The answer is already in your hands. And it’s free.

Tucked neatly into every Spiffy Store is a simple promotional tool that can make a big difference to your business.

What am I talking about? Your store blog.

7 ways a blog can improve the success of your store

If you’re already up and blogging away, good for you! You can skim through the rest of this post if you like. For the rest of you, pay attention.

Contrary to what you might think, a blog’s not just for foodies and cat lovers. It’s a powerful marketing machine that can be working away 24/7 to support your store by:

• Helping your website to rank higher in search engine results
• Attracting more traffic from search engines
• Growing awareness of your store
• Building your credibility
• Developing your unique business personality
• Building relationships with browsers and customers
• Building your email list (as people to subscribe to your blog)

To show you how that translates in real terms, I pulled out some online research.

US Marketing company Hubspot regularly surveys businesses around the world about their marketing habits. They found that web sites with a blog received 55% more visitors and 97% more inbound links than those without.

Not only that, they discovered that 57% of companies with a blog had acquired a new customer from it.

How does something as simple as a blog do all that?

The answer lies in the potent mix of quality content and search engine optimization that a regularly-updated blog provides.

Your blog is the information hub of your online store. It’s the place to share interesting news, opinion, advice and even entertainment with your audience. As you add to it, your online presence and authority grows.

And it’s a search engine magnet.

Search engines like Google look at specific elements when indexing web content and deciding how it will rank. Some of the most important factors are the amount of relevant information it contains, how many quality links are present and the number of social signals it generates (likes and shares etc.) One of the simplest and cheapest ways you can do all this is with a blog.

Now, are you ready for action?

Don’t put it off any longer because you think it’s hard and scary, and you don’t have the time. I’m here to get you up to speed.

Don’t ignore it because you have a Facebook page. You should be driving traffic to your own website, not Mr. Zuckerberg’s.

Over the weekend, grab a cuppa, sit down and invest a little time reading other blogs for inspiration. Blog directories like technorati and blogarama are a good place to start looking.

I’ll be back next week to guide you through the basics. Get ready!