Setting up a Blog for an e-commerce site

[nicc1976]

Hi All,

I need some pointers on setting up a blog for our new e-commerce site. The new site uses magento and is going live in a month or so. This is a bit of a learning experience for me as I have never set a company blog up before I am not sure of the do's and dont's. Any ideas will be very appreciated.

Cheers

Nic

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Nic,

I can give you a few things that have really been of help to me 1st make sure to write the blog like this example.com/blog not blog.example.com you want all you can get out of that domain. Another thing I would do is make sure you blog at least 4 times a week or 20 times a month is this say. In order for Google to actually really like your blog it should be over 300 words every time you post. When you do attract an audience engage them to not just sit back. If you're using the magento you may want to switch to software like discuss for your blog in order to take advantage of people that can sign in using their twitter account. Last but not least make sure if you're not the one writing it that hired somebody that knows what they're doing. Writers access is a good place to look. this is a great tool if you are doing the writing http://scribecontent.com/

I hope I was of help to you.

Sincerely,

Thomas von Zickell

[AdamThompson]

Hi Nic,

That's a pretty broad question, but here are a few basic suggestions:

• Unless you really want to manage your blog in Magento, I would setup your blog using WordPress. All the features and plugins you'll need, plus plenty of community support, and it's easy to use.
• Focus on publishing great content, SEO, social, and building an audience.
• Install Google Analytics.
• Make sure you have Facebook like button, Tweet this, and Google +1 on each post.
• Install the All In One or Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
• Publish great content and promote it.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I want to chime in and say I highly agree with Adam if you really want blogging to be part of your website you might want to look at Woocommerce from Woothemes.com

they will allow you to build a outstanding and blogging platform and on top of that and excellent e-commerce website. Take a look at the sites on the link I gave you

WordPress should be hosted on a managed WordPress host in my opinion you have some great choices like WP engine & Page.ly that you get discounts from SEO Moz however if you are doing e-commerce I'm going to suggest one of 2 additional hosts as I love all of them and use them all if you want a private VPS and don't want to break the bank websynthesis.com is the only one out there offering a under $100 VPS however you can still get dedicated IP's and I know but for fact VeriSign will be fine with a set up run by Zippykid.com they are based on rack space and one of my particular favorites because they have top-notch support they will not charge you out of this world prices if you're going to get a lot of e-commerce traffic you need a dedicated IP Zippy kid is extremely high-quality and very inexpensive for what you get. Have a look at them all I don't mean to get off blogging tool I just want you to know e-commerce WordPress I feel is the way to go and if you can do it do it right.

I also agree with Adam again Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. is the best plug-in for search engine optimization and word press right now in my opinion

One thing you can do I know with an e-commerce site I don't want to get off topic but if you're going use WordPress is simply use Amazons payment system that does not require you to be an Amazon member there's no chargebacks or anything like that so the merchant safe in addition you don't have to run an SSL if you do find yourself wanting to run SSL do it but only in the payment gateway.

Please let me know if I can be of help to you.

and listen to everything Adam said he definitely knows what he's talking about.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[AdamThompson]

"WordPress should be hosted on a managed WordPress host in my opinion"

I don't think you can host your WP blog on a separate host and still have it be a subfolder of your main domain, can you?

P.S. Thanks for the kind words.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Adam,

I agree with you it cannot be done then I know of (I'm sure it could with enough money and DNS tricks you could make a failover and in force at the failover but that would be bad) I was posing I don't know what he's selling however he could make a full e-commerce site based 100% on the WordPress platform have a look at all of these themes and the  they incorporate e-commerce

http://www.woothemes.com/product-category/themes/woocommerce/?prod_cat[]=1050&s=&post_type=product

hear is more e-commerce stuff from woo  the only reason I'm recommending this theme company is because they're known for making high-quality e-commerce teams however you can go and find many other theme makers or developers wil incorporate the Wu commerce suite and I have to say I was amazed with the plug-ins take a look http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/

I just started building the site yesterday so please forgive the really raw nature of it it's not optimized or anything and the guy who I'm doing it for keeps messing with it.  The reader http://solarwindtec.com the site there's on Zippy kid the reason I forgot above for me also mentioning them is their it the only one to give a content delivery network for free so $25 a month buys you 100,000 page views plus content delivery network everything WP engine who I love as well offers $100 you get for $24 and the speeds are comparable if you're hacked though both be fixed and you get DYN DNS + Ultradns if you go with zippy kid plus free themes and free gravity forms developer edition.

Adam you are hundred percent correct I I agree you definitely probably can't just venues to host like that however I believe that WordPress e-commerce has reached a point where it's functional safe and better than magento for some projects I believe most.

Adam I wanted to say I like to give credit where credit's due you named everything I forgot and you hit the nail on the head man so I definitely know you know yourself I agree with you 100%

sincerely,

Thomas

[JHSpecialty]

We have an e-commerce site with a blog and I agree totally with Thomas and Adam. The only thing I would like to add is be sure to make your content interesting for the user. It is difficult with a e-commerce site to give value to your customer without trying to "sell" in every article. Just keep in mind to post blog articles your readers will want to share along with promoting your products and brand.

[josh-riley]

We can't host WP on our server (long story) so we use a third party and domain map it so the URL appears to be a subdomain of our main domain.

Personally, the best benefits for SEO for blogs are when you're tying to the domain you want the "SEO juice" and links to go to, so for me this isn't my ideal solution, but it's what our system allows for. And, for our audience, it gives some authenticity to the content since it's branded the same as our main domain.

But it's also not necessarily stable. If Magento can handle the blog, that would be my first pick for how to do it. WP has some great functionality and such, but you make things a lot more complicated and lose SEO and link benefit.

[nicc1976]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the feedback guys there was some interesting pointers there. I am going to look at setting up a WP blog as www.ourwebsite.com/blog. One thing that did confuse me was that someone mentioned that it should not be hosted in the same place as the site. Is that correct?

[AdamThompson]

No, it's best to host it the same place as your site. Also, you have to host your website and blog at the same place in order to host your blog at www.ourwebsite.com/blog (which is the best option).

[nicc1976]

Doh....so obvious about the hosting slash domain item. Many thanks for your help guys.