Finnish Gifts Blog Interview

I conducted the following interview with Chad Trent, marketing manager for Finnish Gifts. I had met the owner of the site, Ben Horn, at the Internet Retailer show. After reviewing their store I noticed how they had incorporated a blog. I wanted to find out their reasons for starting a blog and the results they have seen as I’m sure many other merchants have wondered about using a blog with their store.

Finnish Gifts Blog helps to drive product awareness and targeted traffic to Finnish Gifts store.

Tell me a bit about Finnish Gifts and what you sell there? How long have you been with Yahoo!?

As a company, we’ve been on the Yahoo! platform since 2002. FinnishGifts.com is our 2nd store with Yahoo! (it was previously on a different platform) – we now have 3 stores with Yahoo!, and are working on #4 and #5. We sell modern Finnish products; from home accents and tableware to fabric and jewelry – really a wide variety of items. Our most popular and recognizable products are made by Finnish companies iittala and Marimekko.

In looking at your site I noticed you are using a blog. How long have you had a blog and what made you decide to start one?

We’ve had our Finnish Design Blog for about 1-1/2 years. We decided to start a blog as a way to introduce new products and get additional exposure on the search engines.

Which blogging platform did you choose to use and why?

We use the WordPress platform that is part of our hosting package with Yahoo! There are several reasons we chose to go with WordPress: it’s easy to install, easy to customize, and there are many add-ons available, among other things.

Are you using any blog plug-ins to engage with visitors such as polls or send page by email?

At this point, we’ve only been using plug-ins that assist with administration, statistics, and other back-end issues. However, there are many interesting plug-ins available and we plan on experimenting with some more in the near future.

[Paul] Check out my list of YStore blog plug-ins at the end of this post.

What do you discuss on the blog? Is it mainly for showing off new products or do you feature other content as well?

For the most part, we concentrate on introducing new products. It allows us to get our products up quickly and provides another avenue for the search engines to find the new product pages at our website. In addition to showcasing new products, we occasionally will post promotions and product/industry related news.

What sort of results are you seeing with the blog? Are you getting new visitors through the blog or are you mainly connecting with return customers? Are you seeing a higher order conversion rate from visitors that started from or visited the blog?

We have seen good results. Almost all of the visitors to our blog are new visitors that aren’t familiar with our company, so as a vehicle to introduce our company and products to potential new customers it has been a huge success. The conversion rate has been slightly higher than that of visitors who go directly to our website – and many of these visitors are searching for information and are not quite as far along in the buying cycle – so we are happy with the results.

Have you seen any tangible effects on your search engine rankings from using a blog?

Absolutely. Our search engine rankings have improved in a couple areas. First, on the blog itself we use terms and product combinations that we might not typically use on our website. This has resulted in increased exposure for many “Long Tail” terms that we weren’t previously ranking for. Second, we include descriptive links on each post back to the product pages on our website. This has improved the ranking of existing pages on our website.

Any tips or advice you would offer to a merchant thinking about starting a blog?

First, determine the purpose and goals for your blog. Our goal was simply to increase the exposure of our products, but yours might be to interact with customers more or to be an informational resource. Second, decide where you want to put your blog. We chose to use a subdomain (blog.finnishgifts.com), but others might use a different domain, a folder on your domain or a subdomain at a blogging website. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these options, so it’s important to choose what works best for you. Lastly, get to work and stick with it. The sooner you get content on your blog the sooner you’ll start seeing results. It was a slow process for us at first – we were only getting about 10 visitors a day early on – but eventually you will start seeing results as long as you continue to work at it.

Big thanks to Chad for sharing these insights. Merchants should know that in addition to WordPress, which is as noted built into the Web Hosting portion of your account, you can also choose Movable Type, another leading blogging platform.

The hardest part of the whole enterprise will be finding the time and creativity to write new content to keep your blog fresh. However, if you are an expert in your product area (and hopefully that is the reason why you decided to jump into your own particular space in the online retail world) you should have plenty to discuss. Don’t be afraid to show your opinion on products. As Chad notes, the work you do here can reap benefits in terms of search engine rankings so if you are spending too much time trying to improve those, this is one thing you can do to help yourself out, and likely drive a new set of more qualified traffic to your site.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

• Don’t even think of having a blog without activating the Akismet spam plug-in. It catches the vast majority of comment spam.
• Customizable permalinks allow you to share static links which will not change.
• WP-Cache–helps speed up your blog by caching