So far in the November round-up of our favorite features, I’ve shown a few of my favorite editorial tools that we built to make writing faster, easier and more effective for building engagement and SEO. I wrote about our internal linking tool, the external linking one,in-story auto-sidebars and how-to choose related posts, and curated in-story sidebars.
While none of these take many clicks, there is clicking involved.
So Sunday’s favorite feature is about not having to do anything.
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 list they’d like folks to subscribe to.
Still others are companies doing content marketing to build their business and they have whitepapers they’d like to promote to blog readers. Others may be authors who would love to have a way to promote their book.
That’s why we built what we call Promo Links. Promo links are internal marketing recommendations that are shown to readers in reserved spots in our recommendation modules.
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 to venture into the Control Panel. We spent a lot of time making the displays not only customizable, but easily customizable. We built some simple tools to let sites choose the order of the sections in the main module.
Adding a good looking sidebar to a blog post or story should not require handcrafting HTML.
You might however want to handcraft the content that goes into the sidebar – which is why we made it simple to create manual or curated sidebars.
A number of our clients make good use of them to build engagement. Take the one pictured above from Modern Farmer pointing readers to more about them apples.
So how did Modern Farmer make that sidebar?
Sidebars in the body of stories not only add a visual flair to stories, they also provide a portal to readers to see your depth of coverage and make their way to those stories.
Adding a good looking sidebar that lives in the body of a story shouldn’t be hard. And adding an in-story sidebar that auto-populates keeps your editorial team free for other work.
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One of my favorite features about Contextly is that you don’t have to do anything to get great related, personalized, evergreen and popular recommendations.
Publishers can do what they do best – creating great stories – and we do what we do best: getting the right story to the right reader.
When we created an easy way for writers to link back to previous stories, we thought it should be just as easy to link to stories and site out on the web.
After all, the World Wide Web, by definition, is made of links between pages. That’s what gives the raucous mess of the web some semblance of order.
[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.]
Contextly originated in part at my frustration at the limitation of the tools we used at Wired (we used WordPress). Linking back to previous stories was just a pain. But links are good for building SEO, and also just plain useful for readers, so we added them every day.
But creating links to previous stories required writers to open a new tab; create a site search like this in Google” “site:blog.contextly.com evergreen”; then click through the search results to get to the normal link; copy and paste the link; and finally, go back to WordPress and copy it in.
So one of the first features we built remains a favorite: making it dead simple to link back to a previous story in the story you are writing.
We’ve had Auto-Sidebars for a long time, and the first version was pretty cool. Version 2.0 shipped this week and now they are wicked cool. The sidebar below is a live Auto-Sidebar.
Basically, Auto-Sidebars are sidebars that live in the body of your story showing related content without you having to choose the stories. They look great as visual elements on the page and help readers dive deeper into your content (sometimes known as reducing your bounce rate.)
And as you publish more stories to the site, they update across the site auto-magically.
But, up until now, Auto-Sidebars were an advanced feature that was a bit confusing.
With the release of 3.2 for WordPress and our Enterprise API edition, Auto-Sidebars got way cooler and way easier. (For those of you who prefer a visual demo, we made a short How-To Use the Auto-Sidebar video.)
Here’s the 5 things to know:
1) From the text editor in WordPress, you can drop an Auto-Sidebar into a post with just two clicks. Simply click the right side of of the Sidebar button, choose “Add an Auto-Sidebar” and the shortcode [contextly_auto_sidebar] goes right where your cursor is.
How to Insert an Auto-Sidebar Manually in WordPress’s Visual Editor
Once you save the post, you can preview it and see it in action.
2) In the Control Panel, you can choose the default title, description, the number of stories to show and the size of the thumbnail image. You’ve got lots of control over how it looks, including whether it lives on the left or right edge of your post. You can even have it run across the page.
3) You can edit the content of any Auto-Sidebar.
If there’s a story, you want to put in there you can. So say you have your Auto-Sidebars set to show 3 posts. You can then highlight the shortcode, press the Sidebar button and choose a story. We’ll then show 3 stories – the one you chose and 2 algorithmic. You can choose some or all.
4) We kept the old method where the Auto-Sidebar code can show up automatically when you start a new post. You can then type around it and put it where you like, or just leave it at the top of the story.
What it looks like when you start a new post with Auto-Insertion of Auto-Sidebars. So much automation.
5) You can also edit any Auto-Sidebar to have a different title, description or placement. Just highlight the shortcode, press the Sidebar button, and change those items.
If you want to see this in action, check out the How-To Use the Auto-Sidebar video.
There’s more to come soon, including being able to choose different kinds of default recommendations. As always, Auto-Sidebars won’t slow down or crash your site as they are powered by our proprietary recommendation system that runs on our servers, not yours.
But the new Auto-Sidebars are really fun, and we’re wickedly excited that these are now ridiculously easy to add to stories.
Interest in evergreen story detection algorithms is driven by the underlying economics that characterize publishers’ archives. Publishers’ archives can be hugely valuable to readers, but remain mostly inaccessible to readers due to the cost of finding content in those archives. Thus, it is important to lower the cost of finding content in those archives to the point where the value to the reader exceeds the cost to the reader. In this case, the market maker is an evergreen story detection algorithm.