Yesterday, I did some research into some business development strategies. One of the things that crossed my radar was the idea of merging an online store with a blog. My situation is this…

PCMech gets a lot of traffic. The online store, however, is linked in the top menu but is otherwise a completely separate system. Being that there is already so much going on on the main PCMech site, the store gets lost. While the main site sees thousands of people every day, the PCMech store sees only a few daily. That definitely affects sales.

So, the idea is to bring the store into PCMech itself. Into Wordpress. The traffic to the store would most definitely increase. Also, being inside a blog means I can use all the standard blog features for the store, including the flexibility that Wordpress allows. And trust me, Wordpress is infinitely more flexible than X-Cart (the store software I’m using).

Two store options that have gotten my attention are:

• 1ShoppingCart. Has a wide following and offers a nice, integrated package of store, affiliate management and email list. I would not move my mailing list into 1ShoppingCart, but it would be nice to have a better system of automated followup.
• E-Junkie. I cannot find any evidence of large mainstream blogs using E-Junkie, but the service looks pretty good. It is nowhere near as powerful as 1ShoppingCart, but their setup for integrating with another website (such as a blog) is much more automatic.

I will, then, probably set up a new category in Wordpress for the online store. Perhaps I will use static pages. It will be more manual labor at first, but since I’m not managing a large catalog, I think it would be fine.

So, that’s my ramble on what I have in mind. Blogs are powerful mediums. Hosting ads seems to be the de-facto way to make money with a blog, however there are MUCH better ways to do it. Integrating it with a store and shopping cart system is definitely one of those ways.

I will follow up as I proceed with this concept. Stay tuned.