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How To Write A Great Product Placement Blog Post

How To Write A Great Product Placement Blog Post

product placement

These days, product placement is everywhere.  

Product placement — also known as embedded marketing —  is an advertising technique where specific products or brands are promoted in another piece of work or media. It can involve anything from obviously branded products being incorporated into film or television, to verbal mentions to a subtle background appearance.

However, product placement frequently appears in a lot of the content we read online — although you may not always realize. 

blogging tips

If you’re a blogger, then it’s a good idea to know how to incorporate product placements into your content subtly — whether you’re promoting your own products or those of others. 

In this article, we’ll be covering some of the best ways to write a great product placement blog post.

Recommended reading: The Strategy You Need to Write Better Blog Posts Than Your Competitors

What a product placement can involve

A product placement blog post can involve all sorts of different things, such as links to your own products or services.

  • For example, if you’re a writer with your own blog, then you can link to your latest book using a post. You could also use posts to advertise any services you offer, such as a creative writing course or copywriting services. 
  • You can also use blog posts to promote other people’s products, either using sponsored posts or affiliate links (Blog Clarity’s guide is a great example of how even small-audience blogs can use product placement and affiliate marketing to their advantage).
  • Or, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur, you can include product placements on your blog that link back to your online store. Blogs are a great way of merging your e-commerce business with compelling content, which allows you to create consistent, valuable interactions with your customers — especially when used in conjunction with a content calendar. Most popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify offer blog functionality to go with your online store — or you can just upgrade an existing blog with e-commerce functionality using WooCommerce (a handy comparison).
  • Branching out from blog posts to other content marketing, you could also use product placement on your social media channels, either using your own page or working with influencers to build hype for your product. 

How to choose a topic

So how do you start your product placement blog post?

Well, like any blog post you write, you should start with a topic and title.

The topic isn’t necessarily that hard to decide on; whether you’re writing about your own product or someone else’s, it’s easy enough to find a topic that the product placement would comfortably fit in. Whatever the product or service you are going to include in your post, there are going to be a range of different directions and angles you can take your content in. Pick something that is interesting and relevant to your readers, as well as relevant to your product promotion.

The key with both is to keep your goal in mind: to successfully incorporate the product placement into your post.

Combine art & science in your title (using keyword research)

In terms of your title, you need to find something that is both SEO-friendly and user-friendly. That means crafting a compelling title full of power and emotion, as well as including keywords with a high search volume. 

SEO tools like SEMrush will help you to set out some initial keyword research into what your market is searching for, and establish the best keywords to target in your headline. 

You could also make a list of the benefits of your product and use that to create a title. For example, if you sell running shoes, start by focusing on the important features and benefits that customers will appreciate, such as improved breathability. Based on this, you could write a blog title centered around how to reduce the chances of getting athletes foot.

Once you’ve come up with a working title with the appropriate keywords, you can then use tools like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to perfect your headline so that it captivates and converts. Tools like this will help you to balance your words for maximum engagement.

paid ads vs organic strategy

Maximize reader value by offering your product as an answer 

So now you’ve got your topic and your title (as well as a product to place), you need to think about how you’re going to provide value to the reader — why are they going to want to read your post?

The best way to do this is to answer a problem or a question with your blog post. 

To return to the running shoe example, if you know that your market is googling “what are the best running shoes for running a marathon?” then you can provide your product as the answer, among other. Your answer could be part of a post on “11 Items That Will Make It Easier To Run Marathons.”

By nature, your product answers a question or a need anyway — it’s just a case of applying this to your blog post and providing useful information. 

Think about searcher intent around the product and write a post that answers this question in a way that allows you to insert a product authentically and usefully. 

kinds of blog posts

Using search to plan sections & your post format

It’s not enough to just have some strong, informative content. You also need to think about the format of your blog post, and how you’re going to divide it into sections. This will make a big difference to how your blog visitor reads your post, interacts with it, and whether your product placement will take.

As with all copywriting for the web, it’s best to split your post into digestible sections so that it can be easily read and scanned by visitors (such as a list-based post). 

See Also
Webmaster Tools

Use short paragraphs with subheadings to format your post, and break it up with some high-quality imagery and plenty of white space. 

Formatting your blog post like this will also help you to incorporate the keywords you’re targeting into your subheadings. The keyword research that you’ve already done for your topic and title will be useful for this part — it helps you ideate for subheadings that the product placement would fit into. 

This will pay off in a more search-friendly and user-friendly blog post, meaning your product is likely to get more attention. 

Photo by Jon Cellier on Unsplash

Minimize obvious promotion

Although the end goal of your blog post is to advertise your product, it’s important to make sure that you aren’t being overly promotional. 

You don’t want your post to look like an advert; if you use aggressive, sales-oriented language and try to force the product in your visitor’s face, it will just put them off.

Instead, offer value and a balanced post. Talk about other relevant products/ideas that complement the product in question — but only if they’re non-competing; you want to avoid linking to competitors in your piece. 

Ultimately, the key to writing a great product placement blog post is planning. 

Pay attention to keywords and search intent when you’re choosing your topic and title, and follow through with high-quality, interesting content that offers value to your reader.

By providing a post that is relevant, engaging and useful to them, you’re proving that you can be trusted — and so can your product. 

Featured Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

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