Everyone who tells you yes has a reason to. Platforms want engagement, agencies want a retainer, and content tools want a subscription.
The honest answer is that it works for most small stores, and not for the reason it is usually sold, and there is a version of it that is a pure waste of time. Here is the distinction.
The reason it is usually sold, which is the weak one
The pitch is that a blog brings traffic and traffic becomes sales.
That is true in a very indirect way and it sets the wrong expectation. Most people who arrive on a guide are not going to buy that day. Some never will. A store that measures blog posts by direct attributable revenue in the first quarter will conclude, correctly by that measure, that it is not working, and stop.
The three reasons it actually works
1. It gives you pages that can rank for the queries product pages cannot
This is the real argument.
A large share of the searching your buyers do happens before they know which product they want, and sometimes before they know they want a product at all. Those queries want an answer, not a shop, and a search engine will show a page that answers.
Your product pages cannot compete for those queries and your collection pages only partly can. A guide can.
That is not a marketing theory; it is a structural gap in what a store has to offer, and it is the clearest reason a small store benefits. This site covers why those query types exist at all on the open web, and did not inside a marketplace, in its own article on marketplace search versus general search.
2. It answers the questions that stop people buying
Every question a buyer has ever messaged you is a hesitation, and a hesitation you answered one person at a time.
A page that answers it answers everyone, forever, including the people who would never have asked and would simply have left.
This is the highest-value content a small store can write and it requires no research at all, because the material is sitting in your message inbox.
3. It gives your store something to say
A store with a list needs to send something. A store with social accounts needs to post something. A guide you wrote once feeds both, and it is the thing that makes the difference between an email list that receives offers and one that receives something worth opening. That distinction decides whether a list survives, and it is covered separately on this site.
The version that is a waste of time
Generic content about your industry, written to a schedule, aimed at nobody in particular.
"Five trends in home decor for 2027." "The history of the craft." "Why handmade matters." These posts exist on thousands of small store blogs. They rank for nothing, because the queries they target are contested by publishers with far more authority. They interest nobody, because they are not about the reader's problem. And they consume the exact hours that the useful version needs.
The test is simple: can you name the query this post answers, and can you name the person typing it? If not, do not write it.
The three kinds that earn their place
How to choose. The comparison people make before buying, written honestly, including the case for the option you do not sell. This is the format most likely to be trusted and it is the one competitors with a stake in the answer cannot write.
How to use, care for, or fix. Post-purchase content, which serves customers, reduces support messages, and picks up search traffic from people who already own the thing and may buy again.
The specific question. Sizing, materials, compatibility, occasion, timing. Taken directly from your inbox. These are short, easy to write, and they match queries a small site can actually reach.
What it costs, and the condition under which it is not worth it
The cost is hours and there is no way around that. A useful post takes real time because it has to be genuinely better than what already ranks, and the ones that take an hour to produce are the ones that rank for nothing.
It is not worth it if:
Your product pages and collection pages are not built yet. Content before the commercial pages is building the top of a funnel that has no bottom. Collections first, always.
You cannot sustain it. Four posts and silence is a worse signal than no blog. Once a month, indefinitely, beats a burst.
You would be writing about your industry rather than your buyer's problem. As above.
You have not yet decided whether you are staying. If the store is a maybe, the content is a maybe, and there are cheaper experiments.
How to start, if you are going to
Take twenty questions out of your buyer messages. Real ones, in their words.
Search each one and look at what ranks. If the first page is large publishers, put it aside. If it is small sites, forum threads or nothing very good, that is a target.
Write the five best ones properly rather than twenty quickly.
Link them from the collection pages they belong to, so they are not orphans and so the people reading them can reach the products.
And then leave them alone. Content compounds slowly and the instinct to rewrite everything every quarter is the same instinct that makes people redesign a store nobody has visited yet.
The honest expectation
Nothing happens for a while. Then one post starts bringing people, usually not the one you expected, and that post keeps bringing them for years.
That shape is why the channel is worth it and why it feels like it is not working for the whole of the first stretch. This site does not publish a timeline for it as its own prediction, because the answer depends on your category, your existing pages and your competition, and a number invented for a general audience is exactly what makes people quit at the wrong moment.
For the wider question of what replaces marketplace traffic, and what each channel actually costs, our article on measuring your marketplace dependence is the place to start. And if you are still deciding whether to make the move at all, our pillar on whether you should move is written to reach a real "no" where that is the honest answer.