WEBVTT 00:00.050 --> 00:00.950 Welcome back. 00:00.950 --> 00:05.660 And now that you've got your checkout looking great in this lecture, I want to talk about an opportunity 00:05.660 --> 00:11.750 that is so often overlooked by people building e-commerce stores, an opportunity that will not only 00:11.750 --> 00:17.990 help you build trust, but that will also, if done correctly, drive a highly targeted stream of traffic 00:17.990 --> 00:20.030 to your store for free. 00:20.030 --> 00:22.280 And that opportunity is blogging. 00:22.280 --> 00:24.350 Starting your own blog now? 00:24.350 --> 00:29.180 Later on in the course, I'll be teaching you how to use your blog to drive a highly targeted stream 00:29.180 --> 00:32.690 of free traffic, along with many other traffic techniques. 00:32.690 --> 00:38.180 But right now, I want to focus on the importance of using a blog to build trust and therefore increase 00:38.180 --> 00:39.140 your sales. 00:39.410 --> 00:44.300 So at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, well, how can a blog build trust? 00:44.300 --> 00:50.150 Well, a blog gives us an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of our subject and in my case, that 00:50.150 --> 00:51.230 would be dogs. 00:51.230 --> 00:57.530 And so let's imagine up here in the top menu next to the our Fabulous products menu item, I created 00:57.530 --> 01:03.320 another menu item that said blog and when somebody clicked on it, it gave them access to a whole series 01:03.320 --> 01:09.080 of articles about dogs, articles that, for example, could talk about how to care for a dog, dog, 01:09.080 --> 01:11.480 nutrition, or perhaps exercise methods. 01:11.480 --> 01:17.450 The list is endless, but the point is, when somebody sees that and reads those articles, they will 01:17.450 --> 01:22.250 immediately start thinking, ah yes, this person really understands their subject. 01:22.250 --> 01:23.840 They really care for dogs. 01:23.840 --> 01:25.850 They really know what they're talking about. 01:25.850 --> 01:28.640 In other words, they begin to trust my store. 01:28.640 --> 01:34.610 And in addition, not only is my store now a fantastic selection of products, but it's also a great 01:34.610 --> 01:39.950 knowledge resource somewhere that dog lovers can come to read valuable information that may help them 01:39.950 --> 01:40.790 with their dog. 01:40.790 --> 01:46.220 And so with that example, I hope you can now really begin to see how important a blog can be. 01:46.250 --> 01:51.770 Now, having said all that, almost every single e-commerce store owner will not start a blog. 01:51.770 --> 01:53.540 And I think that's for two reasons. 01:53.540 --> 01:57.290 The first reason being that they don't appreciate what I just taught you. 01:57.290 --> 02:01.940 In other words, they don't really understand how a blog can build all essential trust. 02:01.940 --> 02:07.670 And then secondly, most people think that a blog is going to be a lot of hard work, but trust me, 02:07.670 --> 02:10.160 it absolutely doesn't have to be the case. 02:10.160 --> 02:16.700 And so in this lecture, what I want to show you is how you can very easily create a blog for your store, 02:16.700 --> 02:21.170 build trust, and create a fantastic resource for your visitors. 02:21.410 --> 02:22.580 So let's get going. 02:22.580 --> 02:28.220 And the first piece of great news is that you have a blog already built into Shopify. 02:28.220 --> 02:34.370 If I go over to the admin, click on online store you see here blog posts. 02:34.370 --> 02:38.270 And if I click on blog posts, this is where I can start to create my blog. 02:38.270 --> 02:41.330 So let's actually go ahead and create my first blog post. 02:41.330 --> 02:46.640 So clicking on Create Blog post, let's first do a quick run through of the blog post template. 02:46.640 --> 02:51.920 So we have a title and some content where of course we're going to actually write the blog post itself. 02:51.920 --> 02:56.930 Then we have the excerpt, which is simply a brief summary of the blog post that you might want to post 02:56.930 --> 02:57.470 elsewhere. 02:57.470 --> 03:02.900 For example, on your home page below that, we have the ever present Search Engine Listing preview 03:02.900 --> 03:05.780 so that your blog post will show up in the Google rankings. 03:05.780 --> 03:10.700 Then, similar to products, we have the concept of visibility, and you can see that it's hidden by 03:10.700 --> 03:12.230 default and that makes sense. 03:12.230 --> 03:16.310 We don't want to make it visible until of course we've actually finished the blog post itself. 03:16.310 --> 03:21.560 We can then add an image should we so wish, and then to the organization. 03:21.560 --> 03:25.310 Now, by default, the author, as you can see, is my store admin. 03:25.310 --> 03:26.360 In other words, you. 03:26.360 --> 03:30.140 And in the beginning it's really only going to be you that's creating the blog posts. 03:30.140 --> 03:34.640 But just know that later on you might want other people to create blog posts for you, and therefore 03:34.640 --> 03:38.180 you could assign different authors and then to the blog itself. 03:38.180 --> 03:44.030 So here we are creating blog posts, but we want those blog posts to sit within a particular blog. 03:44.030 --> 03:47.270 Now, by default it's showing news, but that's not what we're doing. 03:47.270 --> 03:52.100 So if I open this up, you can see that I have the option to create a new blog. 03:52.100 --> 03:53.570 So I'm going to create a new blog. 03:53.570 --> 03:58.850 And then for the moment I'm going to give it a title, which is simply going to be Dogs. 03:58.850 --> 04:01.430 So I will have a blog about dogs. 04:01.430 --> 04:04.340 And then within that blog there'll be many blog posts. 04:04.340 --> 04:09.170 And then for the tags and the online store theme template, you can simply leave those as is. 04:09.170 --> 04:12.050 So let's actually go ahead and create this blog post. 04:12.050 --> 04:16.520 Now, just for the moment, I'm going to do something super basic just so that we can get started. 04:16.520 --> 04:20.240 So for the title, I'm just going to write test and then the content. 04:20.240 --> 04:23.030 I'm simply going to write test content. 04:23.030 --> 04:27.470 And of course we're going to come back and edit this properly later with some real content. 04:27.470 --> 04:32.270 But for the moment, let's just make it visible and then click on save. 04:32.270 --> 04:37.370 And then if I click on blog posts once again, here is the blog post I just created. 04:37.370 --> 04:39.140 The title, of course, was test. 04:39.140 --> 04:40.730 I was the person who created it. 04:40.730 --> 04:45.260 So my store admin and it's part of the blog that I created called dogs. 04:45.290 --> 04:50.990 Now going back to the site, you will remember that I suggested it would be a great idea to have another 04:50.990 --> 04:54.890 menu item, let's say between our fabulous products and contact. 04:54.890 --> 04:56.420 That said our blog. 04:56.420 --> 04:59.480 So what I would like to do now is to create that menu. 04:59.640 --> 04:59.790 You. 04:59.790 --> 05:05.640 And then once we've done that, I'm going to show you how you can create fabulous content very easily. 05:05.640 --> 05:06.090 Okay. 05:06.090 --> 05:08.100 So let's go ahead and build the menu. 05:08.100 --> 05:12.540 So going back to admin I'm going to come down of course to navigation. 05:12.540 --> 05:15.420 And then I want to add that blog to the main menu. 05:15.420 --> 05:20.430 So I click on main menu, scroll down a bit and click on Add Menu Item. 05:20.430 --> 05:24.390 And I'm going to give it a name which is going to be our blog. 05:24.390 --> 05:27.090 And then in the search box I click on this. 05:27.090 --> 05:29.400 And this time I'm going to be looking for blogs. 05:29.400 --> 05:36.150 So clicking on blogs I select my dog's blog okay so clicking on dogs and I click on add. 05:36.150 --> 05:39.450 And now of course our blog has been added to the menu items. 05:39.450 --> 05:44.340 Now as I just said, I want that to sit between our fabulous products and contact. 05:44.340 --> 05:49.110 And so just to make this a little bit clearer to read, let me just collapse this menu here. 05:49.110 --> 05:54.660 And then what I want to do is to pick up our blog and just slot it between those two menu items so that 05:54.660 --> 05:57.960 now it reads our fabulous products, our blog and contact. 05:57.960 --> 06:00.360 And so with that done, let's save the menu. 06:00.360 --> 06:05.100 And now what we want to do is to add that first blog post underneath our blog. 06:05.100 --> 06:07.530 So let's click on Add Menu item. 06:07.530 --> 06:10.800 I'm going to give it a name which is just going to be test for the moment. 06:10.800 --> 06:15.000 And of course, as I said before, we're going to come back and edit this properly because all I'm doing 06:15.000 --> 06:20.730 here is showing you how simple it is to actually build the blog menu itself, and then this time clicking 06:20.730 --> 06:28.140 into search, I go down to blog posts, and I select that blog post that we created that I called test. 06:28.350 --> 06:30.570 I select test, I click on add. 06:30.600 --> 06:34.440 Now of course we want this to be part of the our blog menu item. 06:34.440 --> 06:40.860 So to do that, all we have to do is to pick it up and slot it neatly under the our blog menu item. 06:40.860 --> 06:44.760 So I move it up and then just indent it a little bit and there we go. 06:44.760 --> 06:49.260 So that now test, our very first blog post is sitting under our blog. 06:49.260 --> 06:53.310 So let's go ahead and save that and then head back to the store. 06:53.310 --> 06:58.470 So I'm going to refresh the page here, but just keep your eye on this part here in between our fabulous 06:58.470 --> 07:02.130 products and contact, because the blog is now going to be added. 07:02.130 --> 07:04.890 So let's refresh and there you go. 07:04.890 --> 07:06.480 You now see our blog. 07:06.480 --> 07:09.390 And if I open this up you see test. 07:09.390 --> 07:16.290 And if I click on test, here is my very first blog post, which of course I call test with the amazing 07:16.290 --> 07:18.630 content that I called Test Content. 07:18.630 --> 07:24.660 But what that now means is that we've set up a blog menu that is ready to receive a real content. 07:24.660 --> 07:30.810 So now I want to show you how easy it is to create fantastic content so that you can build all important 07:30.810 --> 07:34.470 trust and create a fantastic resource for your visitors. 07:34.470 --> 07:39.330 But because I've just realized that this lecture is getting a little bit long, if you don't mind, 07:39.330 --> 07:41.640 I'm going to discuss that in the next lecture. 07:41.640 --> 07:44.400 So I'll see you in a moment for part two.