Setting up your blog content is important to help your blog work for you. Typepad makes it easy for you with tools for creating content and laying it out on your page.
Anatomy of a Blog
1. Template Header
My blog has a custom header that coordinates with the design of my photography website. The color palette of the site also coordinates with my website.
2. Blog Posts
A blog post consists of a date, title, and entry. The entry might have photos, text, links, even video! Usually a blog has the most recent entry at the top of the page and older entries are below so you can scroll through them.
3. Subscribe
You want people to come back to visit your blog again and again to see what is new. This helps build excitement in your clients about the pictures they might get on their next scheduled shoot, and reminds them that they need to schedule that shoot! To do that, you'll want to offer the ability for your visitors to subscribe to your site. Many will subscribe using a reader such as the Google Reader. By subscribing the visitor will be notified when updates are made. In Typepad you have a couple of different methods for letting users subscribe. The easiest way is to just click the checkbox in your Select Content screen (under the design tab). However, using that does not give you a way to see how many people are subscribed to your site. So a better way is to setup a feedburner account and link it into your Typepad site!
4. Links
If someone comes to your blog, you need to make sure you provide a way for them to get to your main business site. To do that I created a Typelist which I named "Red Hot Links". It contains two items....a link to my website, and a link to the page to sign up for my e-newsletter.
5. Categories
Everytime a new post is created, you have the option of assigning the post to one or more categories. Then you can display those categories on your sidebar which will let someone click on the category to see just the entries in that category. So, for example, if you create a category for "Newborns" then someone interested in seeing your newborn photography can click on that link to just see those posts.
6. Archive
You'll need to include links to your archive if you want folks to be able to go back and view old posts. A great way for someone to see a bunch of your work quickly. You have the option to turn the archive on or off.
7. Thank You for Visiting
Really, I thank you. But that area is just hiding my Google Analytics code which lets me analyze my website traffic. I'll do a seperate post on how I set that up!
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