Ecommerce merchants who are creating great blog posts for their site still need to effectively lead users who read those blog posts to the products on their ecommerce store which those readers will be interested in purchasing. Answerbase does this for product Q&A content naturally since we know what product the question was originally asked about….so we can display that product and lead visitors to that Q&A page to the related product that visitors are interested in purchasing. But what about blog posts? How do you identify what products are related to the post which will actually convert?

In this post we will cover some methods that people are using to accomplish the end goal, along with some app suggestions on what apps you may think about adding to your store to help you accomplish those goals in the most efficient manner.

The Obvious Way

The first answer is to of course reference the products WITHIN the post. Based on the topic you’re writing about, there may be some non-spammy ways of referencing a product within the post which enriches the content and also gives an opportunity to lead visitors to a sale. This is obviously the first step that you should take to ensure your blog posts are converting business for you.

The Hard Way

The hard way of accomplishing this goal is to do this manually. You can create calls to action below the post and lead the user to products that you would recommend to readers of the post.

This way is not recommended because its time consuming…and doesn’t adjust dynamically over time based on actual user engagement.

The Easier Way

As with many goals that you’re trying to accomplish with your ecommerce store, there are apps likely available that you can plug into your article pages and they will do the job for you. A good app will read the text and context of your post, and then be able to suggest products to readers based on what they are most likely to purchase.

Surprisingly, we didn’t find a long list of apps which provide for this functionality…..and for some app stores we didn’t find any…but from our research here are a couple that help you accomplish that goal:

Pro Blogger

Pro Blogger is a blogging app for getting the most out of your article content, keeping your browsers engaged and ultimately converting readers to shoppers. Related blog posts, related products, image captions, rich Pinterest support – all in one app! App store links: Shopify

Linkscious

Linkcious is a product recommendation engine that allows e-commerce stores to automatically recommend related products on their pages. Unlike other systems, Linkcious uses artificial intelligence to select related products to show. App store links: Shopify

The reviews on the above tools are mixed, but perhaps they can help in accomplishing your goals.  We’ll look to continue growing this list and updating this post if we’re made available of others (and may consider creating our own widget in case this gap continues).

The Easiest Way

Most posts you read about content strategy and determining what to write about in the first place say much of the same thing, to see what types of questions your customers are currently asking you and starting there.   With ecommerce, we’re luck that (1) those questions are directly related to products or product categories and (2) that content is also valuable for distribution across an ecommerce store and driving conversions through attracting new search engine traffic.

This is why we’ve seen that the easiest way to establishing an effective relationship between content and products that will convert is to let your actual customer questions asked through Answerbase to drive your content strategy, and then with new posts you create from that information you will both understand that the content will convert for you and also know what products are related to that content to best convert.   Answerbase provides content insights based on your current Q&A activity so you can understand what content you can create which will convert, and then will help you associate that content with the most relevant products that will convert to a sale.

Please Contact Us if you know of any that are doing the trick well and optimizing the conversion rate of ecommerce blog posts.