5 Blogging Ideas to Engage Customers

Engaging customers with both informative and entertaining content can be a key to keeping them long term and making additional sales. After all, what’s better, a customer that buys once, or a customer that keeps on making purchases because your blog content draws them back to your site?

In spite of the benefits, creating that engaging content — even from the standpoint of what to write about in a blog post — can be a significant challenge. In this article, I am going to describe five blogging ideas that can be used over and over again to engage customers and provide something to link to from Facebook, Twitter, or other social media. These sorts of posts will help you keep customers coming back.

Be Involved in Charity and Community

It is much easier to find something to blog about when your business or employees are doing something helpful. One generally positive thing that makes for excellent blog content is participating in community or charity events.

For instance, in the United States there will be dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure events to benefit breast cancer research. Consider putting together a team from your ecommerce business. You can blog about planning for the event and follow up afterward with pictures and more.

For another example, consider REI’s blog post, “When You’re 80, What Will You Do For Fun?,” which is about volunteerism.

Pete Dewell was featured in an REI Blog about volunteering. REI regularly blogs about community projects and stewardship.

Comment on Events Related to Your Field or Industry

As you consider blog topics, don’t be afraid to talk about current events, especially when those events relate to your store’s industry or niche.

For example, an online store that sells sporting goods might consider a blog about Major League Baseball. The Boston Red Sox are supposed to be a dominant team and yet they started the season with six straight losses.

Last week, a professional basketball player, LeBron James, purchased part of a soccer club in Liverpool, England — if you sell basketballs or soccer balls, why wouldn’t you post something about this?

GardenStyle Direct, a U.K. based outdoor furniture store, recently blogged about how the forthcoming Royal wedding — and its associated national holiday — would create a great opportunity for grilling out.

GardenStyle Direct takes advantage of headline news on its blog.

Describe How to Do or Use Something

Explaining what something is or how it works makes for fantastic blog content. In fact, you could write a never-ending stream of blog posts on nothing but how-to or what-is topics.

Potential blog posts could cover how to assemble some of the more complex products on your site, or even how to use those products. If you sell kitchen supplies, recipes — which are how-to-cook articles — are an obvious choice. A golf site might talk about swing dynamics. A hardware store could explain how light-emitting diodes (LEDs) work compared to incandescent light.

For example, take a look at this Adafruit Industries blog post about “How to make an Emoticon Jacket with LCD Screen.”

Adafruit Industries posted a blog about how to make emoticon jackets.

If Adafruit Industries can write a how-to about making emoticon jackets, what’s stopping you?

Make Lists

Lists make great blog content. Consider these real blog post titles:

• Ten Things I’ve Learned From Healing An Incurable Disease
• Three Phone Tips for Antisocial People Like Me Who Hate Phones
• 10 Ingenious iPad Self Portraits
• 109 Things to Do with Horseradish

Meghan Telpner, who sells online and offers cooking classes, blogged about 109 things to do with horseradish.

Talk About Customers

Finally, it is acceptable to blog about customers. One popular strategy is to hold regular contests on your site or on social media properties like Facebook. Then profile the winners of these competitions on your blog.

Grows Up, which sells products for young children, does just what I’ve described above and then posts about winners.

Grows Up profiles customers on its blog.