iStylista Combine Blogging With Keyword Research To Double Sales In 4 Months by Rachelle Money, 3 September 2008
Blogging is not just an important way to connect with your audience, it's also a great way of including keyword rich content on your site. Online personal stylist service iStylista.com found that their sales had doubled in just a matter of months, after they had launched their blog. Wordtracker spoke to its co-founder Hayden Allen-Vercoe to find out how he did it.
Key points
- It's essential for blogging success to use carefully researched target keywords in your page titles.
- It's got to read well. You have to have a good writer in your business or else you aren't going to connect with your audience.
- Be the first to report something and other blogs will link to you. You could write about the latest gladiator sandal from TopShop and then other bloggers will pick up on it and link to your site. For a little bit of work you can get fantastic value.
The idea of having a personal stylist is usually only confined to the rich and famous. These days stylists have become famous in their own right, with the likes of Rachel Zoe, Carson Kressley and UK's Gok Wan taking their fair share of the column inches and television slots.
It's got a lot of men and women thinking about their own style. Hayden Allen-Vercoe, co-founder of iStylista.com, saw a gap in the market where people wanted to know more about personal stylists but felt self-conscious about actually hiring one or unsure about whether they could afford one.
Last May iStylista.com was born, with fashion stylist Chantelle Znideric, and creative marketer Allen-Vercoe at the helm. The online personal stylist service offers 'style theory' on what clothes to wear for your body shape, what colors to wear, how to accessorize and how to conceal those areas of your body you aren't proud to show off.
Online PR
iStylista have never advertised themselves - instead they have produced excellent online PR from their blogs and their networking skills around the blogosphere. Allen-Vercoe says their success was bolstered by starting to write a keyword rich blog just four months ago, a blog which has pushed their rankings and doubled their sales.
“We do keyword research for every article we post. We look at what the competition is doing, and we use Wordtracker to death. We search for things like 'maxi dress' and I'll get all these keywords and then write the article around the keywords.”
Although this is a relatively good technique, Allen-Vercoe warned against writing articles which look staged. Your blog entry needs to have flow and make sense to the reader without feeling labored by your inclusion of keywords.
“We always knew we wanted to rank highly with 'personal stylist', but we knew that it would take time to get there,” says Allen-Vercoe.
“We built the site with the intention of introducing keywords at the right stage.
“Because the service is unique, we focused on a number of keyword strings which we got from Wordtracker and it drove a lot of organic traffic to our site, which in turn got other bloggers talking about it.”
iStylista have managed to build a good reputation in the blogosphere through their networking capabilities. They leave comments on like-minded blogs, and their reviews of new products are often linked to by bloggers.
Be the first to review products
Allen-Vercoe has worked on getting the website onto a variety of press lists so that they are the first to know about product launches.
“We are constantly being sent information on new products, and we are asked to review new lines or ranges, which has helped us write our blog posts. We often write to the brands and ask to be put on their press lists or newsletters, so we are always kept in the loop. “
This level of new material coming into iStylista's inbox means they have a steady stream of ideas to blog about. They write about three entries per week on a range of issues such as new hair-dryers, perfumes, television shows and competitions.
Blogging success
Allen-Vercoe says the blog has led them to double their sales.
“Since we launched the blog it's taken us two months for us to bed down in Google, but we have doubled our sales and we can track that through the blog. We find that people will type something like Babyliss hairdryer into Google and we'll come up - they read our blog which may have reviewed that product, and then they have a closer look at our site and finally, make a purchase.”
Allen-Vercoe says their winning combination is Wordtracker and a resource called ResponseSource.com which is a free service for journalists, and paid-for for PRs. The website allows you to find out more information about certain brands by putting in a request for information. If you are a journalist you can put in a request and the relevant PR company will send you an information pack on the products you are looking for.
As well as leaving comments on blogs that have a high visitor rate, and networking on social forums, Allen-Vercoe has found he can drive more traffic through the site using Yahoo Answers.
“Although it's read by a lot by teenagers who don't have the money for our product we have converted a few sales from it.”
Using analytics, iStylista found that 'personal stylist' singular doesn't create sales for them, but 'personal stylists' plural has produced a 50% conversion rate.
Allen-Vercoe believes that this is because “people who are searching for personal stylists aren't looking for anyone in particular and it's fascinating for us to get the lion's share.”
The iStylista team are now focusing on long tail keywords they have discovered through Wordtracker's keyword research, which reflect the kind of person who would be interested in the website. This more focused attention on keyword research will inform their new online changing room, a service which will launch in the new year.
About Rachelle Money
Rachelle Money is a freelance journalist based in Scotland, UK. She graduated from the Scottish School of Journalism in 2005 where she was awarded an internship with two national publications - The Sunday Herald newspaper and The Big Issue magazine. Rachelle has been working with Wordtracker since August 2007 and is a regular contributor to the newsletter.
12 comments
Love your articles, although haven't yet figured out how to get readers truly motivated to action, more specically to make a donation, which is the intent of the above website blog submitted. This blog was written, not for myself, but for a friend and her cause, and I would like to load it as much as possible with "keyword strings," but unsure how to approach it without being too "in your face." Would appreciate any suggestions and recommendations, should you find the time to review. Thank you.
Good article... we are trying the same approach and letting our blog build steam through keyword usage rather then strong direct promotion. Though we are also working to build some self-promoting advertorial units from our main site that slot in well below our paid advertisers.
excellent article, we have been thinking since last few months to do something like this..i guess your artilce has helped us make up our mind to launch a blog..
wow
Way to go Rachelle. We have been doing this very successfully at http://winaresort.com/blog/blog and are in fact about to open up a second blog. Takes a lot of time and hard work, but nothing worth while ever came easy.
Fascinating read.
We don't have a blog yet but we do write lots of articles for our site www.SpottyGiftBoxes.co.uk and add news items.
The best piece of advice which you give - and it is something we do - is to start with the keywords. I usually choose two. First a high traffic keyword which we are targeting long term - even if it is competitive - and then secondly a less competitive keyword which has a lower amount of traffic. This helps to give us some almost instant results.
An example is our Christmas Hyacinth article which you can see if you go to the Spotty Boxes website, Children's Gardening and scroll to the bottom of the page.
We probably won't get any results from the Garden Gifts for Christmas until next year but are already picking up traffic from Christmas Hyacinth Bulbs.
Next stop for us - a blog!
Thanks for the advice.
We used Wordtracker setting up our keywords when we started our apartment marketing site for a complex we own in the U.S. The results using this combined with pay per click have been extraordinary - doubling applicants and leases. We immediately achieved clickthrough of over 2%.
Since that time, we've steadily increased the content on our website and increased clickthrough to mid to high 5%.
We now offer a service to other apartment / multifamily owners and managers using the same system at www.occupancy100.com. We also provide industry info focused on apartment marketing using the keyword info and aparment / multifamily issues in general at www.occupancy100.com/blog
The Apartment Guy www.occupancy100.com
We love your articles! We started a blog two months ago, but it hasn't been found in any search. We see it as a good way to advertise our agency, but we also see it as a good way for clients to see us as more than just a web site. When you want to increase your business worldwide, clients need to know you are a responsible business and that they can trust in you to provide the services that you advertise. After reading your article, we see that we really hadn't researched any keywords. We now know that what we want to say in our content must also have keywords to be seen. Thanks!
I have a question. If we would prefer to have a blog that isn't one of our web pages, but can be reached by clicking on a link on our web site, will that benefit our web site? We currently have a blog on blogspot.com, but no one has ever clicked on it. Should we continue to grow it, or is that a waste of time? We are just learning about this area of developing the Internet presence of our business. We want to learn as much as we can by reading such things as this article, then using what we learn. As I said, we are a little reluctant to put the actual blog on our site for fear it might detract from the focus of the actual website. Thanks for any thoughts on this matter.
This information is great to have. We at insure4cheap.com begin to broaden our online presence. As the health insurance field is a broad one we hope to differentiate us from the others in our field.
The blog is an excellent idea as it will allow us to promote ourselves and really help people in the process. Thanks.
Excellent article!
We use keywords research for articles section our websites. We found lot of good keywords start with 'how to'. And today, we generate significant amount of traffic to our clients' websites.
Tony: ideally you blog would be on your main site, linked o from and to your main site. If it is on a different site then do still link to and from it.