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Hi, this is Russel from Low Fruit Solutions. Today we're going to be talking about a feature of our Pro Blogger application called Related Products, what it does and how quick and easy you can add this to your store. So, first of all, what is Related Products? Well, it's kind of exactly as it describes, it's an option that will display related products in your blog posts. The idea being that when readers are invested in your blog posts they'll also be invested in purchasing products that are related to that post. In other words, turning your readers into shoppers.

As an example, if you have a recipe article, what you would have or what you would want to have, is the ingredients as related products to that article so that your reader can quickly add and acquire them straight at the end, instead of navigating around your site searching for those particular items and so forth. So it's all about trying to improve the convenience of your reader to getting to the products that you want them to see. The options are endless. No matter what your article blog posts content is, as long as you've got the products that are relevant to it or products you want to be relevant to it then you should be able to put them there and Related Products will do that for you in a dynamic way. So you can micromanage as much as you want or as little as you want, and we're going to have a look at that very shortly in the example.

First, before we go off and set it up let's have a quick look at what your standard blog post will look like. Here I am on the debut theme which is the one of their Shopify free themes. I've got a generic article example here about pineapples, a little art, a little image in it, some of the sharing. Nothing extra involved, very basic. So if this was my recipe post there will be no easy way for my reader to get those components or those products that are related to the recipe and buy them, they'd have to search for them, et cetera, which we all know that the longer it takes for anyone to find something the less they're going to look for it.

Let's get this set up and let's see how quick and easy we can add value to your blog posts using Related Products. If you've just installed Pro Blogger this is what you will see. It'll come up and it'll show you all the features that are part of Pro Blogger and they will all currently be disabled so we're just going to go down to Related Products. I'm just going to enable the Related Products, I'm going to leave all the other default settings as is, we'll come back to those in a short little while and then we're just going to click save. What this will do is it'll turn green as the feature becomes enabled.

Then I'm going to go to step two which is the installation and I'm going to click on Related Products. For those of you who know Pro Blogger from before we've obviously slimmed down the number of steps in the install to make it as straightforward as possible, so there's only one little piece of code we have to add now and that will be this little item here. As it says in the instructions just copy this line and what we're going to want to do is, we're going to be pasting that in one of our liquid templates that are part of the store. You've got two options here, these quick links that'll take you to them so the article-template.liquid, this is kind of standard in most new themes and for older themes, it will be under the old article.liquid template.

If you're not sure which one your store uses the easy way to check is to basically click on the article.liquid here which will open this up so you don't have to even go down into your themes and edit your theme code and so forth, it'll just directly load that that template file, this is in your active theme. And what we'll show you here, this is just going away and loading here. If I look in here it'll show me a section. You can see the section article-template. Now that tells me straight away that this particular theme is using article-template.

You've got two options. You can either look in the section side for it which is over here or you can go back to the app and just click on the article-template.liquid which is what I'm going to do just for the ease of convenience. What this will do now, it'll load that file so I can put my little code in and put in it. All right, just taking a little bit of time. And there we go. So looking in this now, what we have here is we have the header stuff and then we've got where article.content is. This is the main blog content and below that there's this to include the social sharing, so that'll be be these little icons at the bottom here.

Now, what I like to do is I like to put Related Products below that but you can put it basically anywhere. Here we go. I'm just going to paste that code snippet that we copied, hit save. I'm just going to refresh that article, and there we go. That is literally how easy or how quickly you can add Related Products to your blog posts, just one simple single line of code copied and pasted and now your readers will see products.

As you can see there's a number of things that are displayed on each product. We've got the product image and the name of the product. Here we have the vendor. We also have the star rating or review ratings as well as the price. Now, just a quick note that the default review system that the Pro Blogger app users is the Shopify Reviews. This is the free app that they have available on the Shopify App Store. Pro Blogger can be customized to use any like Trustpilot or Judge.me and cetera, et cetera, with some simple editing which we have referenced to on our knowledge base.

But for now let's have a quick look at some of the options here that are available to you within the app that we can talk about. So I'm just going to go back into the app and Related Products. I'm not going to talk too much about how it finds matches because we have a whole separate video about tuning relativity for product matching and for that matter also blog to blog matching. I'm just going to touch a little bit on the top settings here. As you can see they're scaled from fast to accurate, meaning fast is guaranteed results quickly but not so accurate. It'll be as accurate as it can be but because it only gets a small number of products to check it may not give you the tuned results that you want. Like I said we go into tuning in another video.

Balanced it's quicker than accurate and it's more accurate than fast because it gets more products but it's also not as quick as it gets a bigger set of products to churn through and will only display the ones that it matches but it may not get the matches because it's not looking at everything, while accurate will take longer and this used to be our default setting in the versions before this but it'll always give you the most accurate results.

I'm just going to as I mentioned since we have a whole video that dives into the setting, I'm going to move on to the right side about the slider and what it displays and how you can customize that to look and feel of what you want in your store. So the first piece we have is the slider header. This is the text above the slider. Right now we have Related Products in there. I'm going to change as quickly as an example to buy these little tags there and do HTML, so you can actually change these if you want to do some direct styling if you wish.

The next option is auto-play. So if you don't want the slider moving by itself because you think it's distracting you can disable it there. Then we have the slider content itself. The size basically is the number of items that are actually in the slider. Now the number here is six, so I could change that to eight as an example. That would mean that there's eight products in the slider. The items to display means the number I'm going to show you right now or in one go. If we look at the example it's showing four at a time, which kind of fits this particular theme.

If I had three in here the actual product pictures and such that they would grow to the space because the slider is responsive, but it may look a bit overpowering where if I had five it'll shrink the products down and you can show more display but that wouldn't work as an example on a narrow theme. So what you want to do is play with this if you have a very narrow content screen, in other words very large margins on each side. You may want to change the items to display down to three so that your products stand out more. If you want the products to be smaller just keep adding and increasing the numbers to display.

In terms of the data points that we covered that on display we've got price here. We can turn off price, we can turn off displaying the vendor, I'm just going to do that as an example. I'm going to turn off the rating and turn off displaying the sale icon which is currently showing here as an example displaying that this product is discounted. We can turn that off as well if you don't want to show it.

We can also add a buy button, the text for which is here. So I'm going just as an example change that as well to buy me. We have another option below here called hover button. What that does is it will move the button from being displayed underneath the product to only display when you hover over the image to it's a nice way if you're running out of real estate and a bit subtler, but personally I prefer a call to action that is more visible. I'm just going to click that just to show you that the changes these will make. That's busy saving I might as well just refresh here.

There you go. As you can see I've removed the reviews, I've removed the vendor, and I've added the call to action, buy me, right now. So as you can see, very, very easy, very quick to customize. Obviously there's a lot more in-depth customizations that could be done but out of the box you instantly get the very quick and easy value of displaying content that's relevant or products that are relevant to your content  to help  start turning those readers into shoppers. 


I hope you've enjoyed this particular video and found it very informative. As mentioned there are more in-depth ones that will cover how to get product relation to your blog posts. But for now, all the best and enjoy.