NAME: Kellie Winnell
BLOG: Give a Girl a Blog
TYPEPAD MEMBER SINCE: 2012
WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT: Kellie Winnell is an Australian blogger who designs digital stamp sets and is passionate about essential oils. She wears the "mum badge" like a boss to three girls, laughs every day with her husband, and indulges regularly in coffee (hot and iced), craft/DIY, donuts, oils, Instagram, television, blogging and food.
Did you know Typepad is on Pinterest? It's true! We love pinning and repinning great content from Typepad blogs in every genre, and we're always looking for great, inspirational content. Are you on Pinterest? Drop your link in the comments, and don't forget to follow Typepad right here! If you're not on Pinterest yet, check it out - it's a great way to promote your blog and connect with others!
Want some inspiration? Check out our featured pinner, Kiss My Tulle.
Weddings! If you are planning a Spring or Summer wedding, then you are probably knee deep in the planning now. Cris Stone created Kiss My Tulle to help you plan your special day on a budget with do-able DIY projects, down-to-earth advice, and realistic Big Day expectations.
Want to promote your pinterest account on your Typepad blog? Just go to Blogs > Content and add the Pinterest Widget to your Sidebar via the center menu. While you're there, make your blog posts "pinable" by adding the Pin It button to your post footers.
Want even more? Learn how to promote your blog on Pinterest and follow Typepad at www.pinterest.com/typepad.
As a Typepad blogger, you have access to an ever-growing catalog of built-in features that make blogging with us easy and effective. But that's not all! Typepad also plays well with other services, allowing you to add some nifty bells and whistles to your blog. Over the next six weeks, we'll introduce you to some of our favorite third-party services, making it even easier for you to grow a loyal, engaged audience. Let's get started!
We've talked in the past about how people can subscribe to your blog. Promoting blog subscription is a great way to encourage readers to visit your blog again and again to see your latest content. But what if you've already mastered RSS subscription and are looking for something more?
As you build your audience, you may sometimes want to make information or content available beyond what is on the blog itself. You might do a summary of all your posts for the week or month, or provide special offers to newsletter subscribers, or maybe you have another plan.
One great way to expand your reach like this is to send out an email newsletter. Using a third-party service called MailChimp, you can easily create a newsletter and add a sign-up form to your blog's sidebar.
To get started, head over to MailChimp.com and sign up for an account. After you've logged in, head to the Lists tab. Here you will create a list of subscribers. You may already have some people you want to add to this list, or you may start with an empty list.
Click the Create List button. Give the list a name that will help you remember it (for instance, "Newsletter subscribers") and configure the options as you desire.
Once you've created your list, you'll be taken back to the Lists page where you can see all of your lists. Now you're going to create a sign-up form for the list.
Locate your new list and look towards the right where you will see a button that says "Stats" and a down arrow next to it. Click this and it will open a menu. Choose "Signup forms" from the list:
MailChimp offers a number of different options for your sign-up form. We recommend choosing "Embedded Forms". After selecting what type of form you want to create, you can configure the signup form.
Choose the options you want until the form looks the way that you want. Then go to the section "Copy/paste onto your site". Copy all of the code in this field.
Go into Typepad and to the Design > Content page. Add an Embed Your Own HTML module and paste the code from MailChimp into this module, then save your changes.
Now visitors to your blog will be able to sign up for your newsletter right from the sidebar of your blog!
To actually send out a newsletter or other mailing to your list subscribers, you'll create a campaign in MailChimp and then add the content you wish to include (you can even send out your blog posts by creating an RSS campaign). Happy newslettering!
P.S. Did you know that the Typepad newsletter is sent out through MailChimp? You may already be subscribed to the Typepad newsletter, but if not, you can do so from the sidebar at Everything Typepad, or go to Account > Notifications in your Typepad account and put a check next to the option to be sent newsletters, notices about your account, and special offers, then save your changes.
A few weeks ago, we announced that we had significantly improved the guest author experience and had put it out to our Beta Team members.
We're excited to say that testing has gone well and we're rolling it now out to all of our members. You'll soon see the option to create Author Archives and to also change the authors on your posts. Since the initial announcement, we've also added the Author Archives to your blog's sitemap, so you'll now see them reflected there as well.
We've got even more in store for blogs with multiple authors, so we hope you join the Beta Team so you can get in immediately on these new features and all the other functionality that we're working on!
As a Typepad blogger, you have access to an ever-growing catalog of built-in features that make blogging with us easy and effective. But that's not all! Typepad also plays well with other services, allowing you to add some nifty bells and whistles to your blog. Over the next six weeks, we'll introduce you to some of our favorite third-party services, making it even easier for you to grow a loyal, engaged audience. Let's get started!
With the necessary move to responsive designs for websites and blogs, it is good to start looking at how the modules on your blog display on small and large devices. Many popular social media services do provide widgets which adjust to different displays, including Instagram.
Instansive is just the widget you need to display Instagram photos in your blog's sidebar. You don't need to have an Instagram account to take advantage of this widget if you want to share photos from your favorite Instagramer or by hashtag.
That's it! You can add multiple modules following the same steps.
Note: The code shown in the above screenshots is not valid. You'll generate unique code at Instansive for your own widget.
NAME: Seth Godin
BLOG: Seth's Blog: A Thanksgiving Reader
WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT: Seth Godin is a well-regarded voice in the world of blogging, and this holiday season he has something special to share; the Thanksgiving Reader. The file you'll find there is free, printable, sharable, and Seth hopes it might give us something universal and personal to do this Thanksgiving.
The idea is simple: At your Thanksgiving celebration (and yes, it’s okay to use it outside the US!), consider going around the table and having each person read a section aloud.
During these ten or fifteen minutes, millions of people will all be reading the same words, thinking about the same issues, connecting with each other over the essence of what we celebrate. After all the travel and the cooking and the hassle, for these ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps we can all breathe the same air and think hard about what we’re thankful for.
It’s free to download and share. I hope you’ll let some people in your life know about it and incorporate it in your celebration this year. There’s no commercial element involved—after all, it’s Thanksgiving.
Did you know Typepad is on Pinterest? It's true! We love pinning and repinning great content from Typepad blogs in every genre, and we're always looking for great, inspirational content. Are you on Pinterest? Drop your link in the comments, and don't forget to follow Typepad right here! If you're not on Pinterest yet, check it out - it's a great way to promote your blog and connect with others!
Want some inspiration? Check out our featured pinner, Leigh Kramer
Read about Leigh's journey from becoming a Social Worker and Grief Counselor to becoming a Writer and Life Coach. Leigh loves to take leaps of faith with her life and see what adventures lie ahead!
Want to promote your pinterest account on your Typepad blog? Just go to Blogs > Content and add the Pinterest Widget to your Sidebar via the center menu. While you're there, make your blog posts "pinable" by adding the Pin It button to your post footers.
Want even more? Learn how to promote your blog on Pinterest and follow Typepad at www.pinterest.com/typepad.
As a Typepad blogger, you have access to an ever-growing catalog of built-in features that make blogging with us easy and effective. But that's not all! Typepad also plays well with other services, allowing you to add some nifty bells and whistles to your blog. Over the next six weeks, we'll introduce you to some of our favorite third-party services, making it even easier for you to grow a loyal, engaged audience. Let's get started!
You just added a poll using SurveyMonkey to your latest blog post and you want to get as many eyes on it as possible but you know that hitting the "Publish" button is not enough. You want to share your blog update on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, but the repetitive action of copying and pasting your URL to different accounts sounds tedious. IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a third-party service that lets you control how your online content is distributed to different accounts.
With IFTTT, you are able to automate your accounts by setting up recipes linking your blog's RSS feed to your different accounts (aka "Channels"). Find out more about your RSS feed and what it can do here.
"Recipes" are configured when you want one action to trigger another action - when your blog publishes an update, you want to share an update to your Facebook Page. For your blog, you can create a recipe that shares a status update to your Facebook Page.
Similar recipes can be set up to connect your RSS feed to Twitter, Pinterest, and your Facebook profile.
Pinterest has grown in popularity as being a top blog referrer all due to having pinnable images in your blog post. Let's set up a recipe to post an image from your blog post once it's published. First you need to identify your "trigger" item which in this case is a "New feed item" added to your blog feed:
The next step is to choose an "action" channel which would be the Pinterest channel and then identify which board your image will be pinned to:
If you do not have a Pinterest board set up for your blog, now is a good time to create one! You enter the name of your board in the first field, the rest of the fields will automatically include "ingredients" such as "EntryImageURL" and "EntryTitle." Then you are ready to go by clicking the "Create Recipe" button.
Now that the recipe is saved, the first image that appears in the blog post will automatically be pinned to your "Blog" board and you would not need to sign in to Pinterest to do so.
Another great example of how you can extend Typepad's capabilities using IFTTT is Instagram. We have received requests asking if there are ways to share Instagram updates automatically to your Typepad blog. While there isn't a direct way to connect Instagram to Typepad, if you have a Gmail account you can use IFTTT to automatically publish photos from your Instagram account on your blog.
LinkedIn is another popular platform you can automatically share all your blog posts or just some posts using certain keywords on through IFTTT. We have more information and instructions on connecting your blog feed with LinkedIn in our Knowledge Base.
Once you create your account with IFTTT and have gotten the hang of making recipes, you will find that there is so much more streamlining you can do such as emailing your blog posts to your Dropbox, Evernote, or Pocket for extra backup.
Adding guest authors (an Unlimited, Premium, Enterprise, and Business Class plans feature) has always been a straight-forward way to get your friends and associates to contribute to your blog. Today, we're introducing ways to make this feature even fancier for all of our Beta Team members!
The biggest change is that now you have the ability to change the author of a post within Typepad. You can do this either from the Compose page itself, using the Author drop down, or from the Posts tab and the "More actions..." button at the bottom.
We then followed this up with creating both an author archive option and a feed for your author archives. This means that there is now a dedicated page for each of your authors and also that your readers can now get updates when a particular author creates a post through their favorite feed reader option. You can read more about feeds in our Knowledge Base.
To enable author archives and feeds, you'll first need to invite a new author at Settings > Authors. Once you have multiple authors, you'll be able to check a box to enable author archives. You can also elect to add each author's profile photo and one line bio to their archive page.
To also enable the feed for your author archive, just go to Settings > Feeds, check the "Posts by Author" option, and save your changes. You'll now see an RSS feed icon next to the header on the archive page. We've also enabled this for category archives, so you'll now see this on category archive pages as well.
You can easily add a listing of your author archives (similar to category archives) to your sidebar by going to Design > Content and adding the "Author Archives" module.
We're currently working on improving authors even more, so make sure to join the Beta Team today so that you can try it out!
NAME: Zach and Clay
BLOG: The Bitten Word
TYPEPAD MEMBER SINCE: 2008
WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT: Zach and Clay live (and eat) in Washington, D.C. Their award-winning blog features recipes from their extensive collection of food magazines, anecdotes recounting their adventures (both successful and not so successful) in the kitchen, and artful photography that brings their culinary genius to life. Looking for holiday recipe inspiration? Don't miss their their 2015 Thanksgiving Dinner posts!