Launch Your Online Store Using A Blog: Using Non-traditional Means To Start Your Online Business

Have you considered opening an online store, but are concerned about whether or not your target market is good enough? Want to start something but do not have the money yet to fund your initial launch? Are you concerned that you may not have the background knowledge necessary to launch an online store? Here are some reasons why you should consider starting a blog first before launching your online business:

1. Blogs with quality content (over time) naturally attract traffic. They are loved by search engines because they contain rich content that changes frequently. Most blogging platforms will even automatically ping the search engines to let them know that your site has been updated. Remember, it can take several months to generate significant traffic and it takes effort, so START EARLY! In fact, traffic will trickle in very slowly at first, so do not give up. Give it at least a year. Remember most people give up withing 1-2 months of starting a blog, because they were not patient enough to give it a chance. The greater the frequency of your blog entries, the more potential exposure you have.

2. Blogs naturally attract traffic, while e-commerce stores usually do not. Online stores in and of themselves rarely contain content that changes. (I’ll talk about how to overcome that in later posts, but for now, realize that product pages and your products rarely change content-wise and are by their very nature, static in content) Driving traffic to an online store is much harder.

3. Blogs targeted towards a niche, attract your target market. People like to read about what they are interested in. Blogs can be picked up by your reader’s RSS readers (special web pages or software that will load your blog into their reader should they subscribe to your updates). Your blog posts will show up in your reader’s blog readers right next to their favorite sites and daily news. How cool is that?

4. Blogs let you interact and learn about your target market. By encouraging participation, you can learn about what your target market thinks and what problems they are facing. Its a great opportunity to see if you will like your niche. If you can stay motivated by updating your blog regularly over an extended time frame, chances are you will stay motivated as an ecommerce store owner. (try to blog a minimum of 3-5 times per week).

5. Blogs are inexpensive. Blogs can be free(supported with advertising, etc) but I recommend using a hosting provider, such as GoDaddy, or Host Gator, and registering a domain name. This blog is hosted on GoDaddy for less than $6/month. Having your own domain name makes it easy to incorporate the blog into your web store later down the road. A creative designer, can even make the blog look exactly like it is integrated into your online store.

6. Blogging platforms such as WordPress (my favorite) have hundreds of free plugins (little software modules than can easily be added to your site). These plugins handle everything from SEO optimization, forums and social networking, ad management, to video and audio integration. Blogging platforms allow you to create very sophisticated websites without detailed knowledge of HTML or programming. However, if you have access to a PHP programmer, you are unlimited with what you can do. There are even ecommerce shopping cart plugins that you can use for simple online stores.

Blogging is an excellent way to build of traffic before you start introducing products and can be an excellent way to lead into a successful ecommerce business.