I attended Pubcon 2013 and had a blast. The networking opportunities were outstanding and the most important connection I made was with Russ Jones, CTO of Virante. We had a quick chat about a tool that Virante has called nTopic – it measures how relevant a piece of content is to a particular keyword or set of keywords. Here is more information from the nTopic website describing how it works:
How Does nTopic Work?
nTopic takes keywords you provide, builds a “perfectly relevant” document, and then compares your content to that document. It then compares your relevancy against the probability that any random 2 documents from our cohort will have greater relevancy to one another than the ideal document to yours. A score of 99% means that 99/100 times your document would be more relevant to the ideal keyword document than any two random documents would be relevant to one another.
Russ and I connected again over the phone after the conference and he wanted to know if we could integrate their API into Content Runner and allow users to order nTopic graded articles. We talked through the details of the API and I quickly decided that nTopic would be an extremely valuable feature for Content Runner users. The first thing we did was update our order entry form and provide a new checkbox called “nTopic Required”, when that box is checked each article will require nTopic Keywords as well as a Target Score that the writer needs to meet. See the images below for the updated order entry form and the specific nTopic fields.
After you load up an nTopic article and a writer has started writing it, the first time the article is submitted to you for review, the article will be scored based on the keyword(s) provided. For example, the article below was written for the keyword phrase, “sleep apnea” and scored a 98.15% nTopic relevancy score. In addition you can see the entire set of nTopic Recommended Keywords, they are listed in order of most occurrences to fewest occurrences. By adding additional nTopic Recommended Keywords to your article in logical parts of the article you would expect that your score would increase in relevancy.
We are excited to announce the partnership with Virante, and the complete integration of nTopic into the Content Runner writer marketplace. Load up an order and check your score today! If you want to watch a great screen cast that Russ put together showing off the nTopic integration, take a look below.
About Chad FisherEarly in 2013, we were having trouble managing writer relationships using emails and spreadsheets and thought: why not build something to make the pain go away? From those early conversations we came up with the concept of Content Runner to help us come up with topics, assign tasks to writers, edit and publish content, pay writers, collect W-9's, use Copyscape and do status tracking.