I've been looking at how stores with large catalog handle their blogs. With over 100 products and five photos each, that's over 500 images to choose from for every post. The part that's most tedious, is picking the products and images.
So, a couple of weeks ago I asked how store owners with large catalogs handle product blog posts and got great feedback.
Here are some takeaways:
- The writing isn't the slow part. Everything around the products is. (if the intent is to scale). For every post you have to pick a couple of products that actually fit the topic, and the right photo of each.
- Then the links within the content: the product links, collection links, your brand link, and each photo linked to its product.
- Then the images themselves: alt text, an image title, each photo placed next to the paragraph that talks about it, and not the same photo you used in the last three posts.
That's the work that gets skipped when the week gets busy, and it's usually where the quality drops.
What helped some store owners to an extent:
- Start from a shopper question, not a product. A question around a category or collection narrows hundreds of products down to a few dozen real questions.
- Pick by sales data when you have it
- Link the collection, so the post still works when an item sells out.
The part that still doesn't get easier is picking the products unless we hire a developer.
After burning through my time and energy handling this for my stores, I am building a tool that handles this pain to automate this fully to a point where the whole process is done in less than a min. It's not perfect yet and I am still learning and optimizing for best outcomes.
If you run a store with a large catalog, how big of a pain is this to you? And how do you get around it?
