1. Post a recipe that ties into your site’s theme. If you sell children’s products, make something kid-friendly. If you sell purses, do a couture-purse inspired cake design. Include pictures!
2. Announce an upcoming sale. Even offer a preview exclusively for blog readers, where they can see which products are included at what sale prices via a special link that’s only included in the blog. (Note: This tip also works well in email marketing…think RueLaLa.)
3. Introduce a new product line that you’ve just added. What makes it stand apart, what are the benefits, and which products are the expected best-sellers?
4. Support a cause! Identify a popular movement, and make sure it’s one that you believe in. Then describe how you help, whether it’s with financial contributions, or efforts like recycling and reusing packing supplies to support a greener planet. Ask your readers to pitch in.
5. Introduce a staff member, your entire web or CSR team, or even make it a series and showcase one employee every week.
6. Write about the pick-and-ship process, what happens after the order is placed.  Our friends at MyCubanStore.com place a video of the process on their invoice page; go purchase a guayabera and see for yourself.
7. Share your celebrations! Show photos of your recent store events, company picnic, or holiday party. This can be a great way to humanize your store.
8. Talk about your website itself, instead of your company and its business. It’s a great way to get the some visibility and link love from the tech community. PlumberSurplus.com has made their entire blog about this!
9. Demonstrate a product with a video. Show its uses, how it works, or the process of assembling the product, such as how Zappos demonstrates their knife sharpener.
10. Roll out the red carpet! See if you can find any way to include Hollywood. Internet surfers love celebrities; take a look at any recent list of “most popular search terms” if you don’t believe me. Has one of your products been worn by Suri or carried by Angelina? Brag about it, even if they didn’t buy it from you. Just don’t lie and claim they did,
11. Make a list (and check it twice). Much like this one, blog posts that are bulleted or numbered lists are easy to scan and popular with readers. Make a list of your best selling products (and why), or your top tips for surviving the holidays, or 5 ways to choose the perfect Christmas gift…you get the idea.
12. Think travel! During the holidays or summer you find a lot of people traveling. So pick a place you’ve been to recently, show pictures, and describe the location and some fun activities. Incorporate your products wherever possible – apparel for the locale, luggage for the trip, toys and books for the free time, or a digital camera for the memories you’ll make.
13. Launch a contest. Create or find a great prize and give people one entry per day throughout the contest. Once they enter the first time, email them daily (with their permission) and remind them to come back, and after they enter show them some stuff to buy.
14. Give a quick office tour so your customers can visualize what it’s like to work there. And if you break new ground, show the process of creating your new workspace, from demolition to the finished result. Everyone loves a great “flip” video!
15. Showcase products around a particular theme, such as A Girl Needs Pink at 1928 Jewelry.
16. Write generically for SHOPPERS. What challenges do all shoppers face? Think of topics like comparing prices, avoiding shipping hassles during the holidays, handling returns, shipping internationally…some topics are universal no matter what products you sell.
17. Answer a question your customer service team received by phone or email on your blog for others to read. Keep the caller/emailer anonymous, though it might be a nice touch to use the first name only (if you get permission first, that is).
18. Share your corporate values, ideals, or culture. If this is all you talk about, it’s boring. But sprinkling it in with more people-oriented content lets your readers know what you stand for.
19. Focus a post on parents or the family as a whole. Offer ideas for together time or family fitness. It’s ok to work your products in, but you don’t have to – this is a great value proposition on its own. And parents make up a large portion of online shoppers, so lots of readers will find it relevant to their lives.
20. Go back to the early days of your company and tell its history. Did it start out in your garage? Do you have a picture of packages stacked up in your driveway? A video of you removing a batch of your famous pretzels from the oven in your kitchen? Share your grass-roots beginnings.
21. Incorporate the arts. Feature works from a local artist or write a review of the currently-running show at the community theater. Position your company as a patron of the arts.
22. Run a poll. There are several plug-ins for major blog platforms, as well as third-party polls, and it’s a good way to encourage participation from your readers. Publish the results as you go along so there’s something of interest to see along the way.
23. Offer up a great craft or DIY tip, like Free People’s homemade terrarium ornament idea.
24. Offer a free download – a desktop wallpaper image or a printable coloring page for kids are a couple of popular ideas.
25. Offer a coupon, of course! It’s great to reward your blog readers with a tangible benefit – real savings off the products in your store.
26. Do you attend trade shows or other industry events? Include a diary of your travel and activities along with photos.
27. Happy New Year! These are easy to do and schedule for a future date: just wish your customers a pleasant day for every major holiday of the year. Short and sweet is fine; customers don’t expect you to be blogging that day anyway.
28. Identify what your customers care about, and blog on those topics. Patagonia discusses wildlife and the environment, while Etnies has videos from extreme sports events as well as competition results.
29. Online retailers want to make money; shoppers want to save money (even while spending it). Offer tips on how to save money by shopping online. Some ideas are to purchase multiple products from the same retailer to save on shipping costs, to sign up for the newsletter to receive coupons and discount codes, or to provide bulk discounts to groups that purchase together (clubs, schools, mommy groups, etc).
30. Make a stupidly funny video. Or maybe not so funny? You decide.

The great thing about having a blog for your business is that it gives customers and search engines new content to view. It can increase sales by convincing customers of your product’s benefits, or teaching them how to use it, or giving them ideas for incorporating the product into the lives.

But it’s essential to integrate the weblog with your storefront. If customers can’t go back-and-forth between your store and your weblog, the impact of your blog is going to be less than optimal. If you are using Miva Merchant 5 and WordPress, however, one of the simplest ways to integrate the two is to include recent blog posts right on your homepage.

To start out, you need a template that can display a very simple HTML page – one that, in this example, is no more than the title of each post, linked to the full post itself. This can be done by modifying the index.php file within your WordPress template (located in wp-content/themes/your-theme-name). Just add this code at the top of your index.php file:

<?php if ($_REQUEST['pull'] == 1) : ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts() && $ctr < 3) : the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a><br /><br />
<?php $ctr=$ctr+1; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

<?php else : ?>

The rest of your original index.php should follow this code. Then at the very bottom, close your “if” statement like this:

<?php endif; ?>

At this point, you should be able to see your recent posts by going to the following URL. Be sure to replace “domain.com” with your website domain name, and replace “weblog” with the correct directory for your WordPress installation:

http://www.domain.com/weblog/?pull=1

At this point, you’re ready to begin working in Miva Merchant. You’ll need Emporium Plus’s Toolkit module installed. Then, inside Miva Merchant, go to Pages and edit your Storefront (SFNT) page or your Storefront Welcome Message (under Messages). Add the following code (again, replacing the appropriate parts of the URL as specific to your site):

<mvt:item name="toolkit" param="callurl|weblog|http://www.domain.com/weblog/?pull=1|POST|nhour,nminute,nsecond" />
&mvt:global:weblog;

This will print out the list of recent posts from your weblog right on your Miva Merchant storefront.

To get sales, your website has to get visitors. And one of the best ways to get visitors to your website is to rank well within the search engines. That is an entirely different subject, but one of the easiest things to consider is implementing a weblog for your business.

Originally, back around 1998, weblogs (aka “blogs”) were mainly online diaries. Bloggers wrote entries about their lives, their families, posted photos, and more. By 2001, weblogs were becoming more mainstream, as political weblogs appeared and gained popularity. It still took awhile before blogs caught on for businesses, but in 2005, the publication Business.com published an article entitled “Blogs Will Change Your Business“, that is still popular today. (For a more in-depth history of blogging, see Wikipedia.)

So why would you want a weblog for your business? A common reason is to attract search engines, and as a result, to gain new visitors to your website. Well-written, unique content is one of the tenets of search engine optimization, and a weblog is a relatively easy-to-implement tool for publishing content.

It doesn’t hurt that Google loves weblogs, both directly and indirectly. For example, many weblog tools will ping Google when a new post is made. In fact, on one of my weblogs, I have an alert set up for the domain name, and whenever a new post is made, I get an alert about the post within 2 hours, often less! That’s pretty quick for Google to get information from my site out to customers.

Second, weblogs encourage links. Most bloggers maintain a “blogroll”, which is a list of other blogs they recommend. When a blogger comments on a website, often other bloggers pick it up and add their own posts on the subject, linking to the same website. And weblog software manages things called “trackbacks”, which is a mechanism for weblogs to notify each other about posts. (For a good basic description, see the post How Trackback Works.)

Here are some tips for integrating a weblog with your ecommerce site:

1. Decide on a Blogging Platform – There are tons of options when it comes to weblog software. Remember the cardinal rule of software: the more options it has, the harder it is to learn. Find the one that suits your style – quick and easy, complex and robust, or somewhere in the middle. Some of the common platforms are WordPress, Typepad, and Blogger.
2. Where to Locate your Blog – You can host your weblog on a server provide by some of the software options (such as Blogspot.com for Blogger), but for a business weblog, you’re better off using your own domain. For one thing, it looks more professional. For another, it’s under your control. You can either dedicate a subdomain to your weblog (blog.mysite.com) or just a folder (www.mysite.com/blog). For more discussion on the pros and cons of these choices, see at “How Changes To The Way Google Handles Subdomains Impact SEO” at SearchEngineLand.com.
3. Integrate your Blog with your Website – Make sure readers can get from your weblog to your store, and vice versa. Your sitewide navigation should allow for moving back and forth. Even better, when possible, link from your posts into products or categories in your store.
4. Pick a Design – whether you choose to go with a premade template, or design your own, pick a look and stick with it. Don’t change to a new template every week, or your visitors will have to re-learn how to navigate your blog. Your weblog can have the same layout as your store, or it can be different, but it should be clear that both parts of your site belong together.
5. Find Your Voice – Stary by identifying your audience – both your current site visitors, and any new segments you are trying to attract. Then make sure your content and your voice appeal to your visitors. You need to find the balance between being professional, and engaging the audience. Choose whether to use “I” or “we”, and try to be consistent. A weblog about manufacturing, with an audience of professionals, may use “we” and a more formal tone; a blog about children’s products might use “I”, be informal, and refer to more personal anecdotes, to attract parents.
6. Commit to It – To encourage repeat readers, you need to establish a routine and stick with it. For business blogs, you should probably post a minimum of twice a week…daily, if you can swing it. Make sure your posts are related to your business; don’t meander from topic to topic. If necessary, focus on frequent, short posts, instead of sporadic, longer ones. Also, take the time to proofread. Nothing screams unreliable like misspellings and grammatical errors.