offers useful good tips and quality, original content to your readers (something related to your business perhaps?). A reputable blog that offers quality content can also attract marketers for affiliate opportunity.

Convince with our take that you should have a WordPress blog? Let us know. Share your thoughts on this topic please :)

Related Articles

Tags: , ,