Oliver Wellington from nRelate recently contacted us about a new WordPress plugin that nRelate is developing to help bloggers add value to their existing content and potentially make some money in the process.

Oliver also wanted to know if we would help spread the word about their beta testing program. So we decided to set up and record a conference call with him so he could tell us all about the new related content plugin and give more detail about their beta testing program.

The video and transcript of the call are provided below for you. If you have any questions about the program, be sure to visit the nRelate website for more details.

Can’t see the video? Watch it here.

Charles:
Alright, well welcome back to another Open Source Marketer interview. Open Source Marketer, of course, is your source for information about how to build and market your business online using open source tools.

I’m Charles McKeever and here to help me grill our guest is Toff, aka Christopher Ward. So, today we’re going to be talking with Oliver Wellington from NRelate.com about their beta test program for a new WordPress plugin that suppose to increase the value of your content and potentially help you make some money.

But, before we get in to that I need to give you a little bit of background information about nRelate and Oliver. Basically nRelate is a related content company and their software enables web publishers, including both bloggers and large media sites, to enrich their site content and to increase their relevance to their audience.

Basically they build tools and plugins that let publishers integrate content from their content archives, content of their partners, and even the entire blogosphere which provides better context to their online content. So, overall nRelate’s goal is to help publishers and bloggers get the most out of the articles they are already publishing, which comes back to increasing their content, page views, and the length of visits on the site.

Oliver Wellington, who’s waiting in the wings here to share a good bit of information with us, he started his online career in music. He used social networking sites to promote his band in the early days of MySpace and Pure Volume.

Then, like most struggling artists, he worked for a music management company and produced music videos for a New York film startup. He has his MBA from Babson College. His program focused primarily on entrepreneurship. He joined nRelate last September and he’s been working with the founder to help grow the company.

These days his time is focused on building the blogger community for nRelate along with business development for the company. Today, Oliver’s going to tell us about a new WordPress plugin that nRelate’s developing to help blogger’s provide more value to their readers and hopefully make some money along the way.

So, Oliver I want to thank you for taking out some time to spend with us today.

Oliver:
Yeah, thanks for having me guys.

Charles:
No problem. Now as another piece of background information, Oliver contacted me through our Meetup group and he was looking for a way to get the word our about these plugins that they have and what they’re trying to do with their beta test program. So rather than trying to put together some kind of announcement, I said why don’t we just put you on a call and let you explain it.

So you said nRelate is a “related content” company. So, what exactly does nRelate do?

Oliver:
Basically what we do is index a large portion of the relevant new web, or about 6 million sites. Once we get them in to our index, we basically created a bunch of different products that will allow content to related to other pieces of content on the web. The main thing we are working on right now is a related content widget. So, say a large New York publisher wants to display links to older content, or even if they are publishing a lot next to related articles, it will show up 5 to 10 links to other pieces of content that they’re written from their own site on a given article. If they have partner sites they want to link out to, we can also provide related articles from that. So, the basic thing we do is display related links that allows readers to stay on their site longer, maybe kind of browse through content around a particular topic or story a little more freely than having to search through Google or using the internal site search and that kind of stuff.

Charles:
So when you say related content, does it actually put links in the content, or is just links that are below the article maybe.

Oliver:
Well, actually what we are talking about now is there will be a small box at the bottom of the article or sometimes in the middle of the content. It will say something like “related articles” or “you may also like” or “similar articles”. Then we’ll populate that box with a list of closely related articles. And then we do do some internal linking stuff with customers, which we’ll link relevant keywords to a site search or related articles, or topics pages and that sort of thing. But, generally speaking, for what we are talking about now, it’s located in a separate box and now inside the content itself.

Toff:
So, let’s break it down to a concrete example. For instance, if I’m running a blog for smart energy ideas where I talk about energy efficiency, ways to save, or conserve energy and let’s say I’m talking about solar panels and I write an article on a brand new solar panel. How would nRelate add to, change, or augment something I did on that blog.

Oliver:
So basically, if you want to link to articles that you have written previously. So say you write about alternative energy in general and you write about solar panel and say you also write about wind energy. We need to ingest your entire post, all your content basically, into our engine and then we show you links. Say you are writing, as you said, about solar energy. We show you links that are from another articles you choose. People usually choose between 5 and 10 at the most. So say you had five other articles that you’ve written in your archive, then we could surface those up and you would see links to those alongside in a small box beneath your post.

Toff:
Would you be linking to anybody else’s content, or just my own?

Oliver:
It depends. We started out telling publishers you can link to anyone you want and you can link to the entire blogosphere. But, we’ve found that most people want their visitors to stay on their own site and they are hesitant to link out as much. But, we can set up whitelist lists for people. If they have five or six partners who are also writing about solar energy, we can display content from there. We also go for the full range of available new sources and just link out to any number of sites.

Charles:
Okay.

Toff:
Very nice.

Charles:
Yeah. Okay, there is a revenue element to this, so how exactly does that work?

Oliver:
With the plugin?

Charles:
Yeah.

Oliver:
The one aspect is basically what I’ve been mentioning. Basically, just having the related links gets the reader reading about a particular topic and if they want to learn more, they will probably go straight to Google, but if you show them another related article that you’ve written then you will increase your pageviews and that will help to increase your rates that you get from your own advertising, if you have impression ads on your site.

And then another way is, we are also working with some ad partners who are allowing people to display advertising in the plugin underneath the related links. That’s something we are working on to improve and help bloggers to make some extra money from the space on their site by showing related content. Only if they choose to, of course.

Charles:
Was there an option for the plugin to allow you to add your own advertising. Was that something that I saw?

Oliver:
That is something we are working on. We just released this last week and that’s actually a question a blogger asked. What if I have my own ad code, can I put it in. Our attitude is, yeah it’s your blog, so we are going to work to release that in one of the next releases in the next couple of weeks. Because, we want people to try our plugin and use it. We also want them to be able to use the advertising we are providing, but if they want to use their own, we want them to be able to do that as well.

Charles:
Okay, so basically, to recap we have the related article plugin. Obviously there are some of those out there, but what yours does in addition to that is not only pull related articles from your own site, but it can also pull articles from partner site and it can pull from the blogosphere at large. You can pull from news source, you can pull from other blogs, you can pull from what ever, but you’re basically linking out to related content on these other sites. And, if you wanted to, you will be able to put in your own ads or you can choose to participate in your ad network that you guys are running at nRelate.

Oliver:
Yeah, right now I’d have to say on the bare bones version we have right now, specifying a network of sites to link out to, we don’t have in yet. But that should be in the next week or two. But, yeah you nailed all the features that we’ll be adding in the next couple of weeks. That pretty much sums it up.

Charles:
Okay, so tell me, what type of publishers use your existing products right now.

Oliver:
Right now we basically work with a financial blog that does pretty decent traffic in New York. We are working with them to deliver related content and we are working on a few new products that should be coming out in the next couple of weeks. We’re also being demo’d live on a pretty large newspaper in New York, The New York Daily News. So, in terms of scale you can see a financial blog with a solid following up to a large media site. And then we also we also do some other products for some other sites. We do data aggregation products as well for a couple of other sites that have profile on companies. Basically they have between 20 to 30K profiles for companies, so for each company we provide a news feed.

Charles:
Okay, so would you characterize these as larger media outfits?

Oliver:
Yeah. Well, technically the financial site is a blog. It’s only a handful of people working on it, but it’s not like an individual blogger going out. They are doing it as their full time job. We have been trying to work with bloggers and being that we are a start up, we’ve taken the last couple of months to get to the point where we are ready to start releasing some of our software to bloggers in an easily digestible form.

Charles:
So, is that kind of why now you are approaching the blogger space, is that it?

Oliver:
Yeah basically.

Charles:
I know you have had mentioned specifically building your blogger community.

Oliver:
Yeah, we got in to this space in general because we think the relevancy of the content results we produce is better than the other offerings and we see what other companies are offering to bloggers for related post plugins and we noticed a lot them will put ads on them, but they don’t necessarily share money back with bloggers. So that’s a space we want to get in and give bloggers the best related post software they can and also help us to get our name out a bit more as well.

Charles:
So you mentioned the revenue sharing piece of that, so is that something that is collected by nRelate and then paid back to the bloggers. Is it like an ad network. How does that work?

Oliver:
Basically, right now we are working with a few different ad networks and some affiliate programs, so we are setting that up so it will be through us. We will give each blogger who is of legal age and all that a code allowing them to join the ad community we are building and then we share back revenues to them based on what they choose to put on their site and what the payments are.

Charles:
So someone could join the beta program, install the WordPress plugin, and then not have to do anything else part from their regular operations as far as producing content and things like that.

Oliver:
Yes.

Charles:
Great. They wouldn’t have to fuss with any kind of going out and sourcing ads or starting up affiliate accounts, or managing creatives or stuff like that?

Oliver:
Yeah, basically the way it’s set up it’s just checking a few boxes and then an ad shows up and then if you don’t like it you can just uncheck the boxes and then the ads don’t show up.

Charles:
Okay, as far as set up and things like that, what kind of setup are we talking? Most plugins are just uploaded and activated. Are there settings that have to go into it, you talked about having to have a code?

Oliver:
It’s pretty simple to upload. I’m not actually one of the coders on the team. I pretty good with technical stuff. I’m not by any means at the level that you guys are or most of the other team are, but I can set up this plugin in less than three minutes. It’s as simple as downloading the plugin file and then using the WordPress plugin upload process. It’s pretty quick, and then it’s also quick to delete it if you don’t like it. Just in terms of trying it out, it’s a pretty simple thing.

Charles:
We’re all about open source around here, so is it open source, or closed source, or how does that work?

Oliver:
Basically, the way it works now, the code we have for the widget itself, we are fine with it being open source. The code that actually is going to figure our the results to put in the box is still proprietary. But, as things change, I talked with the founders in charge of tech and he’s going to start releasing some of that as well. But, I don’t know exactly when.

Charles:
Okay, but from the blogger’s perspective, they can get in and tweak the widget if they want and style it to look like their site and things like that?

Oliver:
Oh yeah, definitely. All that stuff is acceptable and encouraged.

Charles:
For most bloggers, it’s less of a property rights issue. It’s more of, my site is blue and that’s orange, I don’t like it. Ha ha.

Toff:
It’s a, “I want to do what I want to do”.

Charles:
Yeah, so I don’t think anybody’s looking to take over somebody else’s stuff. It’s just a matter of if I’m going to integrate it, how does it work and how can I get to it.

Toff:
Along those same lines, can you tell us a little bit about your beta test program?

Oliver:
Right now, basically we’ve got the first iteration of our widget ready. So what we are doing for the first group of people who are going to be beta testing, what they need to do is email me, or go to the website and fill out a form. Basically, I’ll send them back a code and then they install the widget and test it. For the first group of people, we are going to let them keep 100% of revenue that the widget generates for as long as they use it.

Toff:
Very nice.

Oliver:
You know beta testing involves a little bit, we want feedback. People don’t have to give feedback, but we would like to thank the people who do and even the people don’t by just sharing everything.

Charles:
Okay, so you’re truly beta testing. Your not Google beta testing for like 10 years. Your really going to be making improvements and taking feedback.

Oliver:
Yeah, for example, the version we have right now is pretty bare bones, but I’d say in the next week or week and a half. Being in software development, maybe I should just go ahead and say two full weeks. We’ll be including, people will be able to have thumbnails in their results. They’ll be able to specify, as I said before, other sites they want to display related content from. So, I mean we are going to be adding things. So the goal on this is to…we want to beta test as long as we have to until we get to the point where we are comfortable listing the plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. That will signify us being out of the beta testing period.

Toff:
Now, along those same lines again. For the beta program, is this for WordPress users only, or any blogger, or what do you have going?

Oliver:
Well, right now basically we’re focusing on WordPress and we’ve been working with a guy who organizes the New York WordPress Meetup and also has a development company called SlipFire, a great guy named Steve Bruner. He’s been working on this with us and he’s all about WordPress. I personally like WordPress and the more hard coding guys our team likes WordPress. So, we are kind of focusing on WordPress so we don’t do everything at once. But, if there is interest in other platforms then it doesn’t take us to long to customize for those as well.

Toff:
I’m definitely a WordPress person, so that’s not an issue for me.

Oliver:
Yeah, I love WordPress.

Charles:
That’s a great choice really. There are so many of them out there.

Oliver:
Yeah, I mean for me when I first went through setting up a website, I went through cPanel and stuff like that, but it was the only thing out there that was that simple and you could still customize pretty descent amount by just reading some forums. So, I think it’s a great platform.

Charles:
So basically what I hear is that you have a beta test program that people can use to put related listings on their site and you have a revenue model right now that shares back 100% of whatever comes in the door, as far as advertising revenue, and you’re actually actively asking for people’s feedback. So if some were to actually give a suggestion, there’s a pretty good chance that it would be implemented.

Oliver:
Yeah, as long as you all agree that it’s something reasonable. The suggestion for bloggers to include their own ad code, we presented at a meetup and someone got up and said they would want to include their own ad code. That’s a good idea. It’s not like we are trying to shut out everything, we just didn’t think of it.

Charles:
Yeah, obviously not every suggestion can be implemented. But, I’ve seen some beta programs where you feel like you’re on the outside where you feel like you don’t get a voice, but I’ve seen others where the program is very responsive and you can see the progress unfold. It sounds like that’s what you guys are after, being able to have an active conversation with the blogging community.

Oliver:
Yeah definitely. People who write in and email will get a response in a timely fashion and I think a lot of people will actually see their suggestions come to fuition.

Charles:
According to the nRelate website, you said you’re “developing an entire suite of blogger widgets”, I’m quoting here. “That will help you increase your revenues on your blog as well a unique visit and allowing you to define your own content sharing communities.” Tell me about that. What’s up with that?

Oliver:
Okay, in terms of having the revenue it’s basically around the different types of advertising that can be placed in the plugin. Sharing back is one way to help people to increase their revenue. Also, in terms of the content sharing communities, if you can imagine for example, that right now people have their blogrolls. That’s pretty cool I guess, but what we can do with out software is wouldn’t it be cool if you could display content from authors on your blogroll. Instead of just sharing links you’re actually sharing links to timely articles that are related to things your also writing about. So we help people band together in that way. So that’s what we mean about the content sharing stuff. So in terms of the next thing that we will be tackling after we get this thing down, we will be doing a very good internal site search. But that’s probably for a different discussion.

Charles:
Well you know, now the content sharing communities begins to make sense, because there are lots of bloggers who keep in touch with each other behind the scenes. They kinda keep in touch with each other and when they tweet something and say hey I just posted this article, will you retweet it and things like that. It makes sense that these are informal partnerships, where there’s an unwritten rule when you build up credibility so that people will tweet something about you later. So why not tie your content together loosely in a way that allows you to share those visitors. We can’t be all things to all people but we can join together to provide as much value as possible and keep people in our network as much as possible.

Oliver:
Yeah, that’s the thinking behind that aspect.

Charles:
That being said, will the plugins help with getting unique visitors? You had mentioned something about bringing in unique visitors, so can you talk a little about that.

Oliver:
Yeah, for this first version, I can say right now if it’s only internal, it’s not going to help you with your unique visits. It’s only going to help you with your pageviews. But once you allow people to link out and share content across blogs, I think of it as an evolution of link sharing. That just done in many ways to help drive traffic between sites and creates uniques across a network of sites.

Charles:
Gottcha. Again, it’s a traffic sharing mechanism.

I know this isn’t necessarily the plugin your releasing under the beta program, but I noticed under your other products that you had on the nRelate site, you had a popup search box, popup related content, and things like that. Are you going to roll out those plugins as well?

Oliver:
If there is enough demand for those types of things we would be happy to make a WordPress version of them. It’s not that much work. It’s just being a small company, we only have so much bandwidth. That’s basically a place where we could draw ideas from for future things.

I really want to try and creatively figure out with bloggers if there is anything based on the things you just mentioned, if there are things we can put together for them.

Charles:
Okay, that’s definitely interesting. Toff, did you have any questions that you wanted to ask.

Toff:
No, I’m ready to go sign up.

Charles:
Yeah, I’m very interested in the community aspect of things. Being able to hook related sites together. You could just as easily pull in links from other news sources and things like that but what if you had three related sites and you wanted to share traffic across those three sites. Maybe one of your sites is killing it with the keywords, but the other two are just feeder sites. As long as the content is unique across each site, there’s not reason to loose that traffic to something else.

Is there anything Oliver that you want to leave us with.

Oliver:
Basically, I just want to say thanks for having me. If people want to sign up the can email me at blogger @ nrelate.com or visit the website, nRelate.com/blog.php and also I set up a small forum at nRelate.com/forum. So those basically the three ways to get in touch and I want to say thanks again for having me.

Charles:
Well hey thanks for taking the time out to share the program with us. I appreciate you reaching out and contacting us.

That’s it for the interview. Now, go check out the nRelate plugin and then tell us what you think about the plugin and the experience of beta testing a new product.

Beta testing everything,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

A good example of how this might work limiting ads to relevant pages. Let’s say you have a banner ad that you’d like to display to promote a product, but you only want that ad to show on one post. By default, WordPress widgets don’t provide a way for you to limit where they are shown. After a widget is placed in the sidebar, it’s just there. You can move it up or down, but it’s still going to be displayed across the entire site.

Using a few simple plug-ins, you can not only control where widgets appear, but you can also rotate ads in those spots. below is a video that walks you through the process of adding two widgets to your WordPress blog. Those two widgets are data feed or random ads and widget logic. Watch how these two plug-ins help you to control where you’re ads display and how much ad space you can get from a single ad spot.

How to make WordPress widgets show only on selected pages and posts

Is you know of another way to do the same thing, leave a comment and let me know.

Charles McKeever
Open Source Marketer

Accelerate your business online using social media.

How It Works

So let’s say that you’re getting a lot of StumbleUpon traffic and you want to show a custom greeting that prompts the stumbler to subscribe to your rss feed or opt-in to your newsletter then you can do that. You might try to catch their attention with, “Glad you stumbled upon my blog. Stumble me so you’ll be able to show me to your friends later!”. Each referrer message can be custom designed to gain attention by individual traffic source. You can even add links and pictures to be as creative as you like.

By default WP Greet Box comes with a butt load (yes, I said a butt load) of preset referrer messages so all you have to do is upload and activate the plugin to get started. It also does automatic code insertion into your WordPress template so you don’t have to mess with the code if you don’t want to. There is a manual code insertion option for anyone who wants to tweak the message placement, but it’s an option that can be turned on or off in the plugin’s admin settings.

If you want to show a visitor message to a custom referrer, like from the blog of a fellow blogger, then you can create that as well. This would be a good idea for cross promotion or grabbing the attention of visitors who end up on your site as the result of clicking a link on another site.

Think Creatively

The best way to use this plugin is to be creative. Think about what will grab the visitors attention and what will encourage them to take the action you are promoting. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

• Giving them what they expect to see may invoke confidence. If your visitor identifies with a certain seal or logo and that would help them connect with you in some way, then give them what they expect to see.
• Giving visitors what they don’t expect to see may grab their attention as well. If visitors don’t expect to see a message welcoming them from Google and suggesting related blog posts by keyword, then show it to them and get their attention.
• Use reputation transference to your advantage. If a well known or well liked blog links to you then be sure to welcome the visitors when they arrive at your site and let them know you have more of what they are looking for when they subscribe to your rss feed.
• Use the plugin as a tool to deflect negative PR. You could even puposely attract attention by writing a post that’s on the fringe and then show a balancing message when the visitor arrives from a link blog review. I know this might seem a little deceptive, but the idea is to be creative. WP Greet Box can convert your blog from a stateless, one size fits all, blog into a dynamic tool that delivers an intentional message that is directed to a specific audience.
• Give special offers to certain types of visitors. Let’s say you know that you get a lot of Google traffic, but the traffic that really converts well is Yahoo traffic. Imagine you really want Yahoo visitors to sign up for your newsletter. In fact, you’re willing to offer them something you wouldn’t offer to any other type of visitor. Well, with WP Greet Box you can do just that. Now you are able to only offer incentives to certain types of visitors without doing a lot of complicated programming.

Those are just a few of the ideas that came to me as I was writing this post. How would you use the plugin? Do you have suggestions that you think would work better? Leave your suggestions in the comments and let’s see what this plugin can really do.

I guarantee you, Wp Greet Box plugin will save you hours of time and headache. And best of all, Thaya gives fantastic plugin support. I left several questions on his blog and he answered each of them within what seemed like minutes. Thaya is doing an awesome job with this plugin and his blog has lots of creative ideas. So go now, download the plugin.

So what kind of custom message would you use?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com