Creating a blog is an obvious choice for ecommerce businesses to boost SEO, advertise, and promote goods or services. Something that’s discussed a lot about blog curation is “finding your voice”. The way you deliver your message to an audience and convince them you are not only an authority in your field but also that your blog is worth visiting again is important. There’s no magic formula to finding a unique voice for your blog, but by honing in on details, paying attention to what most engages your audience, curating your blog can become a straightforward and engaging process.
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Create a Style Guide
Before attempting to create or curate content, it’s important to consider the tone you want your blog to achieve. Are readers investing in your feed because of humourous critique, formal objectivity, or a combination of the two? It’s important to figure out what tone you want your blog to have as this will determine how you engage with followers and what content you’ll want to post. A style guide won’t just help you shape your voice and tone, it also forms a framework for future content.
A style guide may be created before you have started posting, and altered once you measure which types of content perform better than others. It should include approximate word counts for different pieces of content, whether images are necessary and what kind, how bylines appear (or don’t), whether links are involved and how many per post, applicable specifics on spelling and punctuation and other relevant details. The purpose of the style guide is to provide a framework for content so that it is uniform across all platforms. This uniformity helps your blog look more professional, and this professionalism will inspire an increased sense of loyalty in readers.
Know Your Purpose
Knowing the purpose of the blog makes curation exponentially easier. Whether your blog is being used to generate sales or boost SEO, knowing what the purpose is helps shape the content calendar, and will inform what kinds of content you’ll be creating for your audience.
Blogs can solve problems for businesses or customers, offer unique observations on current events, or provide critically in-depth insights into the history or science behind specific topics. Most blogs utilize a multi-purpose strategy, with a variety of kinds of content addressing different needs posted at regular times.
Talk to Your Audience
Once you have determined the purpose of your content, now it’s time to tailor it to your audience. Not all content reaches audiences equally. Different demographics respond to information differently, and in today’s digital age audiences personalize how they obtain information and tend not to stray far from this personalized media orbit. Finding the right voice for your blog also includes figuring out how best to present your content so that it reaches the right demographic.
Do some research on who your core audience is. Know the age range, common interests and reasons why they are interested in your product or service. Rather than a specific product push, think about what information they want from you and what would be useful to them and create your content accordingly. On the StickerYou blog we run Q&A interviews with sticker artists in order to galvanize the enormous creative community that stickers appeal to. This serves both to highlight the potential of our core product – customized die-cut stickers – and inspire our audience with the creativity of others.
To gain an initial following, it’s important to remember to talk to your audience and not at them or above them. Stay away from content that is overtly promotional or a sales pitch, as this turns off today’s media-savvy audiences. If your blog is providing objective information for example, be cautious not to come across as condescending or insert obtuse humour as this might not appeal to readers and may even ostracize them.
Intentionally Repurpose
Think of your blog as a repository of useful information about and related to your business. Content can be reformatted and repurposed to appeal to different audiences both on the blog itself and across different channels. For example, a video interview can be repurposed and reposted as a text article, or an infographic fashioned into a full blog post, or several posts combined to create a more in-depth piece.
Blogs are adapting and evolving as quickly as e-commerce is. Although there’s no “right” way to curate a blog, with attention to detail, the desire to provide beneficial information and a lot of practice, you’ll be able to find your voice amidst the e-commerce cacophony.
Author: StickerYou Founder & President, Andrew Witkin
As the founder of a global e-commerce leader in custom-printed, die-cut products, Andrew Witkin is widely recognized as a leading authority on e-commerce, customization, startups, marketing and the tech economy. Witkin has also served as VP North American Licensing for Nelvana/Corus Entertainment and Director of Marketing for MegaBrands/Mattel.
About Carson Derrow
