Why Every eCommerce Business In Africa Needs A Blog

Running an online store is no easy task and certainly doesn’t come cheap. You’d have to acquire a lot of merchandise, partner with courier companies, hire staffs to keep track of your stock control process, have an excellent customer service team, build a professional eCommerce site, run or outsource your social media management, and eventually spend a whole lot of money trying to promote your online store.

For people living in most countries in Europe and America, running an eCommerce business can be very profitable, fun, and generally appear to seem like an adventure. But for people living in Africa, especially Nigeria, it’s a whole different game.

The largest eCommerce businesses in Nigeria—Jumia & Konga—are yet to turn a profit, despite spending millions of dollars promoting their brands. And then again, there are thousands of other smaller eCommerce businesses who spring up and fizzle out usually within a period of 3 years.

What then are they doing wrong? Why are most eCommerce businesses in Africa experiencing a downturn? And how can some increase their sales without spending so much on advertisement?

While many factors affect the growth and profitability of eCommerce businesses, there’s one way they could improve their chances of outliving the predetermined doomsday period of 3 years.

Although not an absolute solution, this has its major advantages, and eCommerce businesses that are paying close attention to it experience a little extra traffic and patronage than others who don’t.

“This is running an eCommerce blog for your online business.”

But why then do you really need a blog for your eCommerce business? What type of content should you blog about? And for those who already have one, why is your blog not generating leads?

If you’re running or intend to start up an eCommerce business, here are 5 reasons your online store needs a blog:

See Also: Blogging Vs Affiliate Marketing Vs eCommerce: Which Will Make You More Money?

1). It Boosts Your SEO Ranking:

One of the greatest advantages for an online business to run a blog is it boosts their SEO ranking. Google likes to index pages that pass an immense amount of value to their readers. These pages usually have a lot of contents featuring the right keywords, but at the same time, pass valuable information. Limiting the use of subcategories and sub-folders will help with your blog taxonomies for seo. This means that your category pages on your blog could appear alongside individual pages on search engines.

When you run an eCommerce blog that contains in-depth information with every article posted, your search ranking begins to rise. And as you strategically link to product pages from the articles, their page rankings also start to grow, till your items eventually find their way to the first page of Google.

Since millions of people search for various items on Google before visiting their favorite eCommerce sites, having your product pages rank on its first page will increase your traffic, your leads, and subsequently grow your sales.

2). It Builds A Loyal Following:

When your blog articles are centered around teaching people how to get things done, those who find value in them will slowly begin to subscribe to your mailing list. And as you continue to add immense value to their lives, they’d constantly look out for your emails and would start to visit the blog on their own, while telling people they know, what you’re doing.

See Also: Top 6 Reasons Nigerian E-Commerce Businesses Are Losing Money

3). It Helps People Make Better Shopping Decisions:

A tech blog that constantly reviews tech gadgets, for instance, could easily recommend various products based on reviews carefully analyzed and dissected on the blog. Their readers now would trust their recommendations based on the quality of the previous reviews the blog has had from other people who leave comments asking questions and thanking them for the recommendations.

Knowing this, part of what you blog about, with respect to your product line, should contain valuable product reviews. As people make purchasing decisions based on them, and eventually leave their comments, other readers would come to trust your recommendations and tend to make direct purchases after reading one of your in-depth and highly valuable reviews.

4). It Humanizes Your Brand:

Blogging makes people connect with the writer. It lets them know there’s actually someone behind this website, and the person will continue to add value to their lives, long after they’ve made a purchase or two.

To make this work, ensure the names of the article authors are published on the website. Knowing there are real people writing the articles will make your readers to sometimes put a call across to your eCommerce business, only to ask to speak with a specific person before they make a purchase.

See Also: How To Start A Blog — The Complete Beginner Guide For 2017

5). It Makes You An Authority:

By constantly posting valuable articles surrounding a particular niche, people would come to see your blog and its writers as authorities on the subject. They’d come to value them enough to even invite them to speak at events surrounding the topics they write about.

Depending on how the blog traffic grows and how engaging it gets, your business would be respected and trusted as a startup that has specific expertise in a particular product category or categories.

To Sum It Up

While many entrepreneurs believe they have to keep spending more money to make their eCommerce business work, most are better off implementing content marketing, by running a consistent and highly valuable eCommerce blog covering their product niche, and also promoting the contents posted there.

When you do this, you pass valuable information, humanize your brand, and on the long-run, make people believe your expertise in the niche authorizes you as the best person to constantly recommend the products they need to buy.

See Also: How To Start An E-Commerce Business In Nigeria: The Comprehensive Cost

What are your thoughts on whether every eCommerce business needs a blog or not? Let me know by leaving a comment below.