Outbrain Widget
You have a well-established blog with more than a hundred articles. Your recent publications are always hyped. But what happens with them after a few months pass and they become part of your archives? Are your readers able to find them?
This issue has been critical for many sites that publish reviews or articles that don’t necessarily have a crucial time span. The two fundamental solutions are to either make your archives attractive (which in itself are a challenging task) or draw attention to the content in your archives that is related to the newest articles. This is where the concepts of related posts becomes important. Thankfully there are several plugins for WordPress that can help you interlink articles in your blog (which as an added benefit is good search engine optimization as well).
Some of the well-known and reputable plugins for related posts are: Darren’s Related Posts plugin (relies on the keywords you have used in the various articles), Sphere Related Content and Yet Another Related Posts plugin. The third one is more reputable than the others mainly because of the flexibility of algorithm customization it provides.
Yet, in this post, I would like to bring to your attention another alternative that I have been using successfully on my site for the past year – The Outbrain Widget, which combines the best features of the tree plugins listed above, while adding an additional layer of interactivity to your site by letting users rate your articles and see related content based on the rates they have been given.
Ever since installing The Outbrain Widget, I have noted an increased interaction with the site by visitors who clicked on the image thumbnails (auto generated by the service) to discover more about the topic they are interested in. While The Outbrain Widget provides a text based recommendation as well (it recommends your articles related to the one which your visitor is reading or voting for), the thumbnail recommendations works great for blogs and sites which feature a lot of well selected graphics, as they serve as an additional teaser to the readers. Best of all, The Outbrain Widget rating and recommendations widget is completely free of charge and provides valuable statistical information about the articles your readers found most useful.
How do you showcase your archive articles? What plugging or services do you use?
Guest Post By: SkyKid is the administrator of www.theskykid.com . TheSkyKid.com is a blog that focuses on coming of age movies and young talent in music and the performing arts.
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About The Blog Author
Alex Sysoef is an IT Consultant, Internet Marketer and ProBlogger who shares his passion and knowledge of WordPress, SEO, Social Media and traffic strategies on his blog WordPress Howto Spotter. Connect on Twitter or Facebook
26 Responses to “Outbrain Widget”
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RT @SkyKid: RT @TheSpotter Outbrain Widget http://bit.ly/bIboSl One of the best additions for everyone running a blog or a website
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RT @TheSpotter Outbrain Widget http://bit.ly/bIboSl
This is really interesting! Currently I don’t have a WordPress powered blog, but I am getting one in the very near future, and am really glad that you have shared this with me, as it sounds like a great little widget, as I do have trouble with old articles just fading away.
Thanks again
Christopher Roberts recently posted..Cumbria Holiday Diary
Sounds like a pretty nifty plugin. I’m going to give it a whirl on one of my blogs. It should work on a blog that has a thumbnail image associated with every post.
By the way, which “related posts” plugin is used on this blog?
It can also work for a blog without thumbnail image associated with each post as you can choose to use text based recommendations as well.
Alex,
On this blog I use couple different plugins:
1. Yet Another Related Posts – for related content
2. Where did they go from here – for the content other people have read after reading specific article.
Work very well for reader engagement
An interesting thought… here’s another one –
My blog has been online about a year so far. I’ve already started going back each week and selecting an article from the archives and “re-posting” it, literally scheduling it for a future date.
So, being that each week I post 3 articles, one new from, one guest and one from the archives (updated if need be). It sure cuts down on my time involved each week, and now, because I know more about tags / categories etc than I used to – I am getting some pretty amazing results in SEO.
Just a thought.
- Paul Barrs
Paul Barrs recently posted..Article Marketing Podcast MasterPlan 16
It is an interesting approach for sure, but I think this can be done well only with “ever green” content
Lots of time on blog we post content that is time limited and its useful life expires due to the updates, etc
As for re-posting the posts, how does this work? Does the same post, then, appear in 2 places on your site, once the re-post has been done? Because wouldn’t this create duplicate content? Would like to know more about how this is done.
Thanks
Peggy
Peggy recently posted..Finding Students
Twitter: volaer
says:
This is similar to Linkwithin.
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Hi Alex,
thanks for educating us more about re-using old posts in this more automatic way – showing related posts; I’ll be doing that on my blog this afternoon & telling my subscribers about it too!
Regards
Tracey
Tracey Rissik recently posted..The importance of your “Contact Us” page
Sounds like a pretty interesting plugin – are you using it on any of your blogs, Alex?
Doug Champigny recently posted..Online Marketing Tips For Small Offline Businesses
No Doug,
It does sound interesting but I personally haven’t testing it so can’t vouch on it from my own experience.
Hey all – I’m Outbrain’s CEO.
SkyKid – thanks for the great post! TheSpotter – thanks for publishing this – highly appreciated.
We love supporting our bloggers, so if you guys have any questions about how to install Outbrain, or how to customize it for your specific needs (switching between thumbnails/text, disabling paid links, limiting to in-site links only, etc, etc) – please either check our support forum (http://getsatisfaction.com/outbrain), or shoot me an email to galai[at]outbrain[dot]com
As SkyKid mentioned, the Outbrain service is completely free, and combines the best of most ‘related link’ services to surface for your readers the most interesting blog posts you’ve published.
The main reason to write this article ( aside from the obvious advantages of being a guest author of this site ) was to share something that has proven good for my site and liked by my readers. I have always received first class support from Oubraain which is something of a great value to me . Not related to the widget itself Outbrain used to have another great service for article promotion , but it became highly unaffordable after they changed the pricing policy for it. Yet as a content recommendation and rating I found the Outbrain widget very useful . Of course as each of you I am constantly seeking for ways to improve my blog – for the moment that is what works best for me. Feel free to check the usability of the widget at my blog – this will give you a chance to do a pilot test before deciding if you want to try it out on your own.
I use linkwithin that looks like it does the same thing. It does help people find things and I noticed more page views after install. I also do what I call link surfing through my site every few months. I just read my articles and when I see a phrase that has to do with another post, I anchor text link to the other page. After time, you can zoom all around the the site and never come to a stop. Nice post, and thanks for running the commentluv. You showed on page 1, #1 for ‘seo commentluv.’ Sweet!
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The plugin looks promising, though I’ve seen some great blogs that are already using outbrain widget, and I do think that it’s one of their secrets (or could be not) in having a lower site bounce rate. I’ll give it a try on my personal blog though
Cheers!
Regards,
Jason
Thanks for this great info on this widget – question – can this be used in conjunction with Yet Another Related Post?
Thanks
Lorrette recently posted..Birth and The Middle Wife er- MidWife!
Lorrette,
I haven’t tried it but as you can see above CEO of the company behind willing to support if you do
Share your findings!
Lorrette,
I just tried to use Yet Another Related Post together with outbrain and then only it. It is not working for my blog due to the extensive amount of posts I have ( over 700 ) and tags. The CPU increased greatly and I had hard time even changing the options of Yet Another Related Post. One thing I have learned that its not wise to use both together – and that Yet Another Related Post won`t work for me. I see that Alex is implementing it greatly in here – yet I guess it depends greatly on the capabilities of your server – I am under the impression that in order to use it I have to place my blog on a separate server,
Thank you for highlighting this plugin. I’ve been looking into good ways to interlink my articles and I think I will try this plugin.
Hans Georg recently posted..Pranayama – Standing Deep Breathing Exercise
Thanks for this post. I’ve been looking for something I can use to do this. I’m going to set it up now. This is GREAT for SEO and it keeps people on your site longer and that can only help you.
Mike Antoni recently posted..By- Mike Antoni
I was a bit worry about using an old content from the archive because this might be considered a duplicate content but now it appear to me that many people are doing it and they still getting a good SEO results.
Aaron recently posted..Nintendo Dsi Club – Where You Can Download Wwe Smackdown Vs Raw 2010 For Free!
A picture speaks thousand words, giving related post reference with thumbnail image is always prove fruitful. Thanks for sharing detail insight on the subject.
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