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Once you’ve created posts for your TypePad blog, if you need to go back and edit them, it’s a simple process. There are also some cool things you can do like featuring one post so it stays at the top of all your other posts.
To access a listing of posts, you can go to your “Home” tab and click on the “Posts” link under your blog.
In the last lesson, we showed you how to make your first blog posts on TypePad and some of the options available. Today, we will explain the concept of pages and how to make one.
Posts are published in a chronological sequence destined to be replaced in your readers’ attentions by newer posts. Once they fall off the front page, they form part of your site’s archive. If you want people to consult older posts, you have to do a bit of work reminding people that they exist (unless some kind person has linked to them off their website).
Pages on the other are meant to be a constantly available resource. They are usually termed “static” – that is, they don’t move. Of course, you can edit or even remove the content of your pages, but if you want they can stay there forever being linked off the front page.
Pages are usually used for things that you want to always keep links to like “About Us”, “Contact Us” and policy pages. You may also create reference resources that you don’t want to fade away in a blog post, but want it kept available – these might be better published as a page rather than a post.
As with posts, there are a number of ways to open up the page editor to create a new page.
You can also click on the “Weblogs” tab and click on the “More actions…” button in your blog’s box and you’ll get a link to “Begin a new page” come up.
It may seem like everyone has a blog these days (and indeed many do!) and they will tell you that you need one too. But it will give you a tremendous head start if you know the purpose of your blog and understand what that means for its development.
Just think about it – if you want to start a blog to build your long term reputation in a particular professional field you are going to develop your blog very differently to if you wanted to build a blog to get some traffic and then sell a niche product. This might sound obvious but often people create their blogs with out thinking about their goals for their blog and often either miss opportunities or do things that are inappropriate or even damaging for the purpose of their blog. For example, the placement of Google ads on a your blog is fine if your aim to make an income via advertising and affiliate promotions but can you imagine Google ads on a lawyer’s blog? In most cases, the ads would only be advertising other lawyers.
So ask yourself: why do I want to blog? what benefits do I want to get out of it?
Here are some possible reasons for blogging:
You might find that you have multiple reasons why you’d like to blog – if that is the case, list them in order of your priority. So you may want to earn income through reviewing affiliate products but you also want to create expert status in your field – if you see expert status as more important then you will have to take extreme care to hand select any affiliate products you do promote to ensure that they enhance your brand and make sure you are not overselling to your audience.
Be clear on your blog’s main purpose and be honest about what implications that has for how you implement your blog.
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Next time, we’ll be looking at knowing what your niche is.
We try to keep any Sunday posts dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored – Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul). This will continue during the How to Blog series – only we will be focusing on how this is related blogging.
This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.
Today, we’ll look at how to create TypePad blog posts. TypePad gives you a number of different ways to do this.
You can go to your “Home” tab and you will see all your blogs listed in the QuickStart box, at the moment we only have one blog listed.
Typepad.com is run by pioneering blogging company Six Apart (they also make LiveJournal, Vox and Movable Type) and it is a very robust and powerful solution yet it is also simple enough for a beginner to start using.
Of all Six Apart’s offerings, TypePad is the sweet spot. Vox is cute and supposed to be simple enough for your grandmother to use but it really is just for personal blogs; LiveJournal is also seen as more personal than commercial (though it is actually great for networking with certain markets eg homemakers, crafters); and Movable Type is at the other end of the spectrum, professional and robust, but with a somewhat steep learning curve if you’re not technically gifted. Typepad allows you to create a business appropriate blog straight out of the box but you can make powerful customisations if you so want, often without much technical knowledge.
While there are no free subscriptions, there is a free 14 day trial. As Typepad is hosted for you, you don’t need to get hosting or install anything so really the subscription costs are comparable to hosting fees. Hosting fees range from $4.95/month for 1 blog, 1 blog author to $89.95/month for their super duper business plan if you have a massively popular blog.
Our recommended plan is the Pro plan at $14.95/month – this lets you use your own domain name, have unlimited blogs*** and unlimited blog authors – it also gives you access to more advanced design templates as well as the ability to use your own custom designs. This how-to will be based on the Pro plan, so be aware that if you’re on a lower plan, you may not have the same features available. ***Note that the unlimited blog feature actually gives you unlimited sub-blogs so if you sign up somedomain.typepad.com then you can have as many blogs you want in folders off this blog (eg somedomain.typepad.com/subblog1) but you can’t have anotherdomain.typepad.com – you only get one main blog. However, you can map your sub-blog each to their own domain name (eg your readers see somedomain.typepad.com/subblog1 as www.subblog1.com) so you can have unlimited blogs with their own domain name.
