You may have seen related posts below blog posts and articles. Related posts widget is a great way to engage blog readers on your blog. As you can see, I have implemented this type of widget below my blogs posts. I have seen increase in the overall pageviews for my blog because of this widget. There are three leading services which offer related posts. In this blog post, I am going to talk about these three related posts widgets and which is better than the others.
Linkwtihin, Outbrain and nrelate make it easy to show related posts below the articles on a website or blog. I saw the Alexa rank of the websites of these three services to compare their overall presence on internet. I observed that Linkwithin is constantly losing its position to Outbrain and nrelate. There is one important reason behind that. Customization options for Linkwithin widget are very limited. You can only decide the number of related posts that appear below the post and the colour of your widget. Besides that, you can not track the statistics for the widget. But you can customize your widget and track its performance in Outbrain and nrelate.
Outbrain has seemed to be the most popular service for related posts, but personally, I do not have a good experience with its service. I failed to add my blog to my Outbrain account, even though I had tried several times. Outbrain gives us the option to show advertisements, but only to donate all the money to some charity. Outbrain offers less customization options than nrelate. I do not know why Outbrain has this higher Alexa rank. But my choice for related posts service is nrelate.
nrelate Related Posts Widget
nrelate offers important settings to customize related posts widget. Following are some customization settings for nrelate content box.
- Thumbnail View, Thumbnail size and styles.
- Title for related content box.
- Post title and Post excerpt.
- Advertising settings.
If you like Linkwithin style to show related posts, then you can show related posts by nrelate in the style of Linkwithin. nrelate made it very easy to customize the widget. You can decide whether you want to show this widget on the homepage or not. You can limit its appearance only for article pages. You can track the performance of your widget. You can see how many people clicked on related posts and advertisements. nrelate gives you the chance to earn money by showing related posts below articles. You receive your payment via Paypal.
Default nrelate Widget Example
It is easy to install nrelate. This is the best related posts service that I have seen so far. nrelate even gives you the freedom to hide nrelate branding form the widget. If you are looking for customizable related posts widget, then you should definitely go for nrelate. You can add nrelate Plugin for WordPress. It is also very easy to install nrelate in Blogger, Tumblr or any other website.
