Placing Blogs on a Retail Site

The other day I got into a discussion about where a blog should be placed on a retail site, and it got me thinking in general about where blogs or community content should appear on any site that isn’t primarily a community site, retail or otherwise. While I could spend time discussing how to handle URLs, how many posts to feature on the homepage, and other similar issues, these details are not that relevant. The best way to generate traffic for a blog (or blogs) is to integrate posts or blog promotions into the site in places where the blog content relates to the current section or page.

To use a retail example, if Dell had some kind of corporate or expert blog, there might be a post about their new “color choice” notebook. Dell could feature that post on the homepage, but only a small percentage of people who visit the homepage are going to be interested in that particular topic. If they feature this on the “color choice” notebook product detail page, however, a much larger percentage of users are likely to be interested in reading the post. Driving qualified traffic into the community areas increases the chances that customers and potential customers will ask and answer questions, and spark new discussions. Once a user has been brought into the blog, the chances they will return directly also will increase.

To look at this from a different angle, let’s consider customer product reviews. Typically product reviews are available from the product page, because that is where they are contextual. Imagine if, instead of having them on each page, amazon.com had a separate section off the homepage where visitors could read the most recent reviews? This would make no sense—the reviews would be completely out of context and unrelated to the items users were shopping for!

Integrating this content into the site may, of course, create operational and technical issues. Creating some kind of automated solution to scan blog content for keywords of subjects requires a much more complex technical implementation, but is certainly worth considering if within the available budget. Otherwise, integrating blog posts into the site requires more manual effort, as the producers responsible for page content must take the time to manually attach relevant materials to each page or section. Despite all this, we must remember that users typically visit non-community websites to carry out tasks other than read blogs or participate in forums (using the Dell example, the main reason customers visit is to shop!).

The bottom line is that community content, whether blogs, forums, reviews, or any other user-generated content, can provide users with additional information, answers to questions, the ability to act as an expert, or simply make their visit to the site more pleasurable. If, however, this information is not presented in context and at the perfect moment, the user may never find it.

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