When thinking of how to keep your website fresh, don’t underestimate the value of evergreen content, especially in a world where the pace of consumption moves as fast as it does.
Our team has done an incredible job at making the best tools to help you maximize engagement on your website, meet your specific needs, and match your design aesthetic. One question we’ve been starting to get of late is “What tools should I be using?”
Today we released an upgraded Recommended Content Drawer based on feedback from our Pro subscribers. See it in action by mousing over the arrow you see here to the right, and it’ll reveal articles with big bold images in the background. Nice right? Continue reading →
Website owners are always looking for ways to bring in new visitors, keep them on their website, and turn them into fans or followers.
There are a lot of ways to approach content recommendations. These tools have developed significantly over time, but here’s how our Related Posts are different. We find the right personalized content recommendations for your visitors to help you meet your engagement goals.
1. Most Popular Content
The first widgets for content recommendations mostly showed the most popular content. They determined what was interesting based on which articles were most viewed, had the most comments, or were the most shared.
This was a good start. But the most popular content on a website might not change very much from day to day, which isn’t great for returning visitors. These recommendations might also not have anything to do with the current article, so the visitor might not be interested in that topic.
2. Adding Context
The next wave of content recommendation tools added contextual information. That means they started looking into the content of the articles to make a recommendation that’s similar to the page a visitor’s currently viewing.
Combining contextual information with popularity starts to make for more interesting content recommendations. However, they still aren’t likely to change very much. Additionally, they’re likely to keep recommending the same content, even if people don’t interact with it.
3. Understanding Behavior
More recently, some content recommendation tools are starting to learn from what people click on. This allows the recommendations to learn which articles are relevant and which pages they should be displayed on.
This is a major leap forward. But there’s still room for improvement. That’s because these tools still aren’t tailored to specific visitors, and so they aren’t as relevant as they could be.
4. Personalized Recommendations
The best way to recommend content for a particular visitor is to personalize content for them based on their interests (or the interests of people like them). That’s what AddThis Related Posts do.
We use all of the aforementioned methods and use data from across our publisher network to continuously improve which content recommendations work and for whom.
Content recommendation tools like Related Posts are also advantageous because they can personalize suggestions on the first visit! This enables you to show visitors more relevant content sooner.
Getting more traffic is a big investment for website owners but they sometimes miss an effective method of getting there. Content recommendation widgets can maximize paid media strategies to get more followers and more pageviews to your website.
You’re ready to make your site social this year, and you just created your AddThis account. (YAY!) But now you’re trying to figure out where to put those share buttons and which buttons to add. There’s so much to choose from, and you don’t have time to figure it all out. We want to help. Here are 8 tips that’ll help you get the most out of your AddThis tools.
Today, we’re democratizing awesomeness with the next generation of web tools. AddThis Smart Layers includes Share, Follow, Recommended Content and What’s Next tools all in one line of code. We’re bringing data and responsive technology together for publishers of all sizes in ways that have generally only been available to resource-heavy companies like Yahoo! or Amazon.