Anyone familiar with Wordpress knows about the Related Posts feature as part of JetPack. This places 3 links to other posts you have written with similar content just below each post on WP and it does a pretty good job of it. I think Blogger has a similar function.
It took many months, but what I noticed, over time on WP is that visitors, often helicoptering in from search engines, would actually use the Related Posts to explore deeper and read more posts on my blog, which is what I wanted.
I knew I would be giving that up when I moved to Micro.blog which does not have a Related Posts option. (For good reason, to do Related Posts right and make them relevant takes quite a bit of programming and overhead and it’s not vital to the MB service in the way editing templates or categories are.) But I started wondering if there was a third party hosted service that would do it and discovered two that are not just Wordpress plugins, but usable on most websites.
Disclaimer: At this moment, I don’t know if either of these “free” services insert ads or whatever
I have signed up for Add This and installed the JS code on my Micro.blog hosted blog. Three types of code were available for an HTML site:
You install the unique JS code just like I installed the Comment Code in the template.
Once you install the custom code on your template you need to manually bring up individual blog posts. As near as I can tell this calls in AddThis which scrapes the page and adds that page to it’s list of your pages. Per AddThis: it takes about 24 - 48 hours for related posts to show up.
As I write this, I’m less than 24 hours into it so it’s too early to know anything.
Some observations:
That is going to take a few weeks of testing. I don’t think it will hurt. Since it appears in the footer it is quite far down on the page. I will let you know as I experiment.
If anyone else decides to experiment with either of these services please let me know! Thanks.