Welcome back.
And now that you've got your checkout looking great in this lecture, I want to talk about an opportunity
that is so often overlooked by people building e-commerce stores, an opportunity that will not only
help you build trust, but that will also, if done correctly, drive a highly targeted stream of traffic
to your store for free.
And that opportunity is blogging.
Starting your own blog now?
Later on in the course, I'll be teaching you how to use your blog to drive a highly targeted stream
of free traffic, along with many other traffic techniques.
But right now, I want to focus on the importance of using a blog to build trust and therefore increase
your sales.
So at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, well, how can a blog build trust?
Well, a blog gives us an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of our subject and in my case, that
would be dogs.
And so let's imagine up here in the top menu next to the our Fabulous products menu item, I created
another menu item that said blog and when somebody clicked on it, it gave them access to a whole series
of articles about dogs, articles that, for example, could talk about how to care for a dog, dog,
nutrition, or perhaps exercise methods.
The list is endless, but the point is, when somebody sees that and reads those articles, they will
immediately start thinking, ah yes, this person really understands their subject.
They really care for dogs.
They really know what they're talking about.
In other words, they begin to trust my store.
And in addition, not only is my store now a fantastic selection of products, but it's also a great
knowledge resource somewhere that dog lovers can come to read valuable information that may help them
with their dog.
And so with that example, I hope you can now really begin to see how important a blog can be.
Now, having said all that, almost every single e-commerce store owner will not start a blog.
And I think that's for two reasons.
The first reason being that they don't appreciate what I just taught you.
In other words, they don't really understand how a blog can build all essential trust.
And then secondly, most people think that a blog is going to be a lot of hard work, but trust me,
it absolutely doesn't have to be the case.
And so in this lecture, what I want to show you is how you can very easily create a blog for your store,
build trust, and create a fantastic resource for your visitors.
So let's get going.
And the first piece of great news is that you have a blog already built into Shopify.
If I go over to the admin, click on online store you see here blog posts.
And if I click on blog posts, this is where I can start to create my blog.
So let's actually go ahead and create my first blog post.
So clicking on Create Blog post, let's first do a quick run through of the blog post template.
So we have a title and some content where of course we're going to actually write the blog post itself.
Then we have the excerpt, which is simply a brief summary of the blog post that you might want to post
elsewhere.
For example, on your home page below that, we have the ever present Search Engine Listing preview
so that your blog post will show up in the Google rankings.
Then, similar to products, we have the concept of visibility, and you can see that it's hidden by
default and that makes sense.
We don't want to make it visible until of course we've actually finished the blog post itself.
We can then add an image should we so wish, and then to the organization.
Now, by default, the author, as you can see, is my store admin.
In other words, you.
And in the beginning it's really only going to be you that's creating the blog posts.
But just know that later on you might want other people to create blog posts for you, and therefore
you could assign different authors and then to the blog itself.
So here we are creating blog posts, but we want those blog posts to sit within a particular blog.
Now, by default it's showing news, but that's not what we're doing.
So if I open this up, you can see that I have the option to create a new blog.
So I'm going to create a new blog.
And then for the moment I'm going to give it a title, which is simply going to be Dogs.
So I will have a blog about dogs.
And then within that blog there'll be many blog posts.
And then for the tags and the online store theme template, you can simply leave those as is.
So let's actually go ahead and create this blog post.
Now, just for the moment, I'm going to do something super basic just so that we can get started.
So for the title, I'm just going to write test and then the content.
I'm simply going to write test content.
And of course we're going to come back and edit this properly later with some real content.
But for the moment, let's just make it visible and then click on save.
And then if I click on blog posts once again, here is the blog post I just created.
The title, of course, was test.
I was the person who created it.
So my store admin and it's part of the blog that I created called dogs.
Now going back to the site, you will remember that I suggested it would be a great idea to have another
menu item, let's say between our fabulous products and contact.
That said our blog.
So what I would like to do now is to create that menu.
You.
And then once we've done that, I'm going to show you how you can create fabulous content very easily.
Okay.
So let's go ahead and build the menu.
So going back to admin I'm going to come down of course to navigation.
And then I want to add that blog to the main menu.
So I click on main menu, scroll down a bit and click on Add Menu Item.
And I'm going to give it a name which is going to be our blog.
And then in the search box I click on this.
And this time I'm going to be looking for blogs.
So clicking on blogs I select my dog's blog okay so clicking on dogs and I click on add.
And now of course our blog has been added to the menu items.
Now as I just said, I want that to sit between our fabulous products and contact.
And so just to make this a little bit clearer to read, let me just collapse this menu here.
And then what I want to do is to pick up our blog and just slot it between those two menu items so that
now it reads our fabulous products, our blog and contact.
And so with that done, let's save the menu.
And now what we want to do is to add that first blog post underneath our blog.
So let's click on Add Menu item.
I'm going to give it a name which is just going to be test for the moment.
And of course, as I said before, we're going to come back and edit this properly because all I'm doing
here is showing you how simple it is to actually build the blog menu itself, and then this time clicking
into search, I go down to blog posts, and I select that blog post that we created that I called test.
I select test, I click on add.
Now of course we want this to be part of the our blog menu item.
So to do that, all we have to do is to pick it up and slot it neatly under the our blog menu item.
So I move it up and then just indent it a little bit and there we go.
So that now test, our very first blog post is sitting under our blog.
So let's go ahead and save that and then head back to the store.
So I'm going to refresh the page here, but just keep your eye on this part here in between our fabulous
products and contact, because the blog is now going to be added.
So let's refresh and there you go.
You now see our blog.
And if I open this up you see test.
And if I click on test, here is my very first blog post, which of course I call test with the amazing
content that I called Test Content.
But what that now means is that we've set up a blog menu that is ready to receive a real content.
So now I want to show you how easy it is to create fantastic content so that you can build all important
trust and create a fantastic resource for your visitors.
But because I've just realized that this lecture is getting a little bit long, if you don't mind,
I'm going to discuss that in the next lecture.
So I'll see you in a moment for part two.