This video demonstrates how to use the blog platform in DeltaNET 6.0

 

Video Transcription

Harley:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tech Tuesday presented by Delta Media Group, where we were talking about opening an office on the moon. But I was worried. I felt like it would have no atmosphere. No atmosphere. Come on, come on. So today we're going to take a look at the blog platform. We've done a handful of videos on the blog platform in the past, but it was one that's due to be revisited here. So let's take a look at it and we'll show you how you can set up a blog.

Harley:

Now, one thing I will point out as we go through here is I'm going to focus more on just the building and creation of the blog and try to keep this down so that you're not sitting through a whole half hour video here. So let's get this show on the road. First off, in order to get to the blog platform, we'll go to marketing and then down to blog. Now, if you don't find that link there, like with anything else, you can type blog up here in the quick actions and it will come up as one of the options here if it is available to you. You can see marketing blog. And it is an upgrade only feature. So if you're not on the upgrade package, you will not have access to the blog system.

Harley:

Now, once you've found your way to this page, you can see that I have a blog set up, or at least one blog set up already under this account. And if you do have blogs set up, you can click this dropdown here and select between them. You can see I even already have a Tech Tuesday blog set up that has some articles in here so we'll have something to look at there. But this is how you can just cycle through your different blogs. Now, if you did want to create a new one, you can click the add new blog button up here at the top. You just fill in a blog title. This Man's Blog. I like it. And then for your blog URL, it lays it out here in such a way it's really described to you exactly how this will show up.

Harley:

So we have your agent website domain. And then you'll follow that by whatever you want your blog URL to be. So generally, well, you'll always follow it with a forward slash just like the example there. As you're typing in here, it will actually show you some tool tips to tell you whether or not things are available. So if I put a space in here, it's showing me the link's already been taken. At the end of the day, it's basically telling me that this link can't be used. So because we're talking about a page URL, spaces in it aren't going to work. So you can use forward slashes. You can use regular text, letters and numbers. You can also use hyphens and underscores. See if I put a hyphen in there, this hasn't been taken. So it knows that that's available.

Harley:

Now also, you can't use things that are already taken. So a slash blog is already being used by another one. It wouldn't allow me to do that. Now in this case, it's not being used on this account anywhere so we're fine. But you get the idea there. So we'll put underscore. So that's the general idea. And it is good to kind of name it after the title of your blog so that those line up.

Harley:

Now, the next thing you can do here is you can add a few feeds to your blog. So you can really add any RSS feed you get from any third party blog to your own blog if you'd like. All that does is it will take the articles present in their feed and display them, usually just a piece of them, on your blog with a link to click through to their blog to read the rest of the article. So you can include other content that way. So if you're not updating your blog regularly, you can use these RSS feeds to make sure that there's some content in there, even when you don't have time to add your own articles.

Harley:

Now, one thing I will suggest that you don't do here is just select all of these and add them. Because then what you'll end up with is so many articles from these feeds just filling out your entire blog that it won't matter if you write articles because they'll just get buried by the ones coming in from these feeds. So generally you wouldn't want to add any more than one of these. Like, you just click create blog and that will create your new blog.

Harley:

Now, in this case, I'm not going to create it because we already have a test blog here. But if I did create it, it would load up here. It would automatically be selected in this dropdown. And you would see no articles here because you haven't added any articles to that blog yet. So we'll go ahead and select our Tech Tuesday blog for our demonstration here.

Harley:

At this point, I can click open blog and that will open a new window with my blog open on my website. And you can see I just have some test articles here. But this is what it would look like on my site. And it'll be loaded within your website's template. So yours will likely look very different than this. But this is a quick way that you can get in and open your blog page, how it will actually be visible. So we'll go back into the DeltaNET that I just still have open in another tab because this does open a new tab in your browser. So from here we can get into actually creating the blog articles and configuring the blog. So what we'll do is just kind of run through each of these at a high level, and then we'll go ahead and create an article and then you'll see what we're looking at here.

Harley:

So if I click on categories, this allows me to set blog article categories, which we can use when we create the articles themselves. It's just a way of keeping your articles organized down your blog page. We have tags. This is a secondary way of keeping those articles organized. The idea is categories are these kind of big overarching primary categories that most of your articles will go in. So you generally only have a few of those. Whereas tags, you can apply multiple tags to a single article. And that's really the distinction. You can put an article in one category, but you can attach as many tags to it as you'd like. So these are kind of like keywords instead of categories. So what you would do is you would create all the tags you want here ahead of time. And then when you create your article, you'll have those available to choose from.

Harley:

Next, we have authors. So it'll have you set up here automatically, but you can add additional authors if anyone else will be writing articles for your blog. You have feeds. So this is how you would see any feeds that you added when you set up the blog and also how you would add additional feeds. You just click add new feed, put in a title for it. It will be an inbound feed because you are pulling the data from that feed into your blog. And you would just paste in that RSS feed URL right here. So you can see here's an example of one. So you'll have a URL that looks something like that, that you can paste in here and save it. And as long as it's valid, the system will pull the articles from that feed and place them on your blog page, sorted in order with your own articles.

Harley:

Next, we have the domains. So if you do have multiple domains connected to your website, you can choose which domain this blog will load under. It's kind of a special functionality. It's only really useful if let's say you have blogs that cover different themes or different areas, and you only want them to show up under one domain or the other. So if I had a blog related to vacation rentals and I have a domain that goes to my website that is also kind of geared toward vacation rentals, then maybe I would have this blog load under that domain and I would have a different blog load under a different domain for those that are coming to my website for like regular residential sales. So that's what the domains is essentially used for. Just any domain that you have attached to your website through the domains page will be available here. And then you can select the domain that you want this blog to load under.

Harley:

Next, we have the template page. So we have a few different blog page templates you can choose from. So you can see I have this third one selected. So if I go back to my blog page, you can see that that is the template that matches there. So I do have the ability to just change that and then click the update template button down here at the bottom. And that will use that template on my blog page.

Harley:

And then next we have a subscriber's page. So what this allows you to do is subscribe customer groups to your blog. That way they will automatically get a notification whenever you add a new article to your blog. So you can see it takes a minute to load because I have a number of customers in here. But now if I wanted to subscribe anyone, I could just check the box next to them and then go down here and click subscribe groups for all. And that will subscribe anyone who is in any of the groups that I've selected up here. And then all of those people will receive a notification whenever I add a new article to this blog.

Harley:

Now you can also see current individual subscribers here. These are people who have gone to my blog page and actually used the subscribe functionality to subscribe as an individual. And then these are people who have been removed from that subscription. So people who have been unsubscribed before. And it's just a nice way to keep track of this to see who's been unsubscribed so that you don't resubscribe them if they don't want to get those emails. And then down here, we have just a history of the emails that have gone out as you've added new articles. So those subscription emails that have gone out.

Harley:

As we head back up the page here, we'll head over to settings. So under settings, we can modify our blog title if we choose. We can choose how our blog homepage article limit shows up. So really right now it says blog homepage articles are limited to 500 characters and a read more link is displayed. Without this checked, then that means on the blog homepage it will show all of the article content here. If this option were selected, then it would only show up to 500 characters of that article and you would have to click on the article title to actually go through to the article page. When you do go to the article page, you can see it does load up the entire article. Now, these are all very short test articles, but you get the general idea there.

Harley:

Next, we have the ability to decide what shows up in the sidebar. So basically what functionality you want to include on your blog. So everything with show is shown and everything with hide is hidden. So if we go back to our blog page, this is the sidebar that's talking about. So if I go over here and I want you to be able to search my blog and I want you to be able to pull up an RSS feed of my blog, I can just switch those to show. And then when I save this page down here with this save button, we'll go ahead and save it, and I go back to my blog and refresh it, you can see now we have a search blog field here that'll search just a full text search of all of my blog articles. And then we also have an RSS feed button that'll allow anyone coming to my page to get an RSS feed of that so that they can include my articles in their own blog if they'd like.

Harley:

One important distinction there is that that's not like plagiarizing my articles. It's really those links lead back to my articles so I still get the credit for those even if someone else is using the RSS feed to share my articles on their blog. And when I say credit, I mean I get credit as far as like search engine optimization, that stuff.

Harley:

So moving right along, the next piece we have here is how the blog article names show in the archives instead of the article count for each here. So if we click back over here, you can see it shows the actual article name. With that checked it wouldn't show the article names there.

Harley:

Next we can choose article sharing. So this is kind of neat if you're a member of a team. You can have the team's articles shared on your site. And then you can also have company articles shared on your site. So you can see here company shared articles will be shown in this blog. By selecting that, that means all of the blog articles that the company makes for the company blog, if they select for those to be shared, they'll show up on my blog as well.

Harley:

Now, unlike a feed, those don't show just a snippet of the article and I click here to link through and read the rest of the article. Those actually display the whole article in my blog. Now to kind of further customize that I can use these options to select a specific company blog that will show up on my site. So if the company does have multiple blogs for different regions, for example, I could select only the one that pertains to my region and then only the shared articles added to that blog are the ones that will show up on my blog. So just gives you that level of customization there.

Harley:

And then next, if you are on a team, if you check this box, the blog articles that are written for the team website blog system will show up in your blog as well. So in a lot of cases, your site, you may not have a separate site from the team if you are a team member, in which case really all of these settings are kind of irrelevant at that point. But if you do have a site of your own and a blog of your own in addition to the team that you're a part of, this is what allows you to get those team site blog articles to show on your own blog as well.

Harley:

And then lastly, you do have the ability to delete this blog. And keep in mind, we'll delete the blog and all the articles, they're gone. So if you choose to delete the blog, you have deleted it. It is completely gone. So none of those things are designed to be recovered. So just keep that in mind. Make sure that if you are deleting a blog, you know without a shadow of a doubt which blog you are deleting, and you are sure that you want all of its contents, all of its article contents, and the blog itself to be gone for good.

Harley:

So now we'll jump back over to the articles tab. So from here, this is kind of the meat and potatoes of the blog system, but this is where you would create new blog articles. So from here, you can see all of the blog articles that I have already created or laid out here. And with any of these, you can click this button to view it on the website, which will just take me to the blog page or the article page for this particular article. I can click edit article and make changes to this specific article. I can delete it.

Harley:

Or in the case of a published article, so this was published quite a while ago, back in 2020, I can unpublish it if I want by just clicking this unpublished button. And then it would no longer appear publicly in my blog. And then I could click edit. And from that page, I could republish it. So you do have the ability to even, an article that's been published a long time ago, you have the ability to unpublish that and then make changes and republish it on whatever date you choose. So that's kind of handy. Nothing is set in stone here, as far as once it's published, you don't have to delete it to get it off your blog. You can just unpublish it, make changes, and republish.

Harley:

So to create a new article, I'll click on add new article up here at the top. You see I have the ability to set an author, though I only have one author in this blog. So I only have one choice. I have the ability to choose from my categories one category that this article will be in. I have the ability to select multiple tags here that will all be associated with this article. I can then give it a title. I can give it a link. And you can see we have some recommendations as far as how you should use that and how that should work. But the nice thing is you can basically set the URL of this article to whatever you want. And that can be something that differs from the title. But generally you'll want to keep it the same as the title, or really just leave it alone. And the system will make it or build it based on the title of the article.

Harley:

Next, you can set a separate meta title. So this would be used by search engines and search results if this article did come up on the search results page. You can set a meta description, which is just designed to be a human readable description of the content of this particular article. So you do have the ability to write that out there. You can put an overview page caption. So this is only applying to some blog article or some blog templates. So we have some custom blog templates, typically just at the company level, where they'll show a blog overview, both with an image and a description or a caption. So that's what this is used for. So in most cases, unless you have a customized blog template, you won't have any use for either of these two settings. Well, I should say you won't have any use for the overview page caption.

Harley:

Now, for the overview page image, that can work as a Facebook share image as well. So if you do create this article and then ultimately it is shared on a Facebook page, this overview page image is what we'll suggest that Facebook use for the article. We can't guarantee they will use it. It depends a lot on the image and it depends on what Facebook chooses. But if you add this image, there is a pretty good chance that when this particular blog article is shared on Facebook, this is the thumbnail image that it will use.

Harley:

Next we have an image caption. So it's the same thing, but it is a caption specifically for that image. Again, this will show up on certain blog templates. And then down here, we have our blog article content overall. So this is this full Wiziwig editor, the same as the page editor or very similar to the page editor that is used when creating custom pages throughout the DeltaNET. But this is where you would write out the bulk of your article content. And because it is this Wiziwig editor, it supports text formatting, embedding images, embedding links. So it really is a full featured Wiziwig editor here. So you can set things up however you'd like for your article content there.

Harley:

Next you have the ability to allow Facebook comments on this article. So what this does is if you check this, it has this section down at the bottom of the article that allows people to log into their Facebook account and put comments on your article. If you do not check this box, this article simply won't allow those comments.

Harley:

Next, you have the ability to share this article if you are on a team. So you can set it as a shared article and then other members of your team will have the ability to include this article in their blogs.

Harley:

And then lastly, you set a publish date and that is the date that this article will start showing up publicly on your blog page if you choose to publish the article. If you just save draft, it doesn't matter what's set here because it won't actually set live at that point. However, if you do select publish, then whatever date is set here is the date that this article will essentially show up on your public blog. So there you go. So we'll cancel out of this. So that is how you can get a new article added into your new blog or that article created.

Harley:

So the next thing you need to do is add this to your website or a link to your blog to your website. So to do that, we're going to go to website and down to pages. And again, just like getting to the blog page, I could type pages up here and select it from that dropdown. And now you'll find that any blog you've created is already in your page list here. So as I scroll down, you can see we have blog, and they are labeled blog, which is nice, but they're in alphabetical order based on the name of the blog.

Harley:

So if I scroll down here, there's my Tech Tuesday blog. You can see it's labeled as a blog. So to add a link to it to my website, I'll just click on it. There we go. So that loads it up over here. And now I can decide whether I want it to show in the navigation menu or the bottom links of my website, because that is what the current website theme I'm using supports. So I would select what I want there, hit update page. And if I selected for it to be added to the navigation menu, it will be added to this navigation menu list.

Harley:

Now from here, I can find it and here's my Tech Tuesday blog, and I can just drag it to where I want it to be. So right now I could have it nested under this. So that actually creates a flyout menu. So I would have a meet option in the top navigation on my website. And then that would have a dropdown menu that contains my Tech Tuesday page. And then my Tech Tuesday page would have another menu that appears as like a flyout menu under it that has a link to my blog.

Harley:

Now I could just drag it over here. And now it's part of my root navigation at the top of my site. Or if I want it to just be the first item under meet, I can drag it right there. So it's very easy for me to decide where it will show up in my top navigation. And then once I have that set up the way I'd like, I just hit save. And that's how it will appear.

Harley:

Now for bottom links, it's much easier. These can't be nested and you can see it turns red if I try to. There are no dropdown menus in the bottom links on this template, or really on any template at this point. So all I can do here is I can change the order that they appear in my bottom navigation. And likewise, I would just click save. That saves my navigation selection. And then that is where my blog will show up.

Harley:

So there you go. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to send an email to support@deltagroup.com or give us a call and we can walk you through this or whatever else you'd like. If you are getting anything out of these videos and you'd like to see more training videos, please like and subscribe to this video, and you can even click the notification bell and then you'll get a notification every time we post a new video. So thanks a lot for joining me and I'll see you again next week.