Favorite Feature #9: Promoting Custom Content

Custom Motorcycle

Many publishers have posts and content they’d like to highlight from their site that aren’t necessarily related to a given story.

Say around Thanksgiving, you might have Fall recipes you want to show off – or even content about how to survive extended family time.

Or if you have multiple sites, you might want to have one site recommending content from the other.

That’s where Contextly Custom feeds come in. You simply give us an RSS feed in the control panel, then specify what module or module section you want it to show up in.

Here’s how you can show off content from a category on your WordPress site – which should be handy for the upcoming holiday season.

1. Find your RSS feed. Simply go to the category or tag page like http://blog.contextly.com/category/favorite-feature/ and then stick /feed on the end. Like this: http://blog.contextly.com/category/favorite-feature/feed/
2. Go to the Control Panel and under Settings – Content Types, put that url in either Custom Feed 1 or Custom Feed 2. It may take a little time to parse the feed and enter it into the system.
3. Then choose the module you want it to display in. If you want a Custom Section in the Main Module, go to Settings->Display Modules->Main Module. Choose either Custom Section 1 or Custom Section 2.
4. Give it a name, like Happy Holidays. Choose the Custom Feed that you choose in Step 2. Then use the slider to turn it on.
5. Press Save.
6. Go get a gingerbread latte and brag to the barista about how awesome you are.

Here’s a short video on how to add a custom RSS feed to your recommendations.

A few notes:

These aren’t intended to be related; they are Explore sections that will cycle through your contnet.

If you have a custom feed that needs special parsing – such as a product feed, drop us a note. We’re happy to help with this.

One limitation here: you may not use these to promote third-party external content without prior permission. So, you can’t use this section to drive readers off-site to another company’s content for pay. If you want to do that, simply drop us a note at info@contextly.com and we’ll talk you through the process.

[For the month of November 2015, in honor of National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month #NaBloPoMo, I’ll be writing a post a day about a favorite Contextly feature. It’s a bit of a love letter and a bit of a how-to.]

If you want to try Contextly on your own WordPress site, you can download it from the WordPress plugin gallery or, you want to learn about our custom CMS integration, drop us a line.

Image: CC-licensed by Christian Parreira

Comments are closed.