All TypePad plans (except the Basic plan) allow you to have multiple blogs. You should always keep one aside to use as a test blog.

We will be spending quite a few of the following lessons showing you how to customise your TypePad blog’s design. As you’ve seen from the last lesson, TypePad lets you maintain multiple designs at any one time and share them across all your blogs, but it won’t let you edit designs until they are actually live on your blog.

Because you don’t want to be editing a design that is live on your blog, what you can do is create or edit a design on a test blog and then try out design changes on the test blog’s active design. When you’re happy with your new design, apply it to your current blog. Read the rest of this entry »

Though this lesson on knowing your audience comes after knowing your niche and your competition, knowing your blog audience is the most important of the three. However, it’s difficult to know your blog audience without first knowing your niche and your competition so that’s why they were introduced first.

Knowing the audience you are targeting with your blog is absolutely essential to having a successful blog because it is your audience that determines your blog’s success. It may sound completely obvious but just as many small businesses skip the market research step, many bloggers ignore this too.

When your blog is still new, you will not have established your audience as yet but that doesn’t mean you know nothing about them. In the previous Blogging Goals Lesson, we looked at your competition online (sometimes known as your potential allies). We reminded you to not only look to see what is offered but who it is offered to – read the comments on blogs, look through forum posts – get to understand the audience because these are the same people you will be targeting.

Imagine your target audience – who are they? What do they look like?

Think of the following:

• How old are they?
• Are they male or female?
• What is their family situation?
• What’s their job/business and income level?
• What’s their education level?
• Where do they live and work?
• What are their wants and ambitions?
• What are their needs?
• What are their problems?
• What are their interests and hobbies?

And perhaps most importantly, what would they get out of your blog? What would make them go back to it on a regular basis?

It may be that your niche targets a wider section of the population but often you can find unique features about your audience. In the previous lesson we brought up a company that makes business planning software. Their target market will be people of all ages, men and women, from all walks of life – but the one similar feature they will all have is wanting to build a successful business.

Knowing your blog’s audience is not a one off step. It’s going to be something you will want to regularly review. Once your blog is up and running, you’ll want to look at your traffic and your comments on your blog and see what content is popular, see what gets publicity, see what gets new visitors, see what gets comments. It’s a good idea to touch base with your audience through a call for comments or an online survey to see who they are and what they want to see in your blog.

Also remember to tie what you know about your audience to what your goals are for your blog. If the purpose of your blog is to increase product sales but your audience isn’t buying then you need to look at where the problem is coming from – is it that you are not appealing to your audience with your product or is it that you not attracting your target audience. The right information helps you make the right strategic choices.

Remember what we said before, it’s your blog’s audience that will determine your blog’s success – get to know them and build yourself a better blog.

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Next time, we’ll be looking at how to plan your blog.

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.

All the customising we’ve done so far has been to our Current Design. One very handy feature of TypePad is that you can save multiple designs and apply them to your blog with just one click.

In the Design tab of your blog, select “Saved Designs”.

You will get a list of all your designs across all your blogs. This means you can share designs between blogs. (If you have an account that lets you have multiple blogs, then you can create a test blog account to develop a new design and when you’re happy with it, apply it to your main blog – we will show you this in a separate lesson.)

Whatever design is currently being used by your blog will have an icon with a tick in a green circle in the flag column – obviously, there can only be one design used at any one time.

Managing Saved Designs

If you have more than one design (eg from another blog, like a test blog), you can click the “Preview” for another design in the Actions column to see what that would look like on your blog.

If you like it, you can click “Apply” in the Actions column and it will immediately replace your previous design on your blog.

You can always rename any design by clicking “Rename” in the Actions column.

Your design name will then become an editable field which you can change.

When you have finished, you will find that you now have a “Save” link in the Actions column for that design, click it to save your design’s edited name.

Making new designs

There are three ways of making a new design:

• You can duplicate an existing design and then make changes to it;
• You can create a new “drag and drop” design;
• You can create a new “advanced template” design.

Duplicating an existing design

Select the design you want to duplicate by ticking the checkbox next to it. Click on the “Duplicate” button. 

TypePad will create a copy of your selected design. 

To edit this copied design, you need to first apply it to your blog (remember this will become your blog’s new design) by clicking “Apply” in the Action column.

Once applied, you can click on “Current Design” to customised your new design.

Creating a new drag and drop design

On top of your design list, you should have a feature that lets you “Create a new design” with a drop down. Make sure “Drag and Drop” is selected (it should be by default) and click “Create”.

You will then see a new design called “Drag and Drop” show up in your design list – you can rename this if you wish.

To edit this copied design, you need to first apply it to your blog (remember this will become your blog’s new design) by clicking “Apply” in the Action column.

Once applied, you can click on “Current Design” to customise your new design.

Deleting Designs

Warning: remember that designs are shared across blogs so if you delete a design in one blog, you delete it for ALL blogs. 

You can easily delete designs by selecting their checkbox and clicking on “Delete”. 

You will get a warning popup to confirm you did really want to delete that design, click “OK” if you are certain you want to delete the selected design.

Next up, we’ll go through how to create a test TypePad blog.

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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.

TypePad lets you use your own domain name for your blogs so that when someone types in www.yourdomain.com they actually see the content at yourdomain.typepad.com while still thinking they are at www.yourdomain.com. To do this, you need to do something called “mapping” your domains.  

We recommend using NameCheap.com as they are cheap and reliable. They also have a good reputation for being ethical. We will be using NameCheap in these instructions. We will also just be showing you how to map a normal domain that is not currently hosting anything, not subdomains.

Step 1: Access the Domain Mapping Section

In your Site Access tab in your Control Panel, click on the Domain Mapping link.

Read through the Important Requirements carefully. In summary, you need to have a domain name registered, you need to be very careful with your settings and you need to make sure your domain “resolves” first before setting the domain mapping to active (more on this last point later).

If you have any trouble or are confused, you should contact your domain registry. 

Step 2: Begin Domain Mapping

When you’re ready, hit “Begin Here: Map a Domain Name”

Step 3: Enter your registered domain address

You will get a pop up that asks you to enter your domain name – this is the domain name that you registered eg www.yourdomain.com – hit “Get DNS settings”.

Step 4: Read your Recommended DNS Settings

TypePad will look up your domain details and give you the recommended settings for your domain name.

Here is the example for www.commerceshop.com:

Leave this page open – you will need to set up your CNAME record at your domain registrar before proceeding.

Step 5: Set up your CNAME record at your domain registry

All registries have their own conventions for the following steps. We will demonstrate with our recommended domain registry, NameCheap but if you are with another registry, it’s likely to be different. If you are unsure what to do, it’s best to contact your registry for advice as they will know what to do.

In NameCheap, select Manage Domains to get to your domain management panel.

Find your domain name and click on it.

Once in your domain’s management, look for the Host Management section in the lefthand side column.

Click on “All Host Records”

Find “www” in the Host Name column, replace the contents of its IP Address/URL field with the “Points to:” address that TypePad gave you in Step 4. In the example this is “commerceshop.typepad.com”.

Find the “@” in the Host Name column, replace the contents of its IP Address/URL field with the “Domain” address that TypePad gave you in Step 4. This is your domain name with the “www” tacked on. In the example this is “www.commerceshop.com”.

It should look similar to below (obviously with your own domain names substituted):

Once you’re satisfied that these match with TypePad’s instructions, hit “Save Changes”

Step 5: Return to TypePad

Once you’ve done this, return to your open TypePad window from Step 4 and click “Complete Final Step”.

Step 6: Choose which blog you want mapped

You now have to choose which blog to map your domain name to. Some TypePad accounts let you have multiple accounts, all mapped to different domain names if you wish. 

If you just want your domain mapped to your main account which should also be your main blog then keep it at the default “My main site”.

But if you have more blogs, you can map a different blog by selecting “My weblog” and finding it in the dropdown.

You can also map your domain name to a photo album.

Hit “Add Domain” and you will get a confirmation screen which you can read then close.

Step 7: Wait until your domain name is mapped on the registry side

It can sometimes take 1-2 days for the internet to pick up on your changes. You can test this by putting in your domain name (eg www.yourdomain.com) and if you are transferred to your TypePad blog then you know it is working. Often it does take quicker than 1-2 days, but if 2 days have passed and nothing’s happening, contact your domain registry for help.

Do not do the next step until this step is working or else when someone visits your TypePad blog, it will no longer work (they will be transferred to a site that is not your blog like your registry’s holding page or an error page – not a good look!).

Step 8: Activate your domain mapping on TypePad

Back on your Domain Mapping section in your Control Panel, at the end of the page, you will have a list of any blogs you’ve set up or are setting up domain mapping for.

Find your blog and to activate the mapping on TypePad’s end, tick the checkbox for that blog in the “Active” column and then hit “Set”.

Remember to only do this step when your domain name is already goes to your Typepad blog. What this final step does is mean that whenever someone visits your blog they will see “www.yourdomain.com” in their browser address line, even if they typed in “yourdomain.typepad.com”. Typepad will still keep your Typepad address functional and preserve all the links.

(If you need to remove domain mapping for any reason, then you can do this by ticking the relevant Remove checkbox and hitting “Remove”. You will also need to change your settings at your domain registry to point to something else if you don’t want that domain going to your TypePad blog).

Remember 

If you have any troubles with the CNAME instructions, contact your domain registry.

Next up, we’ll go through how to manage TypePad’s Saved Designs.

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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.

Change your TypePad profile

Your TypePad profile goes across all of your blogs and you can also use it to blog on other people’s blogs as well. 

It’s in your profile settings that you can tie your TypePad account to your Amazon affiliate ID and your social networking profiles.

Go to your Profile tab and select “Author Profile”.

Read the rest of this entry »