Publishers are looking for new sources of revenue right now, and thankfully, eCommerce is booming. But a common response we hear from publishers who are new to writing strong, product-driven content is “It sounds hard, and I don’t know how to start.” In fact, writing great commerce content for Sovrn Commerce is really easy. Brian Lovett, our Product Director of Commerce, has broken it down into a very simple step-by-step process:
Step 1, of course, is to sign up.
Step 2
Make sure you have at least some idea of your audience. You’ll need to look at your own analytics, whether through Google or otherwise. Get a sense of your demographic and who you’re writing for. But don’t let that scare you: if you’re a publisher, you probably know all of this already.
Step 3
Write content the exact same way you normally would. That’s it! Don’t write content just to sell a product—it has to be natural and engaging. Of course, product recommendation lists tend to perform well, like best-of lists and curated collections, so feel free to experiment with content topics.
Step 4
As you write, start to add a few links naturally. This shouldn’t be a time-intensive lift. If you have retailers you prefer, link to their products. If you have products to recommend, link to those instead. Our Commerce technology will monetize the links for you in the background.
That’s it! As you grow more comfortable with writing commercial content, you’ll want to experiment with article formats, products, and retailers. Eventually, you’ll also want to use the powerful editorial and reporting tools in our dashboard to identify trending products and valuable merchant partners. Along with reports on top-grossing articles, these tools will help you optimize your commerce strategy.
We’ll cover those topics in separate posts, but for now, remember: creating content is free.
You have everything you need to create commercial content on hand already. Even if you’re short-staffed or working from home. All you need to do is start monetizing it—and Commerce does that for you.
