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5 Best Practices for Business Blogs

The post 5 Best Practices for Business Blogs appeared first on HostGator Blog . Blogging can be good for your business, if you start with a plan. A blog can boost your website’s SEO, build relationships with prospective customers, and position your company as a trustworthy source of expertise. Sounds good, right? So, what are the best practices for starting your business blog ? Let’s dig in. 1. Blog for Your Customers, Not You What should you write about on your business blog? The big difference between business blogging and personal blogging is this: Business blogging is all about your audience, not all about you or your business. What that means is you’ll need to stick to topics of interest to your potential customers. Write for your customer personas , include keywords they search for, that you want to rank well for, and try to answer customer and reader questions with your posts. For example, does your business sell custom replacement windows? Use your posts to answer the questions customers ask you about energy efficiency, design, durability, energy rebates, and more. Remember that a blog is supposed to be a casual conversation. Readers come to you because they’re looking for information. You build trust and authority with them by giving them the information they want. That means don’t get too salesy on your blog. Yes, you can post about new products and sales, and share user-generated content like customer photos of their new windows. But don’t turn every post into a full-volume sales pitch. A call to action at the end of each post is enough. Vary the format from time to time. Maybe throw in an interview with a customer or supplier, use Canva to make some infographics with facts and stats your customers can use, shoot some tutorial videos, or make a slide deck with PowerPoint that your readers can download and share. 2. Include an Image with Every Blog Post Why? It’s simple. People love pictures. Pictures pull your visitors into your story before they read a single word. Look at the home page for Gardener’s Supply’s blog. For gardeners, these pictures are catnip, because they show what’s possible—and they show what the company’s customers want for themselves. Images also make social media posts more engaging. Tweets with images get 34% more RTs than tweets with only text, according to social media scheduling service Postcron. And Instagram posts without images? Just not happening. So take the time to create original photos or graphics for each posts. 3. Decide on Your Posting Schedule Hamster wheel or lazy river? How often should you post? Business blogs that turn out a post or more each day, like HostGator, have teams of writers and editors dedicated to creating that content. But as a small business owner, you wear many hats, and your most important one is running your business, not cranking out blog posts. If you must choose between fewer high-quality posts and more low-quality ones, go with less frequent, better-written posts. You can get good results from a slower posting schedule, if your content gives readers and prospective customers information they want. The key is to use the search terms your audience is looking for and the questions they are asking. To make an infrequent posting schedule go farther is to promote the heck out of each blog post on your business’s social media channels . If you’ve done your persona homework, you already know where your target audience hangs out online. Meet them there with your posts. 4. Keep Your Posts Fresh with Regular Blog Updates Every post you create is a resource you can edit and update as your business grows and your customer base evolves. When you update an old post, save that update in WordPress or update the publication data so that Google knows it’s been freshened up with new information. It’s a good idea to build regular updates into your content schedule. Changing out quarterly or yearly updates of statistics is an easy way to freshen up old content. Adding new feedback from customers to product-focused posts, or updates on new features, can also extend the life of your posts. For more tips, follow our step-by-step guide to running a content audit . 5. Get Organized with Blog Categories and Tags Keep your business blog categories simple and limited. Here’s how HostGator does it. Give your categories names that are search keywords, when possible. HostGator’s customers search for phrases like web hosting tips and marketing tips and tricks. Your business may have very different categories. Whatever they are, they should line up with what your market wants. For example, let’s say you’re in the dog training business. You might have categories on dog behavior, obedience training for dogs, socialization for dogs, and exercise with your dog. This keeps your blog focused on the stuff your customers are interested in. It also makes it easier for readers to home in on the information they need. You can tag your posts, too. This is different from assigning a post to a category. Maybe you write a series of posts on socializing and behavior training for rescue dogs, and another on senior dog behavior and exercise. The categories for these are clear—socializing and behavior. But you can tag them with “rescue dog” or “senior dog” so your readers can search your whole blog, not just individual categories, for content that matches their situation. Like with your category names, tag with phrases your readers search for. Here’s what the category and tag control panels look like in WordPress. Be sure to fill out the slug and description for each of your blog’s categories and tags. That information helps search engine crawlers understand what your post is about. Tags and categories can also help you when it’s time to update your content. Is there new research about senior dog health you want to add to your old posts? Call up the “senior dog” tag and you can rework all the relevant posts in a snap. Build Your Business Blog with HostGator Ready to get started? You can set up your business blog today with a WordPress hosting plan . Add on HostGator Domain Privacy to shield your personal domain registration information from public view to protect your business from spam. Not familiar with WordPress? You can still get started today, too. Gator Website Builder gives you drag-and-drop tools to help you snap together your business blog in minutes, with lots of mobile-friendly templates to make it look great. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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How to Create Product Categories for Your Online Store

The post How to Create Product Categories for Your Online Store appeared first on HostGator Blog . There are so many things to get excited about when you’re setting up an online store—your website design, your cool product videos, your social media marketing plans, your product categories. Yes, your product categories. What may seem at first glance like boring labels are a tool that can help you get found in searches and guide your customers through your site to buy what they’re looking for. Here’s how to make those labels work harder and smarter. 1. Create Categories that Make Sense for Your Customers Set up your categories based on how your customers shop. This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised. For example, if your store sells clothing for everyone, customers will expect your main categories to be women’s, men’s, and children’s clothing, each with subcategories like tops, pants, skirts, dresses, shoes, and outerwear. But if you have certain subcategories that your store sells a lot of, you can not only have them as subcategories, you can also elevate them to top-level categories of their own to boost visibility and help customers find those popular items faster. Here’s an example. Lands’ End sells clothing for women, men, and kids, along with home goods and bags, and all of those are top-level categories on its homepage navigation bar. Within the clothing categories, the brand has a solid reputation among its target market for swimwear and school uniforms. The site design could force customers to drill into the clothing categories to find those items, but it saves them time by including them as their own main categories in the nav bar. What if you’re selling something that’s a little harder to sort through? If you sell parts or supplies of any kind, you may have a lot more main categories and subcategories than the average clothing retailer—and that’s okay. Again, the key is to think like a customer as you group your items. Here are a couple of ways to do that. Online needlecraft supplier KnitPicks organizes its nav bar categories to match the way crafts shop. These customers go looking for yarn or needles or patterns or maybe a kit. All those main categories are above the fold. But sometimes yarn shoppers need yarn that’s a specific color, weight, or fiber content. Setting each of those variables up as subcategories would make the menus enormously long and not very useful. So, the site gives shoppers two options. Scroll down the homepage and click on the icon for the color, weight, or fiber they need. “See more” under the yarn tab and use the sidebar navigation tools. Dropdown filters for weight and fiber keep the other subcategory options visible above the fold. Another retailer with a lot of products takes a different approach. AutoZone categorizes its inventory by parts, accessories, tools, and other top-level categories that make sense for the DIY auto maintenance customer. But “auto parts” is a huge category on its own and could quickly become unnavigable. AutoZone has done something like Lands’ End. When customers mouse over “auto parts” they get a pop up subcategory menu that features the most popular subcategories (with their most popular subgroups) on one side and an alphabetized list of all the subcategories on the other side.   2. Use Keywords to Name Your Product Categories Once you’ve got a handle on how to set up your categories, name them with care. Use keyword research to see which terms people search for the most before you commit to anything. Why? You want your categories to appear higher in those searches. Knowing how many people each month search for, say, “handknit baby hats” versus “hand knit baby hats” can help you choose more popular category names. It almost goes without saying that category names are not the place to get wacky and creative. Naming your baby hat category “lids for tiny kids” is cute, but it won’t help customers or search engines find your store, and it won’t help you make sales.   3. Make Your Category Pages Pop Shoppers who are truly browsing through your store—like someone who’s buying a gift—and people who aren’t sure exactly what they need will appreciate it if your category pages include useful or fun information. Target, for example, creates an online browsing experience for its patio furniture category by segmenting its products into collections, followed by links to each subcategory—all enhanced with product photos. Meanwhile, REI includes “helpful advice and inspiration” on its camping and hiking product category page to help new outdoorspeople and gift shoppers decide what they need. If you include relevant keywords in your category page content, it can also help with your store’s SEO .   4. Be Consistent When You Categorize Your Products Category filters (to refine category results by color, size, or something else) help customers find what they want quickly, if you’re consistent about tagging every product in your store with the proper categories and attributes like color and size. Otherwise, when customers use category filters to search for a “women’s brown leather belt,” all your relevant products might not show up, and you might miss out on a sale. And if your store offers dozens or hundreds of women’s brown leather belts, add more filters (size, width, hardware color) to help shoppers narrow their results to a manageable list.     Analyze Your Product Categories for Success Featuring popular product subcategories is a great tactic if you know what they are. If your store is new, or if you regularly add new types of products, you may not know exactly what’s hot. You can (and should) regularly review your sales to see which categories are strong sellers. It’s also a good idea to set up Google Analytics  to get insights about how your visitors move around your site. Are they following your category trees from homepage to product, or do they bail out halfway through? Are they using your elevated navigation tabs for popular subcategories? Do their clicks lead to conversions, or do they leave without buying anything? You can use all this data to refine your subcategories, decide which ones to make into top-level categories, and make other improvements. Ready to set up your store? Gator Website Builder helps you get started quickly and easily, with drag-and-drop site design tools, e-commerce functionality, analytics, and more than 200 mobile-friendly, customizable templates. Be sure to add an SSL certificate to protect your customers’ data , keep your site safe from attacks, and get better SEO. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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i need help and i’ll try the best i can to explain what is happening… i made my site in zencarts and it’s fine. Continue reading

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