Thank you for trying out ArticleSuggestion!
In this post, we’d like to introduce the first steps, that you will need to take if you’d like to install ArticleSuggestion on your site.
You’ll have to complete three tasks before our recommendation could appear on your site. These are the following:
- You’ll need to create recommendation boxes in our application
- Decide what kind of articles will fill the boxes
- And add our script to your website
In the next three paragraphs, we are going to summerize what you need to know about each of these steps and show you where you can find additional information about the different tasks.
Creating boxes
Our boxes could appear below or next to your posts. They could contain one or several articles' links, titles, descriptions, and pictures.
When you start to use our system, at first you will have to decide how many different boxes you will install on your site.
If every web page on your site has a similar layout, using only one box could be enough.
But if your web pages’ appearance differ, you’d like to recommend distinct articles on the different areas of your site, or you’d like to overview the performance of your boxes in separate statistics, create different elements!
After setting up a few basic details, you can completely personalize the appearance of our recommendation boxes.
We only need a title and an URL to recommend an article, so if you’d like, you can also display recommendations without pictures or descriptions.
Uploading content
You can send the articles that you wish to recommend on your site to our system three ways.
If you’d only like to suggest a few dozens of posts to your readers, you can simply paste their URLs into our web app.
As with hundreds or thousands of posts adding URLs one by one would be rather time-consuming, you can also use your RSS feeds or the Article Suggestion API to transfer the required information to us.
ArticleSuggestion selects the recommended posts from your newest and most popular content. If one of your visitors clicks on an article’s link in our boxes, that suggestion won’t appear again for that visitor.
Besides automatically selecting posts, that your visitors are most likely to click on, our system also allows you to define which articles we can recommend on certain areas of your site.
You can also change or replace the titles, descriptions and the pictures in our boxes.
Adding our script to your website
Once you’re finished with setting up boxes and adding URLs there’s only one thing that you will need to do.
You’ll have to paste the ArticleSuggestion code to those pages of your sites, where you would like to display our recommendations.
- And what will you achieve by going through these steps?
According to our experiences, visitors spend a longer time and read more posts on the websites, that use ArticleSuggestion.
A few weeks after installation you are probably also going observe positive changes in your visitors reading habits.