Description
Blogs are a great and affordable way to increase an SME’s website traffic and engagement with clients, without having to spend money on marketing campaigns. The the new Mono blog is a revamped and improved version of the blog feature with the goal to fit SMEs' needs better, be more flexible and user-friendly.
With the new blog, site owners will now be able to:
- Plan & manage content through draft, schedule and publish options
- Preview posts before publishing
- Have more flexibility for adding and arranging content - such as adding images within the content
- Benefit from improved designs and simpler flows
It enables site owners to effectively create, upload and post updated content on their website. SEO can easily be customized for each individual post for maximum organic search exposure. Publishing is easy and blog posts can be made live immediately or scheduled for a later date. Blog posts can contain a variety of functionality, including images, galleries and videos. Branded content, such as brochures or catalogs, can also be made available for download.
Get Started
To create a blog post, click on "Products" in the Editor's top navigation bar and select "Blog". This will lead you to the Mono Blog.
Select "Add new Blog post" to create your first post.
In the Blog Editor, fill out the content as desired.
- Post title: the title of your post
- Author: the author of your post (select from list)
- Featured image: This image will be on top of your post and in the catalog module. Choose an image that represents your content. You can upload an image or select on from your file library and edit it as needed. Tip: Select an image with a high resolution, avoid text and with landscape orientation.
- Post introduction: The post introduction will be displayed just below your title, as well as in the catalog. Ideally, you write a description no longer than 140 characters long.
- Post content: This is your post's content. You can style it as you like, add images within the text and even custom code.
- Gallery: If you want to show multiple images below your post in a gallery view, upload your images here.
Tip: Create author and tags beforehand
Authors and tags need to be created in the Author or Tags menu. Make sure to create them beforehand, so that you can select them for your post and save time.
Blog post layout
Add a tag
In the tab Post tags, you can add one or multiple tags to your post. Tags determine whether or not a post will be shown in the catalog module.
Add SEO content
In the third tab, SEO, you can add the following information in order to customize how your blog post appears in search results:
- Title: if left blank, the Editor will add the post title from the Basic tab after you've saved the post.
- Description: if left blank, the Editor will add the post content from the Basic tab after you've saved the post. Try to limit the description to 160 characters as search engines may truncate descriptions any longer than that.
- Keywords: add descriptive keywords about your blog post to help visitors find it through search engines. You can add multiple keywords by comma-separating them.
- Permalink: the permalink is the full URL of the blog post. For example, if your website is petersbakery.com and your blog post permalink is bake-tasty-cakes, the URL of the post will be petersbakery.com/b/bake-tasty-cakes. The Editor automatically creates an SEO-friendly permalink using the blog post title, but you can also create your own. If doing so, try to keep it as short as possible and remember to add a hyphen (-) between words in the URL. Click the Generate link button to reset the permalink and default back to using the post title.
- 301 redirects: enter the URLs of inactive pages (e.g. from a previous website) that you would like to redirect to this blog post. Input one URL per line.
Choose a post status
You can choose to publish your post immediately, but you can also schedule it for being published on a certain date or create a draft to get back to it later.
No matter the status, you can always preview the post to see how it would look like, or update it.
Preview a post
The preview of a post can be access via the post list. When hovering over a post, three dots will appear to the right which lets you expand the options to edit the post or preview it. Clicking on "Preview post" will open the post preview in a new tab.
Publishing a post
If you want to publish a post, click "Publish post" in the post editor view (same for republishing). Publishing a post will require to publish the entire site, so make sure that your website
Blog post template/post design
The new Mono blog fetches the design settings of the site template to look and feel like the other sites. That means in detail:
- Post title --> Dark Headline
- Post introduction --> Dark Preamble
- Post content and author/date --> Dark Body Text
If you would like to make any changes to the post layout, you can make the adjustments in the Global Design settings.
The featured image should ideally be an image with horizontal orientation - vertical images will also fully be displayed but in order to fit, they will be reduced in size.