Video Transcription

Good morning and welcome to another episode of Tech Tuesday Live. I mean, probably live, unless you're re-watching it in which case it's not live anymore. But right now, it's live. Presented by Delta Media Group, where taking the blue pill just takes you deeper. Today, we are going to go into the Deltanet and we're going to take a look at the blog platform. We've gone over it in Tech Tuesdays in the past, but I like to go in and hit the features over again, make updated videos. That way we're sure we have the newest version out there. In case we've made any changes, we've addressed them in video form. Let's jump into the Deltanet, take a look at it.

First and foremost on the agent side, I set up the blog and I will say that the Tech Tuesday videos are primarily meant for all of you agents going into the system and making changes. The admin side version of the blog, the company blog, works in a very similar fashion. As far as creating blog articles, initially creating the blogs, it's all exactly the same. Only with the company side, you can pick an office beforehand. In any case, in order to get to the blog platform, we're going to log into the Deltanet. You can see we're here on the homepage and I'm going to scroll down to marketing and then click on blog.

Now at the top here, I have the ability to select a blog and it just so happens that I've created a few blogs here already, can see my awesome blog, it's one of my favorites. I can also create a new blog here. I'm just going to open up the new blog interface so we can take a look at it. I'm going to click on add new blog.

Now at the top I'll give it a blog title. The main thing when creating a new blog, is to keep in mind that you're stuck with what you pick here. You could always delete the blog and create another one, but you can't create a blog and then go back and create a dozen articles say, and then go back into it later and change the title.

There's just no good way to do that. Make sure that the blog title you pick is the one that you want to stick with. You give it a title. If I can type. Good enough. You select the domain that you want your blog to work through. Now, if you have no domain attached to your site, you're just going to have something like this. It will be your username dot whatever the company domain is.

In my case hdemo2, cause I'm using this demo account, .dmg.demo.com if you do have custom domains that you've added to the system. Say you went to go daddy and you bought a domain name and you have it attached to your website, that would be selectable on this list also. What you'd want to do here is choose whatever you're using as your primary domain.

If you submitted a custom domain and just the one, odds are that is your primary domain. And don't worry too much about that because you can switch which domain is your primary later on. Just don't be alarmed if you have a domain set and then you go to your website and you don't see the blog link because you're probably just on the wrong domain, but you can always contact us and we can help you through getting that worked out.

For now, you just pick whatever your primary domain is here, and then you choose what the blog URL is going to be. This is going to be the URL of the homepage of the blog or the landing page for the blog. Usually, slash blog is the way to go. But if you plan on creating multiple blogs, you can actually set the URLs accordingly for those. Some people will do them by area. I could say, my North Canton News, so maybe I would make this North Canton News. I want this to be a blog where I just focus on articles pertaining to North Canton.

Then I can make another one called, [Massillon News]. I can't spell [Massillon 00:00:06:52]. There we go. [Massillon News]. The idea is I could make area specific blogs if I wanted to. If you are going to be really active with a blog platform, that can be something that would be beneficial to you. But it does take a lot of work. The key to a blog isn't just having it, it's maintaining it, it's adding content to it, and adding content that people are going to be interested in reading. The whole point is getting that content indexed and getting people to your website to read your blog articles. You don't want to make them just for the sake of making them. Just make them as long as you're going to maintain them.

The next piece you have is down here we have a few prebuilt feeds. One thing you can do with blogs is you can take a blog that someone else has created and if they provide a feed for that blog or an RSS feed, you can add that to your blog. What that does is it just has a link to their articles. And if you're only updating your blog once every couple of weeks, or even once a week maybe, you could add a feed to it so that blog articles from, for example in the news, will show up on your website. Now it doesn't show the whole blog article, just on your blog page, it'll show a snippet of the article and a read more link. And when you click read more, it goes over to the Inman blog website where they can read the rest of the article.

And that's why you can do that and share those that way and use those feeds. That's why it's not plagiarism, because it'll show up on your site and it links back to theirs and just shows a snippet. That's why they allow you to use it that way. We provide a few feeds that you can choose from here. I would never suggest adding all of these because they're updating these a few times, even a few times a day in some cases.

If you selected all of these and created your blog, no one would ever be able to catch up with the articles. It would just be spitting out tons and tons of articles each day. And that content wouldn't really be part of your website because it's just a feed that links out to somewhere else. If you did want to fill in your own articles with some information from one of these sources, we pre-provide these for you.

You would just hit the check box and hit create blog. That would include in this case New York Times Real Estate Blog. Those articles would come into my blog and show those snippets there. I'm not going to create this one, but that is how you would go ahead and set one up. Let me go down here. I'm going to cancel this and now I'm going to select from my existing Tech Tuesday blog.

Had I created the blog, I would be looking at something similar to this only there would be no articles in it yet because I hadn't added any. The first thing I can do is I can click on open blog and then in the new window it'll actually open my blog up. I can see this as that blog home page. If these articles were particularly long, they could have links on them where they just show a piece of the article and then the link leads you through to read the entire blog article. Oh, we'll go back over here.

This is where you would set up all of your new articles. I'll just go ahead and run through these tabs one at a time so we can see what they do. You can see the first one, I'm on the articles tab. Here are all the articles in this blog and I can view the article itself, which would just open it up in a new page. I can edit that article or I can delete it or I can add a new article.

We'll go up here and add a new one. You can see right now I'm the only author in here that we can add more authors and I'll get to that. I can choose from the categories, but I only have one category in here. And the significance there is that each article can be in one category, but it can have multiple tags attached to it. That's why we have this kind of text box here. If I had multiple tags in this blog, in fact, let me go over here and add a tag just so we can see it. I'm going to add a new tag, selling.

I'm going with the standards here, selling and home improvement. There we go. You can see those are in there now. We'll go back over to articles, add my new article, and you can see that one of those was picked up anyway. We'll refresh it and see if it's just taken time on the other one. Tags. Oh there we go. It didn't save my home improvement. I was too quick for it. Home improvement. Save. Now we'll give it a minute. Tag has been saved.

Oh well. Replications probably behind in the morning. It'll show up, it'll bite. I promise. By the time we're done, it'll probably be there. We'll add new article and now it's in there twice. You see, I was right. We can select one category and I just have the one in there. So we'll select that. But if I wanted to select multiple tags, I can do that.

It's all just a method of organizing by article so that tag or those tags will show up in a tag cloud on the side of the blog page. And I'll be able to narrow my blog page to just articles attached to those tags. The whole idea is that if somebody is reading through your blog and there's a lot of articles there and they want to look at articles that pertain only to a specific thing, as long as you've organized them with categories and tags, they'll be able to narrow it down that way.

Next we'll add a title. This is a great article, because it is right? Next we can add a meta title. This is a title that's going to fill into a meta tag that's actually going to appear in the code for that page. The purpose of that is that search engines can pick up these meta tags and from them garner information about that article. This is where I would put the title if I wanted to differ from my primary article title. Down here I could put a meta description, which is just designed to be a short but human readable description of what the article is about. This article is about the best things.

There we go. Next I can give it a page caption. Now this caption will show up with the article on the primary overview page. I believe this caption is also what's used for social media sharing. That's primarily what this overview page image. So we're building out the blog platform and adding functionality to it. We may add more things or more functionality to these features in time. But for now the idea is if I set this image... Let me make sure, yeah, just make sure there wasn't another image there. But if I were to choose file here and then select file on my machine and show that image, it would put the image here.

And then whenever I share this blog article on Facebook or someone else shares this article on Facebook, that's the article or that's the image that Facebook is going to prefer. As long as that image meets Facebook's requirements, that's the image that will be preferred and show up with my post on Facebook. This caption is the same deal. That's meant to be a description that's used for those Facebook shares. I would just type out, and you can see a 255 character max, I would type out a little description here. We'll go with the best things again, I'm going for broke.

Here we go. I would choose that and then choose my image here and I'll go ahead and see if I have an image to add. I have a whole bunch of test images here, testing. You can see how much I have hiding in here. Test images. I knew I had it, I knew it. Mr. Blog image. Perfect. We can see it added my image in there and I'll go down here and I can use this Wiziwig Editor to actually create the article content.

I'll just really simply do this is some content, but know that this is the same page editor that's used for any of your regular custom pages or your bio page or any of that stuff. I can add links, I can add pictures, I can embed video here. Any of the options that I have available here, I can make show up on my blog article. Now I can also control things like formatting, color, stuff like that. There's quite a lot you can do with the Wiziwig Editor. Next I can choose whether or not I want Facebook comments to show up on this article.

I can choose what I want the scope to be. Private would mean it will only show up on my blog and shared, depending on whether I'm on a team, could mean that my article is shared with either other team members or with the team website itself. In most cases private is good enough but you could change it to shared. If you're on a team and you want things that are accepting your blog articles to be able to display this particular article.

Next, we set a publish date. A few seconds, which doesn't lend well to live video, but what are you going to do? It could take a few seconds, a minute before the [inaudible 00:15:28] but we have add new author also. I could click that and add a new author in if I wanted. We have feeds. The feeds, if I had had any added into this, automatically they would be showing up here.

But since I didn't, I can still go here and add feeds from other third party blogs if I want. I would just click on add new feed. I'd give it a title just for my own reference. The type is going to be inbound and then for the provide the such a thing. Next we have domains. So this is where that's going to show up on my blog page. This means if the team creates a shared article, like the team account creates a shared article that will also be shared on my blog page.

If I don't want to share those, I just uncheck those boxes and hit save and those articles won't show up. We'll leave them on. Lastly, we have the delete button here. If you do want to get rid of this blog for whatever reason on the settings page, we do have a delete button down here that deletes the whole blog.

Keep in mind at what the warning says here. It does delete everything. The blog itself is gone and all the articles pertaining to the blog are gone. Make sure that you really want to delete the blog and that you're on the right blog before using this button because it gets rid of the whole thing.

All right, so I'll hit save and I will go up here, we'll click open blog again, it should refresh it and you can see I'm on the new blog template. If you look over here, we can see some sections have been removed because I removed them with check boxes there. You can see the article names show up here instead of just an article count. And then down here we have the different available categories. And then here are the different available tags. You have this kind of tag cloud down here. The way this cloud works is, the more articles I have attached to a tag, the bigger the tag will be. If I had a lot of buying articles, this word would actually be larger here. There you have it.

That is the blog system. Just like that, you now know everything about the blog system that I do. So as always, thanks a lot for joining me this week. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to comment on the video on either Facebook or YouTube, or send an email and to support at deltagroup.com or give us a call and we can walk you through any of these bits and pieces over the phone. Thanks a lot and I will see you again next week.