Why Your Ethical Brand Needs A Blog

If you asked me a couple years ago whether ecommerce shops needed blogs to support their businesses, I honestly would have said no. I can’t begin to estimate the amount of blogs I’ve seen over the last ten years, and it’s always bothered me when brands throw one up, only to post a welcome entry and never touch it again. I get it! Blogging is hard work (why do you think I’ve been able to make it as a freelance writer all this time?!) and when running your business solo or as a small team, there often just isn’t time. In that case, I’m like, just skip it. Don’t leave it hanging there like a forgotten project.

Now that I’ve had more experience freelancing for ethical brands and ecommerce shops (mostly on Shopify—more on that later!), I’m passionate about helping them harness the power of a blog to find more success with their businesses. Below, I’ll share the biggest reasons your ethical brand needs a blog:

SEO

Maybe you’ve heard this before, but let me break it down for you because it truly took years for the importance of SEO to sink in for me. If you are operating your shop independently (say via Shopify or Squarespace versus Etsy), you’re truly starting from scratch. This means you need to bring in 100% of your own traffic. And unless you have thousands of people coming over from social media on the daily, you probably need SEO to help you bring in the views.

Shops, especially ethical brands who perhaps don’t have a ton of individual product listings (because, small batch!), totally need that extra text, links, and opportunity for shares that come with a blog, in order to come up on Google. Without it, it’s very likely that your shop doesn’t even have enough text to really make a dent! Now, this this is only part of the whole SEO puzzle, but it can make such a huge difference in organic search for your shop.

BRAND STORYTELLING

If you are positioning yourself as an ethical brand, it’s probably because you are working really hard to “do things right” – focusing on people and planet over profit, growing slowly or staying small, basically spending a lot more $$$ to provide goods ethically.

For the most part, your target audience is probably at least somewhat a discerning customer. Otherwise, they don’t understand why your goods cost more or are made of this or that and why it’s better. You have to show them what makes you so special. And buyers aren’t going to fall for anything. They want to see the proof. A blog is such an awesome tool for storytelling, for sharing all of those parts of your WHY that don’t make it onto the homepage tagline or product description.

CONTENT CREATION

The biggest issue I see with sustainable and ethical brands is that in making things slowly and in small batches, they feel they run out of content too easily to share on social media or in their newsletters. Well guess what? A blog will provide you with so much to share. You can distill each blog post down into several pieces of “micro content” that you share with your audience (which you can often post more than once, too!). A blog keeps you on top of your content game.

Of course, it’s an investment (whether in time or work or money) that isn’t going to reward right away. That’s why so many ethical brands skip it to begin with—there are so many other “must dos” in a business. You’re not necessarily starting a blog to go viral, though you never have a chance if you don’t start one! You’re building SEO, brand trust, and a library of quality content that lives on the internets in its infinite forms (social media, Pinterest, Google, newsletters).

Do you have any ethical brand blogs you love to read? A few of my favorites are Christy Dawn, MINNA, and Zuahaza.

PS: Click here for more resources for sustainable brands!