Video Transcription

Good morning, and welcome to another episode of Tech Tuesday, presented by Delta Media Group, where we can't help but wonder, if the girl has pyrokinesis and her father can control people's minds with his mind, how did he convince the payphone to give up its change?

Today, we're going to jump into the DeltaNet and take a look at the blogging platform. This is one that we've done videos on in the past, so we're going to revisit some old stuff, but we've added features to it over time, and we haven't really done a blog video in a while, so I wanted to do an updated one, so let's jump into the DeltaNet and take a look.

We get to the blog platform. We're going to scroll down here to marketing, and go down to blog, and you can see I've got a number of blogs created here, but this is where we'll interact with all the different blogs we set up, you can set up more than one, or this is where you can go in and create new blog articles. We have a dropdown here. You can see I have one in here now. To add a new one, I'm going to click add a new blog, and we'll call it the aptly named Tech Tuesday Blog. We can pick the domain we want to associate it with. That should generally be your primary domain, so, if you have any custom domains added to the website, that'll come up here, and you want to leave that on whatever is set as the primary.

Now, in this case, if you don't have any domain set up, you can choose the one to the company domain, which is what this one looks like here, and then the blog URL is going to be the actual path to this blog beyond the domain name, so it'll be domain name followed by whatever you put here, so we'll put /techtuesday_blog, and you can see it checks on the fly to make sure that that's going to be available, and then, down here, I can choose from some feeds. We'd just give you a few popular feeds to add to your blog, so you can conveniently check the box and just have them added in here automatically.

What that'll do is display a snippet of the articles from these blogs on your blog, and, if you're not regularly updating content, that doesn't have the same value as actual, unique content on the blog, but at least it does get something displaying there, so you can check those if you like or just leave those unchecked. I'll click on create blog. It'll think about it and then creates a blog, so here you are.

As far as using the blog, we'll go over the articles last, so, under the articles tab, it'll display all your articles here, but we'll get back to that to actually create one. Next, you have categories, so you have uncategorized by default, but you can add in additional categories here. I will just click add new category and say buyer... information for buyer. That sounds better. Save category, so, now, when I create articles, I'll be able to create articles and then put them within that category, and that's just for a matter of keeping your articles organized.

Tags works in a very similar way, except, with tags, you could have more than one tag attached to an article, whereas an article can only be in one category, so... and we add it the same way. Just add a new tag, type a name and hit save, and then we can edit that tag, delete or preview.

Next, we've got authors here, so, if we add a new author, and we'll save that, and this allows you to add additional authors that will show up to write your blog articles. Primarily, it'll just be you, so, when you create a new article, you should be able to select your self from the list, but if you have anyone else writing on your blog and you want or they want to put in their own name as the author, you can add additional authors in there. That's primarily going to be for things like team sites or company websites if they have a specific author writing articles for the company or the team blog.

Next, we have feeds, if we wanted to add a feed. This would be the feeds that we picked up from earlier, so I can click add a new feed. I can select from any of those same feeds that were available when I created the blog or, if I have a third-party blog and I want to feed that into my blog, I can get their feed URL, and I'll just paste their feed URL in here and then give it a title, so... and this would be something like... and you would have probably a URL not dissimilar to that you could paste in, so here's an example one actually for the Inman News, the Inman News blog, so, if I paste in, that'll put the Inman News blog snippets of each of their articles on my blog. We'll cancel that.

Next, you have this domains tab where you can change the domain you selected when you initially created the blog, so the idea would be, if you set it up under the company domain and then, later on, you add your own custom domain, you can go in here and switch it. Keep in mind that your blog and the link to your blog will only appear if you're viewing the website through the domain that the blog is set to appear on.

For example, if I were able to go to the website under hdemo2.dmgdemo.com, I type that in, and that got me to the website, but I told this blog to only display under wolfarth.net. The blog link and the blog itself wouldn't appear, but if I went to the website by going to wolfarth.net and that stayed in the address bar, then the blog would appear. Does that make sense? We'll go with that.

All right, so next in line, under template, we have a few different blog templates you can choose from, so it'll be template 1 by default, but I'll just scroll down. You can have just a slightly different look to your blog pages, and then, next, we have subscribers over here. Under subscribers, we can see all of our customer groups. If I wanted to subscribe a whole customer group to my blog so that they get notices when I add new articles, I could check the box that I want to subscribe and then click subscribe groups, and that would subscribe them into my blog.

I can see everybody that has subscribed to my blog here, and then I could actually remove that subscription if I wanted to, so, if you had a hundred customers in here, and I had one that contacted me to say that they don't want to be part of the blog subscription anymore or get those emails, I could check a box next to their names and hit unsubscribe, and that would unsubscribe them, and then I can also see a list here of all those that haven't subscribed, and that's just more informational for me so that I can see how many people have subscribed and how many people ultimately unsubscribed either by me unsubscribing them or them unsubscribing themselves, so it gives you all that information available here, and then, next, we go over to settings.

We have a handful of different blog options available to us, so, first off, we can choose how many characters, whatever, how many characters, but we can choose to limit the article content for the blog homepage, and what this would do is limit it to 500 characters and then have a read more link so that your main blog page, if you have a lot of particularly long articles, it'll just show a snippet of each one, and then you click on the article title to actually go through and see the full content. Otherwise, it'll show the entire article on that page and then the article after that next and then the entire article after that and, all along, your main blog page next, and we'll see when we look at the preview of the blog page, but, over here, we have these show and hide buttons.

In the right column, there'll be different categories, and this determines which categories show up there. We're showing everything now, but, for example, there is a blog search field that shows up in the top right, if we decide that we don't want that, and it's just a full text search of the blog, if we decide we don't want that, we can click on hide and then go down here and hit save, and then that section will no longer appear, and the same goes for each one of those.

Show blog article names, this is actually newer one. If we're showing blog article names, in the right under the archives to each of your blog, you can actually show the article names there instead of just showing the count for how many blog articles you've had per month, and it just makes it more obvious when each blog was posted or when each article was posted, and then, for including shared articles, this allows you to determine whether or not articles shared that are written on the company's behalf or on the team's behalf, if you're a member of a team, will also show up on your blog.

What this will do is the company go in, they can create articles, and then they can mark those as shared. If this box is checked for your blog, your blog is going to pull in their articles and display them on your blog also, and that will display. It's not like a feeds, so it doesn't just show a sippet. It'll actually display the whole article as part of your blog, and the nice thing about that is you can then take that company content, and you can share it on places like Facebook or any other social media, and then anybody who clicks on that link is going to link back to your website instead of back to the company website.

The same goes for team-related stuff. If you're on a team, and your team members have their blogs and they're creating shared articles, you can display those on your blog as well, and then the last piece we have here is delete blog. Under settings, if you ultimately did want to delete your blog, that is how you would do it. Go to settings and then down here to delete blog, and that's how you remove your blog altogether, so there you have it.

Now, we'll run back over to articles here, take a look at how to create an article quick, and then take a look at our blog, so, on articles, I just click add article. You can see my author that I created, me. I can choose from my categories, which I only added one in there. I can choose from tags. If I had multiple, I'd be able to hold the control key down, or the command key, and click multiple tags. Title, My Test Article, this meta title would be added to a meta tag on the blog article page, and the idea is that it's used primarily for search engines, so it's a good idea to put that in, just one article. Here we go.

Meta description would be a brief description of the content of the article. Very descriptive. I can give it a caption that will show up on the overview page if I want that to show up that way, just some information about the blog there. I can upload an image to the blog, and that's mainly used for sharing purposes, so, if put that... and, actually, this description is used for the same thing. If I were to share this article on Facebook, it would pick up the image I put here and use that as the image that goes out along with the blog, or basically we can't tell Facebook what image to use when you're sharing on Facebook, but we can suggest to them what image to us. As long as that image meets their qualifications, they'll use that as the preview image for the blog, and, to do that, I would just click choose file, choose the image on my computer and hit save.

Then, next, we have our WYSIWYG editor here, and just like the other WYSIWYG editors for the pages or the emails, you can add in links here. You can control formatting. You can add images. You can even embed videos here if you want, so you have a lot of flexibility as far as what you can do with this editor, so that is where you'd put all that content in. Next, you determine whether or not you want to show Facebook comments or really allow Facebook comments, because there won't be any when the article is first created, so you would check that allow Facebook comments.

Next, we set the article scope. This is just going to be available if you're on a team or, really, only going to do anything if you're on a team. If you set it to private, and there are other team members or the team website blog that are choosing to pull in shared articles, this article won't be among them. If you set this to shared, then any of your other team members or the team site itself, if it's saying include team member shared articles, this will include your blog article that are shared. That'll include this blog article on their blogs as well.

Then, lastly, you set a publish date. By default, it'll be the current date, but if you want this article to... if you want a time when your article is published, you could have this article set to publish whatever day that you want out in the future. At that point, you can either save the draft, at which point, no matter what your publish date is, it won't actually publish. This just allows you to save a partially completed article so you can go back in and make changes later, and then publish will set it up to publish on whatever date is set here. We'll go ahead and say publish article, and there you have it, so now our article is saved.

If I click on open blog, let me see if I set the domain right, there we go, so you can see it loads up my blog, and then here is my test article, and then this is actually an office article that was created that's set to shared, so, since I'm set to included shared articles, you can see that the shared article is showing up as if it's an article that's part of my blog, and then the same goes for this company shared article down here, so there you have it. That is how you set up the blog platform and how you go in and create articles and get everything configured there, along with a lot of the new functionality we've added since our last blog video.

Now, the one other thing we'll take a look at is if you'd like to add a blog article or... not an article... a blog link to your navigation. We'll go under website and down to pages, and then, up here, you see we have our page list on the left and, as you go down the page list, you'll see there's ones that are labeled with blog in the actual title. Those are your blog links, so, if I click on that, it opens up the content over here, just gives me my title. The whole blog is configured from the blog page, so there's no configuration options here, but I can decide where a link to this page is shown, so, in this case, I'll say navigation menu, update, and that adds a link to my blog for the navigation menu.

Again, if you access the website through a domain that's not set up as the domain for that blog, this link won't show up, but then we'll go ahead and drag the link to the page wherever we want it, so I'll just go ahead and next it under pendings, because why not, but we'll put it under meet. That probably makes more sense, so we'll put it up there, save it, and now, if we head over here and refresh our page and go down to meet, there's the link to our blog. I click on it, and it takes me to the blog page, so there you have it.

Now you know how to set up the blog page. As always, thanks a lot for joining me today. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to send an email in to support@deltagroup.com or give us a call, and we'll answer any questions you have. Also, comment on any of our videos or, if you have a topic you want us to go over or have any suggestions for new videos, go ahead and leave a comment on either Facebook or YouTube, and we'll add it to the list. We're always looking for topics, so thanks a lot, and I will see you again next week.