Context

An Auto-Sidebar in Every Post (Better than a Chicken in Every Pot)

At Contextly, we’re big fans of sidebars in the body of stories. Sidebars with smart recommendations show off the depth and breadth of your site, and add a nice visual flair without interrupting a reader’s flow through a story. Sidebars … 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For sites with hundreds of posts, there’s a rich underlying content that isn’t out of date and still gives value to readers.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 →

Favorite Feature #7: Promoting What’s Valuable to You

One of the lessons we learned early on is that publishers have more than just content they want to recommend to readers. Publishers might have their sports writer talking every Tuesday at noon about Sunday’s game. Or have an email … Continue reading →

Favorite Feature #6: Customizing the Main Recommendation Display

So far, our set of posts on our favorite features has largely focussed on editorial tools. Things like choosing links for SEO building; or cool sidebars that build engagement and lower the bounce rate. For the Friday edition, I want … Continue reading →