A blog allows you to publish content on your site in organised collections. It's a useful tool for keeping your customers up to date with trends, news, latest products, tips, how-tos, and anything else you think they'll value.
Creating blog categories
Articles are placed into specific buckets, called categories, which determine the article location on your website. Your blog categories must be set up before you can start adding articles.
To Add a new category in Admin, select the Content tab from the sidebar and select Blog, then Blog categories.
Then click the Create a Blog Category button.
There are some required fields when creating your blog categories. They are name, title, and description of your new blog category. Check or uncheck the 'Show in navbar?' option, if this option is ticked the category will be displayed in the blog navigation menu.
Optional Fields: The optional fields allow users to turn blog buckets into dropdown menus using markdown. These work the same as taxonomy buckets.
Sample content to enter into 'Optional Fields' section:
How this would appear on the front end:
SEO content: This is content specifically for your blog category and should be filled out to help drive traffic to this page. It includes Page Title, Meta Description, Content above and Content below.
Ordering & Deleting: From the 'Blog Categories' page you're able to change the order of your blog categories by using the four-way arrow and dragging the category to its new position. You're also able to delete a blog category, simply by clicking on the delete button.
Adding Blog Articles
To Add a new article in Admin, select the Content tab from the sidebar and select Blog, then Blog articles.
You will then be able to Search title which allows you to search any existing blog articles or set a Blog Type to see the articles in a certain Blog Category.
Download all: Clicking download all will download a CSV of all blog articles, published or unpublished, and all content they contain.
New article: To create a new blog article click 'New article' and you will be taken to the 'Create article' page that will ask you to fill in the details for your new blog article.
Create Article
This create article page will ask you for all required information for your blog article. If you're missing pieces of vital information the article will not be published.
- Blog category:This a drop down list of the categories you have created. You have to select one that this article will belong to.
- Blog title:This will be the H1 of the page.
- Page slug:This is the part of the URL after the last back slash, e.g. if you set the slug to be best-dog-food, the URL becomes https://www.bestfriendbazaar.com/blog/best-dog-food. We recommend you keep the slug short.
- Canonical URL:is only required if the article is being copied from another site or vertical. If this is an original article, leave blank.
- Tile Summary will appear in the Blog tile below the article heading. This is optional and can be used to create a quick summary of the blog content.
- Author: you can choose the person who you want to appear as the Author of the blog article, further down in Article Settings you can choose to hide the author from article.
- Hero image:This image appears on the blog article page. You can also insert a header which will appear over the hero image and select a text colour.
- Thumbnail image:This image appears in the blog bucket page.
- YouTube video URL:Enter a YouTube video URL here if you'd prefer to have a YouTube video hero instead of a hero image.
You can then choose if you want to feature the Article on the Blog Homepage and Blog Category Page. If you do not want the article to appear in these places you can untick the box.
SEO Content:
This should be filled out to help drive traffic to this page. It includes Page Title, Meta Description, Content above and Content below.
To see the article live on your website you will need to add in a publish date and click save changes. If you would like to take an article offline but not delete it, simply remove the publish date.
Content Section:
When writing your article you can use markdown for different headers, dots, points, images, etc.
You also have the option to add relevant products into the article. Use the markdown for 'external hot offer groups', and then load relevant products e.g. [external_hot_offer group="Dog food"].
These groups can be moved around within the article by moving the markdown group. Please note: do not change the name of the hot offer group once the products are loaded, this will unlink the products from that group and you will have to re-upload all of them.
Tick ‘randomize order’ for the uploaded adverts to be displayed in a random order, rather than fixed order (unticked). To upload a product to an article follow the below steps:
Step 1: Enter the advert ID and click 'Create new'.
Step 2: You must select a client name (usually the name of the retailer that the product belongs to) and enter a banner name. The HTML box allows you to enter custom text below the image if required, otherwise the price and advert title will appear. The 'Upload your create' option allows you to upload an image, if left blank the adverts first image will appear. 'State' restricts users from a certain state only to see the advert tile. Group tag is the external hot offer group name (do not change this). 'URL your are promoting' if left blank will take the user to the advert page of the product, a custom URL can be entered here if you'd like to take the user somewhere else.
Step 3: Create banner.
Step 4: You're then taken to a very similar page to when uploading a banner. Enter the dates you'd like the external hot offer to be live and if you'd like to change the client for having it. Click 'Create billing' and check the details you've entered.
Step 5: If you're happy with the details you've entered click 'Bill & set live'. Clicking 'Back to article editor' on the next page will take you back to your 'Create article' page.
Image Uploader
To upload an image to a blog article go to Admin, select the Content tab from the sidebar and select Blog, then Image uploader.
From this page you can see all images that you've ever uploaded to use. You can simply scroll through and copy and paste the appropriate markdown code to re-use an image that’s already uploaded.
To upload a new image click 'Add an article image' and select the image you'd like to use. Upload the image and then click create. This image will appear at top of your list of images. Select the size you'd like to use and copy the markdown code and past it into your blog article where you would like it to appear. We recommend using the 'Fullpage' size if you want the image to expand the width of the article.
Creating Blog Authors:
https://support.marketplacer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039558291-Create-a-Blog-Author-Sales-Agent-or-Account-Manager-