In any industry, there are many prospective customers that are not looking to buy at the moment. Instead, they go online looking for useful information. Later on, maybe when they get their paycheck or when a new product is released, they will want to spend money.
If you can capture these people’s attention with useful information, you have a good chance of getting them to come back to your site when they want to buy something.
For example, let’s pretend you’re a online video game retailer. Instead of just having an ecommerce site, you decide to blog about the video game industry. You publish content like video game reviews, news, and strategy.
As you promote your blog, you’ll start getting traffic from video games fans looking for the information on your blog. These fans are probably are not looking to buy a video game. However, through your blog content, they’ll remember your site.
Not only that, but many of them will come back to visit your blog. Blogs are great at attracting repeat visitors. Blogs are chronologically arranged with the newest posts showing up first. This means people will want to return to the blog regularly to see if there is new content.
Through your blog, you’ll gain the attention of video game fans. Whenever these people want to buy a video game, they’ll probably think about buying the video game through your site. They have a favorable impression of your site because of your useful blog posts. Also, they “feel at home” on your site because they’ve been there before.
To succeed long-term in your business, you’ll have find ways to reach more people on a consistent basis. Adding a blog extends your influence to video game fans that are not looking to buy at the moment.
Also, think about the advantage you have over your competitors who don’t have a blog. Where will people more likely buy video games? From a store that gives away quality free information on their blog or from a store that only has product descriptions and a shopping cart on their website?
Finally, by targeting all video games fans including those that are not in a buying mood, you’ll receive a huge increase of word of mouth recommendations. The video game fans that don’t buy have friends that do want to buy. The non-buyers will recommend your site to their friends as a place to buy video games because they received value from your blog posts.