If you’re looking for an awesome related posts widget that includes customizable thumbnail pictures for your blogger blog, read on! I was researching all day on how to get a professional looking widget to help my readers. It seemed EVERY article I read was about adding code to your HTML and screwing around with it. I was so tired of having to save and backup my templates because none of them worked. Finally I stumbled across a website that had reviewed nRelate.com. Needless to say, if you look below this post you will see my beautiful related posts, finally!! 🙂
Here’s an example on a Christmas craft post I made…as you can see it came up with 5 related topics. This has helped increase my internal blog traffic. Even I am surprised by what comes up on some posts because I had forgotten I had written it! This is powerful for upbringing old dusty articles.
How to Install the Related Posts Widget on Blogger
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- You will first need to create an account at nRelate.com. Pick a username, password, and type in a valid email address.
- You will need to confirm a link sent to your email to start.
- Login to your account.
4. Up at the top of the website, click “Install“
5. Next, choose which platform you want to install it on (obviously choose Blogger, the orange icon)
6. Enter the website URL that you want to put the related posts widget on and click Submit.
7. Choose which widget you want to install. Posts Only, Posts and Homepage, or All Pages. Personally, I prefer the posts only just because it’s more personalized to your readers. If you have it on your homepage it can get kind of distracting, plus it may bog down your page loading time.
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8. Select the blog that you want to add it to and click “Add Widget” this will transfer you to your blog’s layout page. As you can see, you will find the widget “nRelate Posts Only” on your layout (unless you changed the widgets name.) Now you can move it right underneath the posts area.
9. Next is the lame part of the process…to WAIT, unfortunately. nRelate needs time to index all your pages to get the keywords ready. It could take up 20 minutes to 2 days depending on how many article posts you have. (I had 1,819 posts and it took about 35 minutes to show up on my blog).
Customizing Your Related Posts Widget For Blogger
This is the fun part! There are so many options that you can play around with! Once you are logged in at nRelate.com, on the top banner click “Settings.” You will then see your website to click on.
The first thing you will see is the Main Settings. Here you can choose the thumbnail size, the title of the related content box, the maximum number of posts to show, how far back you’d like your archive to go, etc.
 I want to point out that you get to choose how relevant you want the results to be. Low is recommended and I am sticking with that. I tried Medium but most posts didn’t show very much so it all depends on how close your niche topics are. On the down side, if you look at the widgets below this post, random articles come up that have NOTHING to do with this…you’ll have to decide.
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At first your related posts will show nRelates ad underneath, but you can turn it off by un-checking the “Would you like to support nrelate by displaying our logo?” under the Layout Settings.
 If you look under Settings you will find a “Styles (samples here)” option. Click on the Samples Here link and you get to see the different options of how your thumbnail pictures are displayed. Pretty cool! Mine is on default right now.
Hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial and got it to work on your blog! Remember, be patient at first! 🙂 I would recommend this widget to anyone who wants more internal traffic!
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I was scrolling back through your posts to find one that you wrote when you linked up to the Thumping Thursday bloghop. I found this one and I say “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” I will definately look into it because I think those “reference” posts are a great idea!
No problem Jill, definitely try it!