Fred Wilson just posted a basic truth that every online retailer should know:
Everything that works for bloggers will work even better for e-commerce merchants.
Forget the feed flares and widgets Fred was originally referring to. The blog itself is the most underutilized tool on the internet when it comes to online retail.
Like always, the projects we’re currently working on command the bulk of my limited attention. Two of these have a very heavy social shopping focus. And since neither have launched yet, let me just take a moment to say both are nothing short of dazzling. (By the time you can challenge me, you’ll have long forgotten about this post.)
SEO
Blogs can play a huge roll in owning organic search results. Consider, for instance, that a search at Google for the phrase “owning a business” returns this blog as the number six result (of 3,810,000) based only on a short post I wrote about, you guessed it, owning a business. Just think of the money I could have made had I been selling businesses.
Social referrers
That same post made it to the front page of Reddit and generated more than 7,000 unique visits to the blog in one day. For several days after posting, this blog was the number one referrer to our ‘corporate’ site. The number two and three referrers were blog posts by Guy Kawasaki. Number four referrer? Another blog.
Now, you might be thinking a few things… 1. I am a master blogger, better even perhaps than the great Guy Kawasaki. 2. Our ‘corporate’ site isn’t actually an ecommerce site.
I’ll handle these in order… 1. Thank you. I appreciate that. 2. Whether or not we have a shopping cart on the site to help visitors buy their very own website, traffic converts to leads. And the number of leads coming in from our site is very reflective of the day’s traffic.
We’ve launched scores of online shops. All of these have done very well (by my standards that is… again, by the time you can challenge me…) But every single one of them could do better.
The non-exaggerated, non-sarcastic truth is that online retailers who haven’t integrated blogs, sharing, bookmarking, reviews, and other social features directly into their shopping experience are hemorrhaging opportunity.
Give us a few weeks to launch one of the examples I’m referring to above (the relaunch of an already active ecommerce site.) I’ll come back with some stats after the social features are deployed. The client is a personal friend and won’t mind if I spill his secrets (especially if we don’t tell him.)
Great post. Better watch out, though, Guy might smite you.
I’d love to see you follow up with a case study of your client’s site after adding the “social features.” I’m trying to get my organization to implement a blog right now, but convincing a group that’s scared to death of blogs that there’s an actual revenue generatig component is a bit of a task.