Why Large Publishers Should be Using Zemanta Related Posts

Lack of relevance is one of the biggest complaints about related posts plugins. If you recommend content at the end of your post that is irrelevant to that very post, you begin to lose your audience's trust and credibility.

“Native advertising” was one of the biggest buzzwords of 2012. Where a lot of native advertising goes wrong is when publishers (or the service that the publisher uses) go overboard with the advertising part of it. The moment publishers begin to exchange the value of recommendations for the value they are offering their readers is exactly when users begin to notice. And when they continue to notice, they get annoyed – and you don’t want that.

The best test I’ve seen when it comes to this kind of advertising is “Will my readers naturally share this content?” If the answer is yes, then congrats, you have found a great form of advertising that your readers will appreciate. If the answer is no, then you risk annoying your users and generating a negative sentiment. And for large publishers that have millions of readers, that is a lot of annoyed people.

Why you should use Zemanta Related Posts plugin

Relevance

Because relevance is key, it is our primary goal.

The plugin is based on our award-winning semantic algorithm. We have built a network of over 300,000 publishers and we have over five years of experience; there is no denying that we are trusted for delivering only the most relevant related posts. If you want to get your content in our recommendation engine, you have to get past our dedicated spam-kill team that blacklists hundreds of sites daily – and they will certainly tell you, there are a lot of spammy sites on the Web.

Editorial Control

If you aren’t convinced that we will recommend only the most relevant content, then we have a solution for that too. If you are not satisfied with a certain recommendation (or all of them, and we sincerely apologize if this is the case!), then feel free to take complete control. Simply click “Edit Related Posts” from the reader side and add or remove any posts that you either love or hate. If there is a site in particular that you find that we continue to recommend to you despite your continuous removal, then we also offer the ability to blacklist the site from your recommendations. And yes, this applies to both organic and promoted recommendations. As we’ve mentioned before, as it is your site, you should have complete control over what goes on it.

If you are curious about the process of adding and removing related posts that are displayed, check out a screen shot of the window that appears when you choose to edit your related posts.

Focus on Mobile

One of the other major components where many other related posts plugins fall flat is mobile optimization. Google is signaling loud and clear that mobile is only going to become more and more important; so your related posts must perform as well on mobile devices as they do on any desktop. With that in mind, we’ve made mobile a priority and have fully optimized it, giving you, the publisher several options to customize it on your side. Want to see our mobile related posts in action? Whip out your phone and check out any one of our blog posts!

Revenue and Traffic Options

Of course, it may be difficult to sell you on quality recommendations and mobile optimization alone. Like most things, the real incentive comes in the numbers and with Zemanta you’re getting two different kinds – both in revenue and analytics.

In addition to earning revenue from any promoted recommendations on your site, there is also the opportunity to enroll in our Reader Exchange network. It connects you with other websites and publishers in your niche and allows you to exchange relevant traffic. You will only receive traffic from a site where your post was a relevant recommendation and for every click you give out, you get one in return. Therefore, it’s not just about giving you a chance to increase your revenue, but also grow your audience – which of course may increase your revenue as well.