Blogging on Shopify: Everything You Need to Know

Is Shopify good for blogging?

The first question is: are there advantages to blogging on Shopify over WordPress, or some other native blogging platform?

The answer is yes – there are definite advantages to running an e-commerce blog on Shopify. But there are a couple of disadvantages as well.

Let’s go over them briefly.

Advantages

The advantages of blogging on Shopify are:

• Direct Shopify integration: Shopify‘s native blogging engine is fully integrated with Shopify‘s e-commerce system. This means you don‘t have to deal with third-party solutions for server hosting, store integration, databases, etc.
• Convenience and ease of use: Shopify’s blog editor is simple to use. You can start publishing in minutes, with no extra configuration steps. Even easier if you already have a Shopify store.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits: Hosting your blog directly on Shopify means that your organic traffic is not split between different subdomains, which is inevitable if you use a third-party blogging platform.
• Lead generation: Your Shopify blog is an excellent tool for generating leads. Attract visitors with engaging blog content, and then nudge them to subscribe to your newsletter, or follow you on social media.
• Streamlined sales: Get straight to the action and use your Shopify blog as a sales channel. Hook them in with an exciting post about your latest product, and funnel themseamlessly to the checkout.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages of blogging on Shopify are:

• Cumbersome UI: In terms of usability, Shopify’s native blog editor leaves a lot to be desired. Cramped text fields, preview window in a separate tab, and unintuitive buttons (you publish posts by toggling visibility to “visible”, really?) are the major downsides here.
• Limited selection of components: The blog editor lacks support for CTA buttons, forms, embedded product listings, image carousels, and social sharing buttons.
• Poor SEO support: Basic SEO tagging is supported, but there is no built-in analytics tool to actually help you produce SEO-ready content.

These disadvantages are not a deal-breaker when it comes to simple blogging, but they do limit what you can accomplish in terms of CRO (conversion rate optimization). The easiest way to fix them is by installing a dedicated blogging app such as Bloggle.

Should I use Shopify for my blog?

The answer depends on your specific use-case. There are 3 common use-cases that cover most users.

Let’s go over them in turn.

Use-case 1: You already have a Shopify store

If you‘re already managing a Shopify store, blogging can help you accomplish a couple of different goals.

Blogging is a great way to help customers get more value from your products. For example, you can create tutorials, how-to posts, feature highlights, shopping guides, and other product-centric forms of content.

Another reason why you might want to add a blog to your Shopify store is to stay ahead of competitors. For example, if you consistently keep in touch with customers through regular content updates, they’ll be more likely to stick around, generating more up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

Use-case 2: You‘re starting a new Shopify store

If you’re just getting into Shopify e-commerce and don’t have much to spend on advertising, blogging can work wonders as your main sales channel.

Since hosting on Shopify is free, you can do effective inbound marketing by publishing focused, informative, SEO-ready content. It might take a while before your organic reach builds up and you start seeing an uptick in conversions, but it costs nothing and provides secondary benefits in the form of increased brand awareness and customer satisfaction.

Use-case 3: You‘re already a blogger on a different platform

If you’re a blogger looking for ways to monetize your work, opening up a Shopify store is not a bad way to go about it.

With the right Shopify blogging app, you’ll gain access to features usually present only on dedicated blogging platforms such as WordPress. This takes care of the content production part. As for monetization, you can sell merchandise, ebooks, video tutorials, webinars, and other products.

How to use Shopify for blogging

Blogging on Shopify is really straightforward.

Let’s briefly go over the steps.

To set up your blog, do the following:

1. Log in to your Shopify account.
2. Navigate to Sales channels > Online Store > Blog posts.
3. Click Manage blogs.
4. Click Add blog.
5. Provide details and click Save.

To create and publish a blog post, do the following:

1. Navigate to Sales channels > Online Store > Blog posts.
2. Click Add blog post.
3. Provide content, customize settings, and click Save.
4. Set visibility to visible to publish.

To learn more about blogging on Shopify, check out our article on how to add a blog to Shopify and create beautiful posts.

Bonus: Use a Shopify blog app

Instead of using the default Shopify blog editor, you can try Bloggle, our own Shopify blogging app.

Bloggle provides advanced customization options for your Shopify blog. It is easy to use, fully compatible with your existing content, and includes advanced features such as:

• SEO suggestion engine.
• Template manager.
• Forms, buttons, product carousels, and more for your posts.
• Post importing.

Examples of blogs on Shopify

Here is a selection of our favorite Shopify blogs, along with brief explanations on why they work. Read our post on Shopify blog examples to see more.

Made for Home

Made for Home is a home decor blog with a thoughtful, organic design. They cover a range of topics including decor, fragrances, furniture, lighting, and dining apparel. They use high-resolution images paired with embedded product listings to make you fall in love with the tasteful, affordable items on sale.

Andrews

Andrews is a fashion blog focused on style, creativity, and individuality. Their blog posts combine insight into psychology and aesthetics with subtle fashion advice and good deals for designer clothes.

Mexico in My Pocket

Mexico in My Pocket is a simple food blog for lovers of Mexican cuisine. It showcases the power of simple layouts, useful content, and charming visual design. While you browse traditional and modern Mexican recipes, you can shop for quirky glassware, tasty snacks, and other Mexico-themed products.

The Future Rocks

The Future Rocks is a cleverly named blog about diamonds. Their content goes into great detail about the process of extracting, cutting, and polishing diamonds, giving customers an insight into the luxury world of artisanal jewelry.

Five Fields Decor & Design

Five Fields Decor & Design is a home improvement blog that helps you create your dream home. Its main selling point is the tutorial posts covering a range of home improvement topics. Giving readers something of value upfront is a great way to generate goodwill. It also helps with nudging customers to click the Buy button.

7 Best practices for blogging on Shopify

If you want to be a successful Shopify blogger, there are a couple of things to keep in mind as you create content for your blog.

Here are 7 best practices for Shopify blogging.

1. Set blogging goals

Before you start publishing content on Shopify, think about your blogging goals. Having a specific goal in mind for your blogging efforts will help you develop your blogging strategy over time. Typical Shopify blogging goals include:

• Generating more inbound traffic from search engines.
• Capturing leads for your email newsletter.
• Increasing sales volume and quality.
• Strengthening your brand.
• Engaging with prospective and existing customers.

2. Outline a content strategy

Once you’ve set your goals, put them to practice by outlining a content strategy. This document will act as a guideline when you start writing posts. Your content strategy document should specify the following:

• Audience: who you’re writing for. It can be multiple audiences, but then it either becomes hard coming up with topics, or you end up splitting the audience by publishing on multiple blogs.
• Topics: the stuff you’ll be writing about. The number of topics to cover depends on the nature of your business. If you’re selling diamonds, you have one principal topic to cover, whereas if you’re selling clothes, you probably need to cover multiple topics to rank.
• Competitors: always be mindful of your competitors. Analyze them to find inspiration for your own posts, observe what they do well and what they do poorly, and ultimately try to come up with a better offer.
• Platforms: in this case, your Shopify blog. There are a couple of other options to explore, including running a blog on another platform and linking it to Shopify.
• Content clusters: organize your blog post ideas into content clusters. This makes it easier to develop content over time. It’s also useful for seeing which topics perform better, so you can meet the demand accordingly.
• Content calendar: develop a rough timeline for publishing posts. Consistency is crucial if you want to amass followers for your blog.

3. Write quality content

Your blog posts should provide tangible value to readers. This is what keeps them hooked to your content, and what might nudge them to spend money at your Shopify store.

The hallmarks of a quality blog post are the following:

• Structure: keep your posts organized in sections with appropriate headings to help readers pace themselves as they read.
• Information: provide useful information to the reader, ideally information that can‘t be found elsewhere.
• Clarity: state your thoughts clearly and unambiguously. The quickest way to lose readers is by making things hard to understand through the use of flowery prose, awkward metaphors, and generalized statements with no meaning.
• Focus: stick to the topic at hand. Going off on tangent can work for a personal blog, but in business blogging you’re trying to get readers to act in a certain way, not simply admire writing for its own sake.
• Humor: even if you’re running a blog on serious topics, it pays to have a bit of humor sprinkled in to lighten the mood. This will help humanize your brand and set you apart from business-minded competitors.

4. Add visuals

Visuals help bring your blog posts to life. They’re also useful for breaking up long blocks of text, illustrating key points, visualizing data, and providing condensed explanations for complex topics. You’ll be working with images and video mainly, so it’s worth going over a couple of points relating to their use.

When adding images, be mindful of their placement, aspect ratio, and file size. Keep them evenly distributed throughout the text, make sure the aspect ratio works for different screen sizes and orientations, and make sure they’re compressed to save space.

When adding video, pay attention to length, file size, and captions. Short videos work best for embedding into posts, and this takes care of the file size issue as well. Captions should be provided for silent viewing.

5. Add links

Links are useful for a variety of purposes. They serve three important functions:

• Helping readers explore the rest of your content.
• Providing authority to your posts by linking to relevant sources of information.
• Improving your organic reach on search engines (more on that in a bit).

Two things to keep in mind here. First, don’t overstuff your posts with links. This used to be common in the early days of e-commerce, and search engines have taken steps to curb the practice. Second, keep links relevant to the topics you’re covering. Linking to frivolous or unrelated pages serves only to confuse the reader.

6. Add interactive elements

A blog post without interactive elements might be an interesting read, but it does little to improve the conversion potential of your Shopify blog.

Interactive elements include buttons, forms, product galleries, as well as links. Be mindful of their placement. CTA buttons work best when placed in the middle, or at the bottom of a post. Product galleries should go in product-focused sections. Forms are typically reserved for the end of the post.

7. Be mindful of SEO

SEO improves the odds that your content reaches its intended audience. It’s a big topic to cover, so we’ll just outline the basics here. Here are the key SEO factors of e-commerce blogging:

• Meta tags and descriptions: keeping your posts tagged with appropriate meta descriptions and tags helps search engines crawl and index your content.
• Keywords: keywords help you rank for specific search queries, which is essential for increasing your organic reach.
• Heading structure: headings help organize your content into a hierarchy, making it easier to index for search engines.

Get started with Bloggle on Shopify

We have covered everything you need to know to get started with blogging on Shopify. 

The rest will come with experience and practice. And to help you get there faster, we suggest giving Bloggle a try. 

Sign up for the free trial and transform your Shopify blog into a content powerhouse.

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