What is Related Content? I’m sure you’ve seen them on many blogs, at the bottom of the post you would see a few links to more of the blogs post with a nice caption “Other posts you may like” or something along those lines. Related content is a great way to give your viewers a link to other posts that they may enjoy and keep them interested on your site. It also provides an easy way to have internal links on your posts which is great for SEO!
There are many plugins that will provide this for you, most perform the task by comparing categories or tags but I have a better one for you!
nRelate is a plugin that takes related content a step further in a 3 distinct ways
Better Related Content
nRelate actually spiders your cites content, indexing all your posts and keeping it in a database on their servers. This allows them to use the actual content of your posts to find other related posts rather than just same category or tag. All this is done on their server as well which means faster delivery and freeing up your server for other content delivery, making your site just a wee bit faster.
The set up is very easy as well allowing much of the editing from the dashboard rather than tweaking the CSS. You can have as few or as many links as you wish as well as changing the size of the thumbnails. Some other features that you can adjust in the dashboard:
- Post titles and length
- Excerpts
- Exclude categories
- How far back to go
- Several built in styles or use your own css
- Location of related posts
- Thumbnails or plain text
I have used many related posts widgets and most of the time I had to fidget with css and code to get it the way I wanted. This plugin has I’d say 95% of what you would want to change in the dashboard for quick changes.
Add a Little Revenue to Your Site
nRelate also gives you the ability to earn a little money with the plugin. You can simply sign up for ads through the plugin and it will then show one of the related links as an ad which you will earn revenue each time its clicked. gain using the indexing of your site it will show related ads that should be of interest to your viewers. You have control of course on how many ads you wish to show in your related content from 1 to 10, as well as postion of the add (either first, last or random).
You dont have to worry about black hat tactics as it will clearly have a “sponsored” overlay letting your viewers know it is an add
Your Own Blog Network
Another cool feature of nRelate is networking with other bloggers in your niche. By adding other blogs to your blogroll (or any other category in your links) you can have nRelate show related content from other blogs. nRelate server will spider and index the other blogs you choose and serve up related posts. You again can choose how many of your related posts links are from other blogs and it will let your viewers know, like the ads, that the link is from another blog.
This feature is great for SEO providing links to fellow bloggers and hopefully they will do the same for you and provides a benefit to your viewers giving them more related content to follow.
Putting it all together
All of this is easily tracked from your nRelate account on their website. You can track information from all your blogs from one account, seeing how many clicks you get for your own related content as well as click to your networked blogs. Of course it als tracks the ad clicks and revenue you earn.
I think if you try it out you will like it over any related post plugin you are using now. To get the plugin just go to plugins and search for nRelate. They do have 3 plugins so be sure to get the related content one.
If you do decide to use it and want to use the network feature, let me know and I’ll add you!
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