When it comes to eCommerce, blogging is still alive and kicking. According to a recent study by DemandSage, more than 61% of American consumers have made a purchase based on blog recommendations. 

In the past few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made great inroads into digital marketing in general, and content marketing in particular. On one hand, Generative AI has brought down the cost of content production, and democratized this channel of marketing. At the same time, it has also commoditized content production making it less valuable and unique. 

In this article, we will look into the actual benefits that AI has to offer in your eCommerce blogging strategy, and tips on how to make the best use of it for your business. 

Why AI matters

The world is increasingly globalized and a major chunk of eCommerce businesses cater to a worldwide audience. Such businesses seldom have one target audience or demographic to go after. As such, the marketing strategy for such businesses should include a budget and plan to reach these different markets. 

Scalability

Generative AI helps eCommerce businesses translate their blog content into multiple languages at scale at minimal cost. This helps eCommerce businesses to reach various audiences with their bootstrapped budget.

The best part is that Generative AI for translating is not like using a tool like Google Translate. Instead, you could ensure that your content pieces in each language are customized to appeal to the specific audience - including the examples that you use in the article, the popular slangs and cultural references.

Personalization

AI helps analyze millions of data points to generate actionable insights. ECommerce business owners may use Artificial Intelligence to analyze past purchases, search history, and preferences to create highly relevant and personalized content pieces. 

This is good for your customer engagement and conversion.

AI Tools for eCommerce blogging

A blog strategy has several components to it. It starts with identifying the target audience you want to go after.

Once you have this ready, the next step is keyword research and competition analysis. At the end of this step, you will have a draft content plan to follow. 

The third step is to build a content flow plan for each article you write. This helps you flesh out the article into its final form. 

The last step is distribution - that is, making sure that the content you publish is discoverable and drives conversions. 

AI enables eCommerce businesses to achieve each of these objectives faster and with fewer resources. 

Tools like Jasper.ai, Rytr, and Writesonic assist eCommerce marketers produce hundreds of blog copies in short time while other SEO tools like Surfer SEO, Clearscope, BuzzSumo, and AnswerThePublic enable other activities of blog strategy like keyword research and competition analysis.

The Guide to AI in eCommerce Blogging

Step one: Start with Keyword Research

There are several non-AI tools that assist with keyword research at scale. However, one thing that AI can help with is by identifying our objectives and integrating your keyword research process with the next step, which is to build a content plan. 

With tools like Optimo and Junia, eCommerce marketers can quickly build a database of keywords that they need to target with their blog marketing. In addition to this, you could also build keyword clusters to target a bunch of keywords from within the same article, and segregate the keyword list into long-tail, questions, or based on intent. 

This information can be used to build an ideal content plan that is a mix of different types of keywords to target in a monthly plan.

Step two: Competition Research

The next step in the eCommerce blogging process is to perform competition research. An eCommerce business faces competition not only from its direct competitors but also from informational websites, affiliate marketing sites, and other eCommerce businesses that serve other markets (but are still ranking for specific keywords in the target markets). 

Tools like RankYak, and SEO.ai help automate the process of competition research along with keyword research and can also potentially help business owners publish content on autopilot with very little human oversight. 

Step three: Content plan and production

Once your keywords list is in place, the next step is to build a content plan for the next month or quarter. 

Generative AI plays an extremely important role in building the content for your blog posts. However, it is important to note that offering your AI tool the right kind of prompt can make or break your AI strategy. 

This is because letting AI make the decision on the content structure and flow is a recipe for disaster. Not only is such content mundane and non-unique, it is also poorly optimized for conversions. 

Scott Chow from The Blog Starter recommends working on a modular prompting strategy which is essentially building content piece by piece for each section of your blog post instead of generating the entire content in one go. This way, you are more likely to generate more value-adding content to your blog section.

The most popular generative AI tool is definitely ChatGPT. But besides this, there are also other AI tools focused merely on content writing including Writesonic, Jasper, and Rytr.

Also, blogging is not just about the text. The best content pieces also include engaging visuals that AI can make. Tools like MidJourney, ChatGPT (again), Invideo, and Canva can help you design videos and images that can add value to the content you produced.

Content Distribution with AI

The final step in the eCommerce blogging process is content distribution. As mentioned earlier in this article, content distribution includes translating content to multiple languages, or customizing them to different audiences. 

AI tools like Quillbot, Sider.ai and WordVice can be handy here. 

In addition to this, the latest version of Google Analytics deploys AI for performing predictive analytics, identifying anomalies, and creating user segments based on behavior. 

The Future of AI on eCommerce blogging

Artificial Intelligence is the future and is going to shape the way eCommerce marketers do business. While AI can make life easy, it is important to adhere to certain guidelines while adapting this into your blogging strategy. 

Firstly, acknowledge that a pure-play AI integration into your blogging strategy would basically be a rehash of everything that exists on the internet already. There is no uniqueness to your content. Feed your own insights to AI and prompt it to add this as part of the generated content. 

Secondly, AI is still not ideal for personalized storytelling. While it can certainly help with scaling content to reach the various microsegments of your audience, you can still observe higher conversion rates with human-written content. Keep testing both content formats to know where your blog stands. 

And lastly, it is easy to abuse AI to spread false information - especially with visual content like images and videos. Keep ethical considerations in mind while utilizing AI for such purposes.