Related Posts | Zemanta's Lovely Test Blog

“Native advertising” was one of the biggest buzzwords of 2012. Where a lot of native advertising goes wrong is when publishers (or the service that the publisher uses) go overboard with the advertising part of it. The moment publishers begin to exchange the value of recommendations for the value they are offering their readers is exactly when users begin to notice. And when they continue to notice, they get annoyed – and you don’t want that.

The best test I’ve seen when it comes to this kind of advertising is “Will my readers naturally share this content?” If the answer is yes, then congrats, you have found a great form of advertising that your readers will appreciate. If the answer is no, then you risk annoying your users and generating a negative sentiment. And for large publishers that have millions of readers, that is a lot of annoyed people.

Why you should use Zemanta Related Posts plugin

Relevance

Because relevance is key, it is our primary goal.

The plugin is based on our award-winning semantic algorithm. We have built a network of over 300,000 publishers and we have over five years of experience; there is no denying that we are trusted for delivering only the most relevant related posts. If you want to get your content in our recommendation engine, you have to get past our dedicated spam-kill team that blacklists hundreds of sites daily – and they will certainly tell you, there are a lot of spammy sites on the Web.

Editorial Control

If you aren’t convinced that we will recommend only the most relevant content, then we have a solution for that too. If you are not satisfied with a certain recommendation (or all of them, and we sincerely apologize if this is the case!), then feel free to take complete control. Simply click “Edit Related Posts” from the reader side and add or remove any posts that you either love or hate. If there is a site in particular that you find that we continue to recommend to you despite your continuous removal, then we also offer the ability to blacklist the site from your recommendations. And yes, this applies to both organic and promoted recommendations. As we’ve mentioned before, as it is your site, you should have complete control over what goes on it.

If you are curious about the process of adding and removing related posts that are displayed, check out a screen shot of the window that appears when you choose to edit your related posts.

Focus on Mobile

One of the other major components where many other related posts plugins fall flat is mobile optimization. Google is signaling loud and clear that mobile is only going to become more and more important; so your related posts must perform as well on mobile devices as they do on any desktop. With that in mind, we’ve made mobile a priority and have fully optimized it, giving you, the publisher several options to customize it on your side. Want to see our mobile related posts in action? Whip out your phone and check out any one of our blog posts!

Revenue and Traffic Options

Of course, it may be difficult to sell you on quality recommendations and mobile optimization alone. Like most things, the real incentive comes in the numbers and with Zemanta you’re getting two different kinds – both in revenue and analytics.

In addition to earning revenue from any promoted recommendations on your site, there is also the opportunity to enroll in our Reader Exchange network. It connects you with other websites and publishers in your niche and allows you to exchange relevant traffic. You will only receive traffic from a site where your post was a relevant recommendation and for every click you give out, you get one in return. Therefore, it’s not just about giving you a chance to increase your revenue, but also grow your audience – which of course may increase your revenue as well.

We have been in the business of delivering semantically matched related posts for over five years now, and with a network of over 300,000 publishers, there is no denying that many find our tools useful and beneficial to their site. But first, why would anyone want to add related posts to their site? And more importantly, why should you choose us?

There are several reasons why it is beneficial to have related posts on your site. There is a reason why nearly every major publisher is using them. With the advent of content marketing and how important it has become in any digital marketing strategy, I would actually be impressed to find a blog that isn’t using it. After all, why wouldn’t a publisher do anything that they can to keep you reading?

Increased Engagement

One of the most frequently stated benefits of having related posts is the increased engagement and readership that you earn from having them on your site. This is important whether you are a publisher or a brand engaged in content marketing. Even a small boost engagement can go a long way.

Think of how much more likely a reader is to click through to one of your posts that he sees if every time he is on your site he reads two or three articles rather than just reading one and then bouncing. That site recognition goes a long way, especially if you are a beginner blogger battling major news sources, big brands, and tenured publishers.

Less Bounce, More Views

That brings me to two other frequently stated benefits of having related posts: a lower bounce rate and more pageviews.

If more engagement didn’t get your attention, then a boost in traffic most certainly will. I think it’s pretty safe to say that most, if not all, bloggers would love to have more traffic – the search term “how to increase traffic” is searched on Google over 60,000 times a month alone!

According to Search Engine Journal, “Many studies have shown that after a web visitor has finished reading your post, they are in action mode – they want to do something.” This makes sense.

Personally, I know that if I reach the end of a post while I am a visitor of another site and a related post catches my eye, I am very likely to click through. I can actually think of several occasions when I catch myself realizing that I just spent the last 20 minutes reading through posts on a site all because I kept on seeing related, interesting content. And if this happens, not only am I likely to trust the site and recognize it at a later date, but if I really liked the content, then I am likely to subscribe to it – either through social media, email, or RSS.

The Available Options

So now that I have convinced you that you need some kind of related posts on your site, you have two options: either manually insert and format your own related posts, or use an existing, established plugin.

Let’s explore the first option. Sure, it sounds enticing at first, you have full control, you don’t have to rely on a third party service, you have the freedom to make it however you want. While all of these things may be true, there is also a lot of work there. You have to comb through your posts and posts around the web, you have to add them using the proper formatting and CSS, you will need to find, and possibly edit, the featured images that you will use as the thumbnails, and then you need to make sure that it displays correctly in all browsers. Of course, this is all on top of all the research, writing, image searching, and any other work you might do for the blog post itself!

Luckily, we have a solution to all of this, and that comes in a fancy new plugin called Zemanta Related Posts.

Why You Need Zemanta Related Posts

We would like to think that Zemanta Related Posts is the best related posts plugin you’ll find and of course, we have many reasons for that.

More Traffic

I’m going to start with the one that everyone wants to hear, more traffic. And we don’t just do that by keeping users on your site. Nope, we also bring in traffic from other sites that are also using our plugin. This is quality traffic too, because of our semantic technology, all posts to and from your site are going to be related to what you are writing about – increasing the likelihood of the visitor engaging with your post and finding other related articles on your site.

In fact, many users of our plugin experience an internal traffic increase of up to 10%. Not only does this increase your reach and readership of people who otherwise may have never seen your blog, but it places you in a network of similar bloggers that will appreciate the exchange of traffic just as much as you do. Oh, and if you want to check to see how many visitors Zemanta brought you, you can check that directly through the plugin dashboard.

Real-Time Analytics

One thing that many related posts plugins are lacking are analytics. Most people would like to see how many users who make it to the end of your post actually click through to a related post. For that reason, we decided to include real-time analytics directly in the plugin dashboard. Check out a screenshot of our statistics for the past 30 days.

Mobile Optimization

With the rapid adoption and use of mobile browsing, it is more important now than ever to optimize your site for both desktop and mobile use. Thankfully, Zemanta Related Posts are customizable and fully optimized for mobile use, and as you can see above, we even offer you mobile analytics.

Complete Customization

Another benefit of using Zemanta Related Posts is the complete customization that we offer you through the plugin dashboard. It is on your site so we believe that you should have full control of how it looks on your site. That is why we offer seven different designs and, if you really have something special in mind, an option to customize the plain design via CSS.

Check out all six of our awesome designs:

Complete Editorial Control

Last, and certainly not least, is the full editorial control that you get with Zemanta Related Posts. One of the biggest complaints about related posts plugins is that you do not have any control over which posts are actually displayed. We think that it is very important that you, the owner of the site, should have complete control over what is shown on your site. So we made it simple to add or remove any of the related posts that we suggested to you using our semantic engine.

Simply click “Edit Related Posts” in the right corner of the related posts and drag and drop whatever you want. And if you would also like to restrict the posts that we recommend to a certain date range (for example, only posts from the last 3 months), you can do that from the plugin dashboard.

So, what do you think?

By now, I hope I have convinced you that not only are related posts a necessity on your site, but Zemanta Related Posts are the best option. We offer you the ability to get more traffic from our network of over 300,000 bloggers with analytics to prove it, we offer you mobile optimization and full customization, and most importantly we offer you full control to truly make Zemanta yours.