Favorite Feature #17: Let Readers Follow Topics on Your Site (Channels!)

Contextly Channels let readers sign up to get notified of new posts on topics they care about, without any extra work by writers or editors. Channels let you build and own a new distribution method. Continue reading

Favorite Feature #16: Reports on Referrer Sites and Homepages

Contextly Analytics now includes more data to help sites decide what to do more of, including data on referrers as well as traffic to non-story pages such as homepages and tag/category pages. Continue reading

Favorite Feature #15: Filter Related Posts by Date, Categories and Tags

Contextly now lets sites exclude posts from related, popular and evergreen recommendations by date, tags/categories, url/keyword. Hide unwanted or expired content from your recommendations. Continue reading

Favorite Feature #14: Automatically Recommending Evergreen Stories

For sites with hundreds of posts, there’s a rich underlying content that isn’t out of date and still gives value to readers. These older stories are what we call Evergreens, since they keep giving value to readers long after they … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #13: Reusing a Curated Sidebar (or We Love Libraries)

Creating a manual sidebar is one of my favorite Contextly curation tools. Curated Sidebars let you choose internal or external links, providing context to readers in a fast, writer-friendly editorial interface. Even better, the in-story sidebars both look good on … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #12: Integrated Video, Text and Product Recommendations

Videos, stories and products shouldn’t be siloed on a publisher’s site, so we integrate them in our recommendation section to get readers to discover more of a publisher’s offerings. Continue reading

Favorite Feature #11: Adding Related Links Pointing to Another Site

The middle of the month deserves a sneaky feature, so here it goes: Here’s how you can add a second site to your curation search and have Contextly think it’s your default site. Let me explain: say you wanted to … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #10: Analytics Reports, Not a Dashboard

Early on, we made a counter-intuitive decision. We were not going to build a dashboard. Instead, we would send a daily, weekly and monthly report to our publishers with info on how Contextly was working and other info about their … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #9: Promoting Custom Content

Sometimes you want to show off holiday content or a particularly powerful section of your site. We made custom sections that take any RSS feeds and incorporate it into your recommendations. Continue reading

Favorite Feature #8: Not Having to Do Anything

Contextly has lots of tools for curation. But Contextly also works splendidly when you don’t press any of our buttons. Here’s how doing nothing works. Continue reading