We’d like to announce that our FlowerManager Blogs are available to launch starting this week. They are WordPress blogs that have been customized for FlowerManager. We think you’ll like the approach we’ve taken. We’ve kept things simple so it’s quick to manage and all about presenting the content.
Benefits of a Blog
Blogs are great for your both SEO and providing value to your customers because they give you a platform to publish and share floral content directly within your website. They establish trust for your brand based on your expertise in the floral content you share. They’re a key part of your entire marketing solution including social media, email, PPC and SEO. They help with every one of these channels… and having the blog hosted within your eCommerce website is exponentially better than a stand alone blog.
“Best way to sell something: don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, and trust of those who might buy.”
– Rand Fishkin, CEO and Founder, SEOmoz
Best Practices
We recommend that for maximum return on your FlowerManager sites you consider a few things. First have a separate domain name for your main ecommerce site and one for your wedding/event site. They are two completely different sites with two different audiences. You will have more success optimizing each for it’s respective terms if they have unique domain names. For example www.texas-flowers.com and www.texas-weddings.com. Secondly, have a blog hosted on each of those domains with meaningful content about each domain’s topic. For example www.texas-flowers.com/blog and www.texas-weddings.com/blog. This will give proper keyword and domain authority to each site based on the content.
What Makes Our Blog Unique
We’ve customized WordPress blogs to be integrated with your FlowerManager website. We’ve secured them to keep your site PCI compliant and we’ve locked down the features to ensure they stay safe and load fast. Our blogs are hosted on your site and are themed accordingly. When you change your site’s theme the blog’s theme automatically switches to match it. We have themes that match both the Ecommerce site and the Wedding/Event site. Additionally you can make content pages for your site as well as blog posts, so this becomes a really powerful tool.
All you have to do is provide meaningful content. And if that is a resource issue for you both GravityFree Marketing and Beneva Solutions provide blog writing services to help you create great, unique content.
Cost
There is no cost other than the $20 monthly hosting and a $125 set up fee. We host the blog through WPEngine which is the very best company in the business. Some of their other customers are Williams Sonoma, HTC, Foursquare and SoundCloud. They are as good as it gets… and then for search benefit we serve the pages through our servers at your local domain. We chose them, rather than hosting them ourselves because they are industry experts at securing and hosting WordPress blogs.
Importing Content
If you have a blog currently and want the content imported we will review your blog and quote that for you. Some blogs will be simple and require minimal work to import the content, but depending on your current blog’s level of customization some may require more work. We’ll recommend what will be in your best interest.
Master Floral Blog
We also created a master floral blog we’ll launch at FlowerManager.com Wednesday, August 21st. The purpose will be to provide a single source for sharing floral based blog posts and generating inbound links for your websites. This should help you with SEO and driving traffic to your site. We welcome any of our FlowerManager clients to be authors on this blog to help establish authority and drive traffic to each of your respective sites. Each author will have an “About” page that will profile their business and FlowerManager website.
There will also be private blog posts that are only accessible by FlowerManager members. Those posts will be categorized and hold new product announcements, training posts/videos and best practice recommendations. Essentially an online training and recommendations manual.
If this is something that interests you please give us a call so we can answer your questions or get you scheduled. Please contact myself (941-928-9822 or scott@gravityfree.com) with questions or Kelli (941-927-7674 x102 or kbarclay@gravityfree.com) to schedule an install.