Starting a generic blog on a third-party site is like building a vinyl “add-on” room to your brick home on a vacant lot one hundred miles away. It just doesn’t make sense. In order to really get the most from your blog, it should be custom-skinned and fully-integrated into your online store site.
The first screen capture below is Babybeat.com’s blog, which FastPivot.com Yahoo store designers skinned and integrated. Compare it with the second screen capture, which is Babybeat.com’s homepage. Notice the brand presence and theme continuity on both pages.
The whole idea behind making your blog a part of your store site and skinning it with your own branded design is to make customers feel as though they’ve never left home. Navigation should be convenient and familiar. Every store page should satisfy your customers’ needs and serve as an intricate part of the whole, especially the blog page. Social media is the new search, so chances are this will be one of your top landing pages in the future.
In short, until store owners begin treating blogs as part of the family, they’ll be missing out on a huge piece of conversion pie.
For more information on blog integration, continue reading here.FastPivot.com takes delight in creating brand new, custom Yahoo Stores around myriad of novel, cerebral inceptions. We can even re-breathe life into an already-established, under-performing Yahoo Store, without damaging fragile internals. Contact FastPivot.com to let the magic begin.
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As a avid wp supporter I completely agree with your points, but a question I have been presented with time and again is that using wp with a yahoo store is not as beneficial for seo as building a custom rtml blog template and hosting within the same hostname. Thoughts?
Thanks for commenting Joshua. To build a custom RTML blog template you are talking about HOURS and HOURS of work. Plus we all know that Yahoo’s store SEO is muffled by all their tracking scripts they have. You ALWAYS want to keep the blog within the same domain. So for babybeat.com, the blog is at blog.babybeat.com which is still in the same domain. What you want to avoid is signing up for a wordpress.com account and having a blog like babybeat.wordpress.com. That would be bad for SEO. Another thing is that WordPress is written from the ground up to focus on SEO… Yahoo is not. Since WordPress is free it only makes sense.