FAQ & Tutorials

You can focus on writing the best content. We'll jazz it up for you and spread the word about it.

Before I start

  1. How can I start using Zemanta?

While I'm using it

  1. Using Zemanta with ScribeFire
  2. How to use filter
  3. Promote your pictures
  4. How to use more than one picture

Personalization

  1. Can I turn parts of the widget off?
  2. Can I get my old posts recommended?
  3. How to configure Zemanta?

Under the hood

  1. Can I use Zemanta on unsupported platform?
  2. How Zemanta works?

Examples

  1. Social media expert?
  2. Movie blogger?
  3. Business blogger?
  4. Food blogger?
  5. Music blogger?
  6. Books blogger?
  7. Using Zemanta with Posterous
  8. Wine blogger?

Anything else

  1. Can I make money with blogging?
  2. How do I uninstall Zemanta?
  3. How to use Zemanta in Chrome

Before I start

How can I start using Zemanta?

Zemanta is a writing assistant that recommends you content while you write. It does that by extending your writing area, allowing you to keep the same work flow that you have while saving you time by not having to find additional content elsewhere. We support all the major blogging platforms as well as GMail and Yahoo Mail.

Step 1: Download Zemanta

Zemanta comes in three main flavors:

We also have book-marklet for Safari and Chrome, as well as direct integration into ScribeFire.

You can get it from our Zemanta Download Page

Step 2: Give Zemanta a try

To see Zemanta in action you should just start composing a new blog post or an email. Zemanta will be displayed at the right-hand side of the writing area.

Zemanta in Gmail

Step 3: Personalize Zemanta

Burnham PavilionImage by hernan.seoane via Flickr
Registering your copy of Zemanta, allows you to personalize recommendations we generate for you. Most notably:
  • you can tell us which blogs and RSS feeds to recommend you stories from
  • by connecting your Twitter, Facebook and MyBlogLog account, we'll be able to recommend you links to your friends home-pages and profile as well as show you their avatar picture
  • connecting your Flickr account will mean that we'll also search your Flickr photos
  • Amazon affiliate ID allows you to earn money from your blog

You can also specify the way Zemanta creates HTML for you, image alignment and behavior of additional components.

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While I'm using it

Using Zemanta with ScribeFire

One of the important lessons of working with bloggers was that people take their editors and blogging software very seriously. That's why we're happy to announce integration of Zemanta into ScribeFire Blogging Editor. For those who don't know it, it's #1 blog editor for FireFox with over 2.5 million downloads.

Zemanta is integrated directly into toolbar within ScribeFire editor. Just click on Image icon and then select "Find Related Images with Zemanta" or "Find Related Articles with Zemanta" right of YouTube icon. Afterward it's just like Zemanta widget where you can click on images or articles to insert them into your blog post.

Zemanta integration in ScribeFire

Zemanta withing ScribeFire supports your feed and image personalization so you can get the best results that are optimized for your writing style and editorial preferences.

You can download ScribeFire from their Mozilla Firefox Add-ons Page. Make sure to also check out ScribeFire.com where you can sign-up for their Advertising network and further monetize your blog.

To see Zemanta in action within ScribeFire, check out a quick screen cast:

Zemanta with ScribeFire from zemanta on Vimeo.

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How to use filter
Zemanta Filter feature

Writing good blog posts is a creative process that often requires just right supporting media. While Zemanta tries its best to find semantically most relevant recommendations, it turns out that often only writer knows exactly what metaphor or a specific image is needed to add that extra edge to the post.

That is why we added "filter" option to Zemanta. It allows you to specify a term that Zemanta recommendation engine should take into account while deciding on what's most important in your text. It's not a classical search, since it still takes into account your body of text.

When you enter your term, all recommendations will change. Images will be more focused on your term, as will articles, links and tags.

Zemanta Filter feature, expanded

If you enter a term, that is mentioned in text, Zemanta will try even harder to find a place on Internet to link it to. That's useful if you're sure that something should be hyperlinked, but we didn't automatically figure out that it should be link. After using filter, if we can, we'll provide recommendations for link target. If you want to disable filtered recommendations and go back to initial ones, just click on Filter again and they'll disappear.

There's also a short screencast that you can take a look, demonstrating usage of Filter feature on adding puppy picture to a blog about cats :)


Zemanta Filter tutorial from zemanta on Vimeo.

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Promote your pictures

If you are a photographer and would like to see your pictures getting recommended to Zemanta users, there are three sources you can try to get images into:

Since it's unlikely that you're photos will get into Getty Images, unless you are professional news photographer, we'll focus on second two options.

Screenshot of Wikimedia Commons

Uploading into Wikimedia Commons is relatively easy. You just have to to register on site and follow their their instructions. They're always looking for good photographs that are as license free as possible for inclusion into Wikipedia articles and other uses around the web.

Make sure that you provide a good and keyword heavy description of your image, so that the editors and also Zemanta can then find your image in connection with different displayed concepts.

Other alternative is to upload images to Flickr using Creative Commons license. Here approach is similar, get a Flickr account and start uploading well tagged images with longs descriptions and good titles. What you want to do is to just write tags for each image for a few minutes, and also allow other users to tag you images.

DSC07705

This way you're raising your chances that someone will write about something that you took a photo of, include it in their blog post and drive traffic to your Flickr photostream. You're then free to use the stream to show off your great work and of course, provide a way to contact you for commercial ventures.

Alternative reason for doing this, would be to make sure that your well prepared photos are actually used by bloggers as opposed to less quality ones that are taken e.g. with mobile phones, but released to Flickr.

When you're adding your photo, make sure that you've set Creative Commons license to your images, so that you give explicit permission to bloggers to actually use your photo and that computers understand that.

Want to know how good you are doing? Enable your Flickr stats and see who likes your photos!

(All the photos in this blog post, provided by Zemanta while writing and using a bit of Filter feature to select a best one)

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How to use more than one picture

Looking at all the great blog posts you write every day, we quickly realized that they're often long enough or cover in-depth topics that require multiple images per post.

We added ability to insert multiple images into blog posts. Just grab the image and drop it into the place where you want it to show up. Then you can move it around and use your normal blog image tools to further modify placement and appearance.

Zemanta Drag and Drop Images from zemanta on Vimeo.

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Personalization

Can I turn parts of the widget off?
Sure, we realize some of you only use parts of our widget. If you log into Zemanta Preferences, you'll find a tab called Widget. In there you can choose which parts you don't want to see. This speeds Zemanta up, too!

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Can I get my old posts recommended?

Interlinking Your Old Blog Posts has clear benefits to readers who come to your site via search engines or are looking through your archive. It also help with your SEO as you can better define important keywords for your blog posts as well as interlink related content.

To make this process easier, I'm going to show you today how to setup your Zemanta to recommend blog posts from your own blog.

  1. Open Zemanta Preferences. You can find them at the bottom of Zemanta widget.
  2. Make sure to register and log in into preferences, if you haven't done that before. Note that the user name/password is not the same as for your blog so you'll have to register.
  3. Afterward click on "My Stuff" at the bottom of Preferences and you'll see a section where you can add your own blog. Click on the big yellow RSS icon and add the blog address:
    Add your blog screen
  4. To make sure that the Blog is active, you'll then have to scroll down a bit and click on "Edit list of my sources" and locate the feed that you have just added:
    Edit list of my sources
  5. Find your blog on the list and make sure that the checkbox is checked so that we'll recommend stories from this blog:
    Active feed
  6. That's it. Now when you write your new blog posts or edit your old ones, you can use "My Stuff" button on top of Zemanta widget to just limit the recommendations to your own feeds:
    My Stuff
    and you'll get:
    Related articles from my own blog

That's it. You can add multiple feeds from your own blogs so it's going to be even easier to tie your content together. At the moment we only know the blog posts that we've seen through your feed so we might not have the full history. We're working on a mechanism to upload your archives to Zemanta.

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How to configure Zemanta?

One of the questions we got asked often is - "how can I make Zemanta more personal" and "is there anything I can configure to make it better tailored for my blogging style"?

The answer is - yes, you can! A lot of changes and updates in last year were done with different types of bloggers in mind and we've made sure that you can customize the experience to your liking.

  1. Lets start with accessing the Preferences, where you configure the whole Zemanta experience:
    FirefoxScreenSnapz127
    Clicking on Preferences link that will open a new window that gives you - well, preferences. This works the same for all flavors of Zemanta (plugins, extensions, etc.)
  2. Login / register in Preferences To access most of the options, you need to be logged in into Zemanta. If you haven't registered with Preferences before you'll need to do that now. Do note that you will not be able to login with your blog username and password but you need to register once again for Zemanta.
  3. Three levels of settings in Zemanta: Layout, Personal and My Stuff. We'll go through each one in more detail
    FirefoxScreenSnapz128
  4. Layout - set the way Zemanta integrates into your blog design and the features that we append to it.
    FirefoxScreenSnapz129
    • Image position - here you can set the way we align the images by default
    • HTML Code Style is a specific setting for bloggers that would like more control over their HTML so Zemanta doesn't insert so many compatibility tags and styles. Use this if you know your XHTML and CSS kung-fu.
    • Semantic tagging - this is part of our recently announced CommonTag standard.
    • Signature Image - decide on the style of Zemanta signaure or even turn it off.
  5. Personal
    FirefoxScreenSnapz130
    • About you - here you can set your blog and if you want to receive our monthly newsletter and release notes. Adding your blog will allow us to start aggregating it and recommending you your old content.
    • Affiliate is very interesting as it allows you to make money by blogging with Zemanta and adding your own Amazon affiliate.
  6. My Stuff

    This is the biggest part of personalization as you can link your social network accounts and tell Zemanta to aggregate from these sources.

    FirefoxScreenSnapz131
    • Images - right now we can recommend you images from Flickr. The only limitations is that you have to reasonably tag them or use manual search to locate them, if we don't automatically understand your tags.
    • Friends and other content - tell us who are your friends on different social networks and we'll recommend links to their pages and profiles if mention them in your blog posts or emails. We can also recommend you articles from their blogs.
  7. Continue writing

    After you customized Zemanta, there is nothing else to do in Preferences. Close the preferences and continue blogging and writing emails. Zemanta will automatically take all your new settings into account and provide you with more personally tailored recommendations.

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Under the hood

Can I use Zemanta on unsupported platform?

At the moment Zemanta Browser extension natively supports: Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, Drupal, Tumblr, Gmail and Y!Mail (and Joomla via 3rd party plugin). But what if you're blogging on a platform that we don't directly support?

There are a number of approaches that you can take:

Use Zemanta plugin for Windows Live Writer

WLW is a very good and popular blogging application. We have a plugin for it, so you can just use WLW to publish your blog posts. It supports essentially all blogging platforms that support remote publishing.

Zemanta 0.50 for Live Writer

Use ScribeFire Firefox extension

ScribeFire is a blog publishing extension that is integrated directly into your Firefox. Same as with WLW, it uses XML-RPC to publish to your blog. It supports Zemanta out of the box, so there is no need to install or configure anything else.

Post to your blog from GMail or Y!Mail

You can also use our mail integration to draft your blog post, enhance it and just publish it via email. This is how some bloggers are using Zemanta to publish to Posterous.

Let your blog provider know you want Zemanta

We have a very easy developer API that allows any blogging provider to quickly integrate Zemanta into their offering, if they wish to. Let them know that you want it and we'll do our best to help them bring it to your favorite dashboard.

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How Zemanta works?

We've been getting a lot of new users lately and as many of you are also new to blogging, I've decided to write a quick tutorial on how Zemanta works so you have better understanding of how it will affect your blog.

To start with, Zemanta is a tool for writers, so all the magic happens while you create your blog post. It's important to note that Zemanta works best when you just write your blog post as you would normally do. No need to do any special searches, or to type keywords. We're not a search engine and the way the tools is designed is to quietly watch your post as it progresses and provide recommendations based on that.

howzemantaworks1

Once you've written enough text so our servers can analyze it properly, we'll update Zemanta Widget with recommendations. Basic idea of Zemanta is to leave all editorial decisions to writer. Just click on things that you like and feel comfortable with having in your blog post. Zemanta never inserts content into your blog post if you don't actively select it by either clicking on the recommendation or drag and dropping the image into the blog post.

After you tell Zemanta that you want a recommendation to become part of your blog post, we add it to it. To do that we modify the markup code of the blog post itself, that's called HTML.

howzemantaworks2

This has a couple of positive effects on your blog post:

  • There is no extra code that you need to add to your blog to ensure that it's visible to your readers.
  • It's also displayed in your RSS feed making it accessible to your whole audience of readers.
  • It's visible to search engines, giving you SEO advantage as you have a well linked and multimedia-rich blog post.
  • It's going to be always there. Removing Zemanta will not break your blog posts in any way.

The last point is an interesting one. Putting the content directly into your blog post, means that if you decide to remove Zemanta for some reason, even temporarily, it won't affect how your blog posts look. But it also means that we can't change anything in your old posts once they get published. So new additions to our tool will not change your old posts.

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Examples

Social media expert?

Blogging is a social activity where in addition to writing down our thoughts, we also need to reference others, connect people together and of course, figure out how to get in contact with other like-minded people.

Zemanta can help you with this process in different ways:

  • Related articles while writing allow you see who else is writing within your field.
  • Automatic recognition of your friends on different social networks and their feeds allows you to easily connect to their stories.

Lets take a look at them in more detail:

1. Related articles

While our feed readers are already full of different interesting blog posts, it's always a challenge to find that exact post on the topic you're writing. While Google can sometimes help, there's something better than just keyword search - full text comparison. Zemanta brings you related stories from all over the web while also notifying that the story was written by someone who you follow.

Zemanta Related Articles

As shown on screen shot, this makes it really easy to identify posts coming from your network of friends. As with all the recommendations, these are also fully option so you get to keep full editorial control over your blog post.

2. Automatic friend recognition

It's easier for everyone if you can show someone's face or at least the avatar by which their online profiles are known. Zemanta makes this easier with direct integration with Twitter, Facebook and MyBlogLog:

zemanta social network preferences

this then allows you to quickly link to your friends or even integrate their avatars, to help others recognize and follow them:

or just link their nick name's exactly where you want:

Zemanta social linking

Why loose time with finding URL's and copying them around?

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Movie blogger?

Nowadays we spend a lot of time watching different types of video, from movies in cinema to TV series and DVD releases. As such it isn't surprising that the field attracts many passionate bloggers who share their educated opinions on each release.

Zemanta provides support for movie blogging and with this complements Music Bloggers blogging helpers and Book Bloggers blogging helpers.

Specific optimizations for movie blogging with Zemanta:

  • Integration of IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes for link recommendations
  • Support for Amazon.com links and images of DVD covers
  • Automatic recognition of celebrities and linking to their Wikipedia page, IMDB profile or homepage.
  • Licensed celebrity photos from Getty Images (via DayLife), Flickr and Wikipedia.
  • Automatic tagging of blog posts with name of the movie/TV series and celebrities mentioned
  • Related articles from a selection of best movie and TV series blogs

How does it work?

1. Install Zemanta for free from http://www.zemanta.com/download . Zemanta supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveWriter, ScribeFire, Gmail and most other popular platforms.

2. Log-in into your blog platform and start writing, you’ll see an extra widget right-side to your text editor, where recommendations will appear:

Zemanta movie recommendations

I'll use a short text about Iron Man movie to show you the usefulness of Zemanta.

1. Images and multimedia

Zemanta image recommendations

Zemanta investigates your content, while you write, figures out which movie(s), persons on concepts your writing about and locates the best supporting multimedia content for it. As such it will find photos of actors, DVD boxes, shots from the movie or the shooting locations as well as concept art. Inserting multiple images into blog post is easy - you just drag and drop them where you want to place them in the text.

We take Copyright seriously, so each image has a clear license information as well as link to original source. Images that we are recommend are blogger friendly and we automatically insert proper attribution.

2. Easy linking

Zemanta features single-click linking. We figure figure out which people and terms are important in the text and show you link recommendations below the writing area. You just have to click on the default option or find alternative one from the drop-down menu and the link is going to become part of the text.

We provide links to IMDB, Amazon.com, Rotten Tomatoes, Last.fm, Homepages, Wikipedia and many more.

Links for an article about a movie

3. Articles

Zemanta article recommendations

Zemanta indexes a wide selection of best blogs and review sites on the Internet and automatically shows you related articles from these web sites. You just have to click on them to have them inserted into your blog posts.

Linking to other sites has a number of positive effects on your blog:

  • provides additional reading and establishes you as a connecting spot in addition to information source
  • generates trackbacks to other blogs, notifying their readers and owners of your site - more promotion for you
  • allow search engines to give better context to your blog post as it's now connected to series of other sites with similar theme

You can also add your own feeds and blogs to match only the sites you're trusting as well as your friends blogs and feeds.

4. Tags

Adding good meta-data to your blogs with tags is a good practice, but something that we all find annoying as it takes even more typing and thinking.

Zemanta removes this hard work by providing single click recommendations for tags. Just click on them and they'll be added to tag input field. Just a few clicks and you'll provide an important SEO aspect of your blog.

Zemanta tag recommendations

5. Make money with Zemanta

All Amazon.com links and images can include your affiliate code so you'll earn money when your readers buy things from Amazon.com.

Conclusion

It takes just a few clicks to enhance your blog post as well as to insert affiliate code to your blog post. Zemanta is a free download and supports most blogging platforms and editors.

Blog post enhanced with Zemanta

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Business blogger?

Internet is a wast and resourceful place that provides us with new services everyday. While we might give a lot of attention to the applications from bigger vendors, it's the startups that bring the new innovative solutions that make our everyday easier and provide exciting ideas of where we're going. One of the biggest issues for startup, besides providing exceptional product or service, is getting the word out. Bringing the people to try the service and provide them with valuable feedback.

Blogging about startups and new things is one of the important pillars of blogging verticals and today I'm going to show you how to quickly blog about a new startup that you've just discovered.

Zemanta's Startup Blogging Support comes from:

  • CrunchBase database integration - premier resource of startups, their founders and investors.
  • Tracking popular news sources - we follow most of startup blogs, so you can easily refer to them and provide additional reading for your visitors
  • FlickR as an image sharing service that provides a lot of screenshots, for the days you don't feel like making your own.
  • Additional images also come from CrunchBase image collection.
  • Tags are automatically calculated based on what other bloggers think the story about this startup should be tagged with and from  your writing.

Example

There's nothing better then observing a enhancement of a blog post, so I'm going to pitch in for fellow startup Heyzap.

We'll start with a simple text, that in published form looks like:

Heyzap text without enhancements

While it gets it point across, it doesn't provide much of visual stimuli or provide additional value to the reader beside the actual content of the text.

Now let's use Zemanta to enhance it:

Zemanta enhancing process

With a few single clicks we transformed original piece of text into a full fledged blog post that has everything one expects from dedicated bloggers: image, links, tags and related reading.

Lets take a look how the same blog post looks in a published state now:

Enhanced HeyZap text

We've added all the relevant information to our blog posts allowing our users to easily check them out, as well as to read more in-depth reviews from other places on the web. We've linked two stories: one that deals with the startup and another one that provides useful Firefox extension to the ones that would be interested in their service.

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Food blogger?

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how Zemanta can help you write a great blog about your favorite dish in 4 easy steps.

1. Hyperlinks

We need a piece of sample text to begin with:

An article in the health section of the BBC™s website stated that the popular Indian dish chicken tikka masala with pilau rice typically contains around 47g of fat, while a similar Thai food choice, stir fried chicken with plain steamed rice (phad khing hai) has just 13g of fat of which only 3g is saturated fat. The difference is striking, and the more dishes one compares, the greater the contrast one sees between the two cuisines so far as healthy eating considerations are concerned.
from Thai Food for Health

When we run it through Zemanta, it picks up the most importants the concepts for the text:

For this article, we'll use:

  • chicken tikka masala
  • Indian dish
  • pilau rice

To apply them to your text and provide your readers in-depth information, if needed, just click on them and they're going to get automatically hyperlink the words they describe.

Now our text looks like this:

An article in the health section of the BBC’s website stated that the popular Indian dish chicken tikka masala with pilau rice typically contains around 47g of fat, while a similar Thai food choice, stir fried chicken with plain steamed rice (phad khing hai) has just 13g of fat of which only 3g is saturated fat. The difference is striking, and the more dishes one compares, the greater the contrast one sees between the two cuisines so far as healthy eating considerations are concerned.
You might have noticed that we didn't hyperlink the "phad khing hai" text. That's because it doesn't seem to mean much as Googling around for it doesn't reveal any helpful hints and as such Zemanta can't recommend anything meaningful to link it to.

2. Images

Zemanta recommendations

Second step in making our blog post nicer to our readers is inclusion of images. Visual elements make it easier for people to decide if the article they're about to read warrants their attention and if you they should continue with their reading.

Looking at the recommendations we get, there is a number of pictures of chicken tikka masala, allowing us to choose the one we like the most:

Chicken Tikka Masala and Naan

To insert image where we want it in the text, we can just drag and drop it towards the location where we'd like it to be.

3. Related reading from the web

There are two main types of readers your blog will receive:

  • regular readers that follow your blog either through feeds or direct visits
  • random readers that arrive through various search engines

Both of these audiences can benefit from adding additional reading at the end of your blog post:

  • regular readers can learn more and find more in-depth information from other similar blogs. You then become a good source of additional reading in addition to having a good blog in a first place.
  • random readers will be able to click-through to the other blogs, if they don't find something on your blog, but will still be happy as you provided them with something of value. This increases the chance of the returning to your blog and also clicking on search result with your blog it next time they search for something that you've covered.

For our example text, I used Filter for "chicken tikka masala" to find more articles dealing with this dish. Two most interesting results are:

Related articles by Zemanta

that talk about how "chicken tikka masala" is becoming UK's national dish and the experience with cooking it at home.

4. Tags

Tagging your content allows you to better define your own content for later browsing and als gives important meta information about it to different search engines providing an important SEO benefit.

Most of the tags that are recommended are directly useful for this purpose:

We're leaving out Home as it's too general and BBC as it's a byproduct of quote.

5. Conclusion

Applying all these steps gets us a rich blog that should make anyone hungry. All the additional recommendations took seconds to apply as Zemanta automatically found them.

Zemanta on Food blog

There's no excuse anymore, why your blog can't have beautiful additional content.

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Music blogger?

Zemanta is a free blogging add-on that recommends you content while you write. This case study presents how bloggers who blog or mention musicians and their albums in their blog posts can increase fidelity of their posts as well as easily add affiliate codes for Amazon.com.

Benefits of using Zemanta while blogging about music and artists:

  • We can recommend links and images for over 1,1 million Albums, Artists and Record Labels
  • Automatic link recommendation to Artist Home pages and Wikipedia entries
  • Amazon.com integration - linking to CD listing and one click cover inclusion in your blog
  • Amazon.com affiliate support
  • Automatically find other similar blog posts

How does it work?

1. Install Zemanta for free from http://www.zemanta.com/download . Zemanta supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveWriter and 7 other platforms.

2. Log-in into your blog platform and start writing, you'll see an extra widget right-side to your text editor, where recommendations will appear:

Zemanta recommending content for Supergrass

3. Start writing. Lets say you want to talk about an album by Smartgress:

Today I decided to listen to album Diamond Hoo Ha from Supergrass. They're an English alternative rock band from Oxford and have been on the scene from 1993.
You just enter it into your blog and recommendations in above screenshot will appear.

4. Clicking on them will automatically make them part of your blog post:

Applied recommendations

5. After publish, you'll have a blog post with hyperlinks, articles to others writing about the same album or artist. Besides album covers you'll also get images of artists from different public appearances like interviews or concerts.

Published blog with Zemanta recommendations

6. (Optional). You can also set you own Amazon.com affiliate ID for all recommended links and covers (covers are hyperlinked to their Amazon.com CD)

Zemanta.com Amazon affiliate setting

Related articles to connect to other blogs

While you write your post, Zemanta finds related articles to your blog posts. This means that we'll find reviews from other bloggers, blog posts from musicians and others who are fans or somehow involved with the artist you're talking about.

For Music, Zemanta is tracking over 1000 different music related blogs as well as pages and blogs of artists.

On top of that, bloggers can also setup their own list of blogs to follow and we'll make sure to recommend posts from there. This way it's really easy to link to reviews of your friends, without having to search all of their blogs.

Related articles in Zemanta as chosen by blogger

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Books blogger?

Zemanta is a free blogging add-on that recommends you content while you write. This case study presents how bloggers who mention books in their blog posts can increase fidelity of their posts as well as easily add affiliate codes for Amazon.com.

Benefits while blogging about books and their authors:

  • We can recommend over 1.1 million books
  • Recognition and automatic linking to writer's Wikipedia page and homepage (when known)
  • Amazon.com integration - linking to Amazon.com listing for book and inclusion of book cover
  • Amazon.com affiliate support
  • Related articles from a wide selection of book bloggers

How does it work?

1. Install Zemanta for free from http://www.zemanta.com/download . Zemanta supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveWriter and 7 other platforms.

2. Log-in into your blog platform and start writing, you'll see an extra widget right-side to your text editor, where recommendations will appear:

Zemanta recommendations for Yann Martel - Life of Pi

3. Start writing. Lets say you want to talk about a novel about Yann Martel:

This week, I've decided to pick up a book called Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It's a wonderful story about a boy stranded on a raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
You just enter it into your blog and recommendations will appear:

Zemanta recommendations for Yann Martel - Life of Pi

4. Clicking on them will automatically make them part of your blog post:

Applied Zemanta recommendations

5. After publish, you'll have a blog post with hyperlinks, articles to others writing about same book and image cover. If you want you can also insert multiple images, so you can start the review with book cover and finish with image of author.

Published blog with Zemanta recommendations

6. Optionally you can also set up your Amazon.co affiliate account in Preferences. Then all the Amazon links and covers will automatically include it in the link.

Zemanta Amazon.com Affiliate ID

Related articles to connect to other blogs

While you write your review, Zemanta finds related articles to your blog posts. This means that we'll find reviews from other bloggers, blog posts from their publishers and often also from the book author. Of course they need to blog, so we can find them. Zemanta is already tracking more than 500 book bloggers and more than 300 authors blogs.

On top of that, bloggers can also setup their own list of blogs to follow and we'll make sure to recommend posts from there. This way it's really easy to link to reviews of your friends, without having to search all of their blogs.

Example of related articles for Life of Pi review

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Using Zemanta with Posterous
Image representing Posterous as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase
Blogs are a big field with a wide variety of different ways of expressing your thoughts and ideas. Recently a new service came sweeping the internet - Posterous. They have a great tagline - "Posterous - The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email". Soon after their launch, a few of you asked us how to use Zemanta to enhance your Posterous posts? It turns out that their service is perfect companion to our recent GMail and Y!Mail releases. To enhance your Posterous post, just use Zemanta for Web Mail and post such blog to post@posterous.com email address. The end result is a colorful post with your thoughs, e.g.: Zemanta and Posterous one of the most active Posterous + Zemanta users is @tacanderson who's nicely mashing Posterous, Zemanta and Google Alterts: @tacanderson mashes Posterous and Zemanta Take a look at his Posterous blog and and leave a comment if you like it. Are you mashing Zemanta with Posterous or any other service? Link to it in the comments!

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Wine blogger?

Blogging is a perfect written medium to talk about Wines as there are so many different tastes and regional wineries that it's best described by local wine experts and wine lovers. Each blog contributes important opinion on experience of enjoying wine and food as well as environment in which it was tasted.

While having a good glass of wine is enjoyable experience, blogging about it is often something we can all wish it would be easier. That's why Zemanta developed a tool to help you with most annoying tasks - linking of important terms, finding images and connecting with like minded bloggers with good SEO tags on top so your post can be discovered more easily.

To get a quick idea how Zemanta can improve your blog post, take a look at the following screenshot:

FirefoxScreenSnapz081

The main features that can help you with your wine blogging are:

  • Powerful integration with Snooth for information on wineries and wines together with the labels and homepage
  • Automatic recommendation of links to Snooth, Homepages of wineries, Wikipedia, Google Maps and other resources.
  • Related articles from your own list of blogs and from selection of best sources on the internet
  • SEO optimized tags that you can apply with a single click and make organizing your content even easier

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Anything else

Can I make money with blogging?

One of the bloggers dreams is also to make money by blogging. Maybe not a fortune, but some pocket money would still be nice for long hours we put into creating content and sharing our knowledge and experience.

Zemanta offers two main ways for monetizing your blog: built in affiliate and by increasing traffic.

Built in affiliate

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Zemanta offers direct integration with your Amazon.com Associates Account. By including items that are sold on Amazon in your blog, you're earning commission from what your readers are buying, after they follow your links.

How it works:

1. Setup your Affiliate ID in Zemanta Preferences. That way we'll know how to create special hyperlinks that Amazon needs to know who to give money to.

[caption id="attachment_452" align="alignnone" width="477" caption="Zemanta Amazon.com affiliate"]Zemanta Amazon.com affiliate[/caption]

2. Just blog normally. While writing you'll see Amazon recommendations for your links, they'll look like this, with little Amazon "A" next to it:

When you click on the link, it's going be automatically hyperlinked in your blog and it will include your Amazon Affiliate ID. More-over, Amazon Covers will also have this ID in place, so that a big, clickable image, works directly towards a sale through you blog.

Increasing traffic

More Fast Traffic and City Lights
Image by a.saliga via Flickr

Feeds from partner sites

You can add feeds from your blogs/partner sites and by using "related articles", easily connect them together, thus driving more traffic to them.

Higher reader engagement

By inserting more images and links in your blog, you actually get more click-through on Ads as well as more visitors as your users will return more likely because you have prettier blog.

Broader audience

We regularly add blogs from our users to general recommended articles, this would then recommend it to all Zemanta users, driving even more traffic to your blog.

SEO tags

Better tagged content gives search engines more ways to find you as well as better understanding of your content.

Of course, you can just blog faster which helps you blog more and as a consequence, earn more money :-)

Did you discover any other way how Zemanta helps you make money? Share it in the comments!

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How do I uninstall Zemanta?

This tutorial will explain how to know which version of Zemanta you have installed and how to remove it. Note that removing Zemanta will not remove any of the applied recommendations. You have to manually remove them from your blog posts.

Mozilla Firefox

Look for Zemanta icon in URL bar:

To remove Zemanta from Mozilla Firefox, go to Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions Tab and find Zemanta in the list of extensions:
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You can then disable or uninstall it using appropriate buttons.

Internet Explorer

Look for Zemanta icon in status bar of your browser:

To remove Zemanta from Internet Explorer, go to Start -> Control Panel ->Add/Remove Programs and find Zemanta in the list of installed applications:

You can then uninstall it from there.

Windows Live Writer

To remove Zemanta Plugin from Windows Live Writer, go to Start -> Control Panel ->Add/Remove Programs and find Zemanta in the list of installed applications:

You can then uninstall it from there.

Self-Hosted Wordpress.org

To remove Zemanta Plugin from Wordpress, first disable in your Dashboard: Plugins -> Installed and find Zemanta in list of Plugins:

You can then disable it there. Afterwards you can delete it from your server if you want. It should be in your wp-contents/plugins/ folder.

Drupal

To deactivate your Zemanta Drupal module, disable it in Admin section of your site, under Site Building -> Modules

Movable Type

To deactivate your Zemanta Movable Type plugin, disable it in your Plugins section of page:

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How to use Zemanta in Chrome

Google Chrome is gaining market share and we're getting more and more requests for details on how to get our Zemanta Google Chrome Bookmarklet to work, as not everyone is familiar with how bookmarklets work.

1. To start, go to http://labs.zemanta.com/bookmarklet/ - and click on the Generate button:

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2. Afterwards, grab the generate link and start dragging it:

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3. Drop it into your Bookmarks bar, on top of Chrome window, just below the address bar.

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4. That's it. Now Compose a new blog post or email and Click Add Zemanta button.

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There are a few things that you need to be careful about. "Add Zemanta" only works when you're composing a blog post or email in one of our supported platforms. At the time of writing, these are: Wordpress.com and self-hosted Wordpress.org, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, Drupal, Tumblr, GMail and new Yahoo! Mail.

Zemanta Bookmarklet works with Chrome 5 as well as Safari 5.

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To learn more about Zemanta features and how to get the most out of your blog, visit our FAQ section, topic tutorials, or tips and examples from our power users.


Got more questions? Got feature requests? Drop in on the lively customer forums.

If you can’t find answers here or in the forums, you can always contact support and we’ll get back to you within a few hours.


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