How to setup and share your MV Blog

Follow along with Steve to setup your MV Blog, make it easy to share, and start a new Post. 

This interactive guide is designed for you to take action and get your hands dirty in your MV!

Get ready to listen, pause, and DO some activities inside MV to build out your new Blog feature.

We like to make things flexible, so for your convenience you can listen to the audio-only version at The Vault Podcast, or read the text version below.

AUDIO VERSION

TRANSCRIPT

Steve Knots  0:00  
Hey, I'm Steve knots. Welcome to the User Experience podcast where I help you build fun stuff inside your MV account so you can take it out, use it, play with it, share it with your audience, and bring them one step closer to working with you... so you all can be successful in your business and in your communities.

Steve Knots  0:14  
So this podcast is all about the new blog feature. We're really excited about it, it's a lot of fun. And today, I'm going to show you three things, how to set up your blog, how to make a new blog post, and how to share your blog with other people.

Steve Knots  0:24  
And this is an interactive video, meaning I want you to do it along with me, we're going to do the activities, you can pause, fill in the stuff that we're doing, and then play again, if you go through this step by step, you'll make some major progress in your MV account right now. And the best part is, all this stuff is completely reversible, you can update edit, and change it again later. And keep it invisible and private until you're ready to go live. So nobody's going to see all your dirty socks, we're just going to play with some blog settings. And, and this is the video component. By the way, there is also an audio component if you prefer to listen, which you can find in the blog post on the MV blog about this topic.

Steve Knots  0:59  
It's a blog about a blog, so you know, alright, so two places to work with your blog. The first one is to set it up for the first time. These are things for the blog title, the link, you do this once, and then it's done. So to get here, go to your left sidebar, click Settings, and then you'll see the blog tab. So here's my blog tab. And right up top, we have blog page settings.

Steve Knots  1:18  
First thing is putting your blog title, I made up an imaginary blog called gripping near death experiences with chocolate pudding. I wanted something memorable that I could see on display when I'm previewing. And I don't know I mean, maybe people do have some near death experiences with chocolate pudding. But the idea is, there's a topic it's specific. And then I can fill in that topic with a number of different stories, where each blog post is a different story about someone else's putting experience.

Steve Knots  1:42  
Now next we have the link, you can see my MemberVault, custom URL, and blog. So people are going to type in, you're going to type in your own member vault address with a slash. And one more thing after it to get people to your member vault blog, where they will see all your list of posts, I recommend you keep this short, it should be relevant and tell people that this is your blog, don't put in the whole entire name of your product and your company. And then the word blog because they're already in your Member site. They're already at that link. So you just need one more little thing that says blog or news or newsletter or something like that, articles, whatever, and posts per page. If you're blogging a lot, you know, you could have 25 posts per page where people are looking through recipes or something. Or if you're doing just pillar posts where each post is a specific piece of content, leading people strategically to one product, you might only have four posts at all, and then have a page with those. So that's up to you. Then click Save.

Steve Knots  2:36  
Now sidebar settings. This is kind of fun. This is where you will see a little window on the side of the page showing we should just show this. So of course is mixitecture.com. Here's my main site. And let's get to the blog slash blog drink. Now all my posts are set to invisible because I haven't built them out yet. But this is a good place to show. Up at top is the title of the blog gripping near death experiences with chocolate pudding.

Steve Knots  3:08  
So there's the home breadcrumb people can click here to get to the list of posts, this place would show all the posts. What's over here on the right, well, we have a search bar where people can find out stuff in your blog, and the Call to Action section. So in our setup, sidebar CTAs call to action. There's a link a title and content. What does that look like? Well, here's the link that's actually a clickable link, I put the words link to get free stuff. There's a description. This shows up on the right side under the search bar where you can direct people to any link you want. And there's a picture. So we have CTA link title content, just below that an image. This is all about strategically leading people from one blog post to the next step in your member vault account, I recommend putting in your freebies. So if you have a link to your subscriber hub, you take them over there. This one is a free presets product so that people can read a post related to your field or your product or your universe. And then when they're finished with the post right there in the sidebar, there's a place they can click to get the next step to get the freebie to watch the next video to do a teaser module. Anything that will engage them more with your memorable content. And it's all right here on the same site, which is awesome. Now for the picture. Obviously, you want to have something related to the blog topic. If my blog is about putting so it's about cooking so it's in the kitchen. So I just got a stock image of some kitchen stuff. You could use the actual image from your freebie product.

Steve Knots  4:31  
I'm going to do a little right click on here and so you can see my freebie product. So since my freebie product is about these repressed presets, I might take a screenshot from the software and show them what they're going to actually get that looks fun and enticing and makes them want to play with it. And for the description. Again, keep it short. Just say click here to get a free preset that you can play with to make cool music. Click here to get on my list of free free recipes for a new dish every month. Click here to get my daily tips on Instagram, whatever you're doing for your little freebie engage stuff, describe it right there, keep it short.

Steve Knots  5:02  
And you want to preview this on your phone, so that when you're scrolling through, you see what other people are going to see. And that's really a lot of fun. So again, in the settings, we're in the main general Blog area, you have a link, you can enter, you could pause the video and put in your link, a title link to get free stuff, you can see those words right there are showing up as link to get free stuff. And that might be better with something like, sign up here to get recipes, enter here to be on the newsletter, whatever. And then the content, keep it short chance to upload your image.

Steve Knots  5:31  
And underneath search engine optimization, always a hot topic. This is where you get to choose what Google is going to display on the search results when people are googling chocolate pudding recipes or whatever. So the SEO title could be the title of your blog or something a little bit longer to say what it is. And then the description is a brief brief story of what people are going to get why they should come there who you are, as something that's short enough to show up on the SEO field, not going to go too much into SEO, because I'm not an expert. But if you know what I'm talking about, you know, that's important.

Steve Knots  6:02  
And that is it for your main blog settings for the head topic container of like the blog with all the posts in it, you can change all this later. But I recommend once you have your your blog link set, I don't recommend changing that very often or at all, because after you share, share it once. If you change it after you share it, all the people with the old link, it's going to be broken, they're not going to get there, it's going to be a bad experience for them, it's going to reflect badly on you and your brand. And they're just going to miss it.

Steve Knots  6:30  
So set that to something where you can leave it and I don't see anything wrong with the word blog, or I don't know, archive, newsletter articles, some short thing that just says what your content is going to be all about that might take a little planning to decide what your posts are going to be about. But you should be able to think here's my topic, here's what my my updates and posts are going to be and title it something like that.

Steve Knots  6:51  
Now, how do you make a new blog post? Well, let's go up to the content section. Products pages, posts about that. And you will see this as blank if you don't have anything in there. So let's go through the process from the beginning. You can see by test posts, episode one, episode two how my kitchen exploded. I never knew spoons are so important. These are all pretend posts that I filled in to just show that content can exist.

Steve Knots  7:18  
So let's add a post. Click that button. Title, Episode 100. Date drop down today. Status invisible. Now this is the same as product status. Inactive means nobody can see it not published doesn't exist. Active is it's going to show up on your list of posts in your blog page. And invisible means you can edit and people with the link can see it. But nobody else can see it just for fun. Let's set this to active. Go back to our blog up did I save it? No, I didn't junk. And what if I refresh this page? Do I get a post yet? I don't think so because I didn't create the post yet. Okay, well, we'll wait for a minute. Let's set this to inactive. Now let's set this to invisible. Now we can create a post edit. And then we'll come back and look at the blog page to see where the posts show up.

Steve Knots  8:12  
So I just clicked Add post. Now post settings, title episode 100 victory. I don't know why I won, but I won something. So that's good. Put in the date, put in the the slug or the the words that come after your blog link, or your site link, Episode 100. That's good enough for me. Here's your link that you can copy for later. Status and visible post content. After many, many life changing experiences in the kitchen typing, I finally figured out this is going to be so clickbait figured out this one thing that made the whole story come together dot dot dot. What a clickbait title. That is the only reason I put that in there is to show you where the post content area comes in. Let's put post content area. This is this is and what I'm saying is that literally the words post content and the MV admin. I use those right here. So that when I'm looking at the actual published version, I know okay, the stuff I'm seeing here came from this post content editor. And you got all this stuff in here for formatting.

Steve Knots  9:28  
You can put bullet points and enter the code editor. You can embed videos and images just like a product module or lesson. This is where you build out your post. This is where you tell the story. Write your recipe, give your tips. Drop your advice, add value that takes people from wherever they came in. To find out wow, this person is amazing, talented, interesting. I know them. I like them. I trust them. They're giving me something awesome for free right now. I want to click on the sidebar and go to the next step. So the blog post strategically is entertaining. Valuable helpful, gets them excited, gets them motivated and It doesn't get them motivated to sit on their couch and do nothing, it gets them motivated to click the link to get to the next step.

Steve Knots  10:05  
So that's what you're that's, that's the purpose of at least that's how I see it. And post preview, this is kind of fun, headline mini sentence, kind of like in your email, when you see a little preview of the posts. This is where you can customize what people see in the list of posts when they're looking through all your lists. And blog image is going to be something related to this post. And so if you're writing a travel blog, specifically about hiking, and you have one post about the mountains, you're going to have a picture of the mountains. So let's save that so far.

Steve Knots  10:39  
SEO again, same thing with the main blog, but now it's the optimization for just one post. So you can have the title of the post the description, Advanced section to add custom code for a CSS or JavaScript, if you know about that, then you know what to do. And if you don't, you can put that in your little bucket for later. And what's not here at the bottom, the big red button, not going to delete the post. That's if you need to delete something.

Steve Knots  11:00  
So we have just made a post and it's invisible. Let's try this, I'm going to right click on the post link first, just take a look at a new tab. That's how you can preview episode 100 victory. And there's my post content area. Oh, okay. So that's the title of the post, the date. And the post content is right down here after many life changing experiences by the law. And that was so fascinating. You know, I just want to go over here and link to free stuff. So I can have life changing experiences, just like the person who wrote this post.

Steve Knots  11:31  
And I look, there's the home. breadcrumb, there's the title of the blog, there's episode number. So this pathway is filepath. Up top shows you a really cool structure of home as your membership site. This title is the title of your blog. And then here is your episodes inside that blog. So just like we have your marketplace, your products, your modules in your lessons. Now we have your marketplace, your blog, and your blog posts, which lead people to take the next step. Now let's get down and dirty and publish it active.

Steve Knots  12:00  
One cool thing is if you just click outside of the little area, you might see up at the top right, it just saved it. There's an autosave feature that Mike built so you don't have to scroll down and click Save, you can just click outside and get it updated. Now let's go to the blog itself. Refresh. What's gonna happen, Deana, ah, Episode 100 Victory headline mini sentence. So if you're writing a scientific journal, and you want to have an abstract for each article, in the post preview, you can put the abstract, and then have all your articles come down and people can figure out where to go to see your peer reviewed research and everything.

Steve Knots  12:35  
And I didn't upload an image for this one yet. Let's see if I can add something from my downloads folder. Okay, nevermind the image. This is where you would see your list of episodes. Let me go back to this blog post. I want to set this to inactive, because I don't want my real people seeing this. And make sure that the blog is not displaying that.

Steve Knots  13:03  
Now the last thing is, what do you do when you want to share your fantastic new blog with your list of posts or share one individual post? Well, just like we did at the beginning to share the whole entire blog, go to your main settings, click on blog. And you'll get a link right over here. To share your blog, it just generated that. So you can copy that link. Or you can right click and do open in a new tab or a copy link. That's the link to get to this page which had my post on there which will have all your list of posts so people can come in, they can binge on your posts, and your posts will lead them over to your sidebar where they can click on the link to sign up on your mailing list if they're a first time visitor or do anything.

Steve Knots  13:44  
So this blog is a great front page for your site for cold traffic coming in warm traffic who's maybe a follower on YouTube or a subscriber but they're not in your member vault yet. And you get an inside your member vault and then they're your family, you can develop the relationships, you can give them one click links by email where they can click in and start racking up engagement points, unlocking bonuses special offers, you can track their progress and send them offers about the things they're clicking into as a hot lead. So much fun.

Steve Knots  14:10  
So it's really, really a great, I don't want to quite use the word funnel because that's so overused, but it's a nice path. It's a user journey to bring people through. And there's plenty of other people in the MV universe to help you with the user journey.

Steve Knots  14:20  
I just want to make sure you understand how to build this stuff to get started along the way. So for sharing the main blog, you get it there. If you want to share one post in your email newsletter to say here's the post of the week, you click to your posts tab under Content, I went to content and posts. Here's a link of all the posts. You can just copy this ending URL and add it to the blog. Or Or you could right click on here, copy the link or go to action click the gear and get the whole entire post link as one thing that you can copy with a preview button and the Delete post button which we should watch out for.

Steve Knots  14:54  
So that's how you can share your blog how you can share your posts and let's make this fun. Let's add it to the footer because you never know when people might be somewhere else in a lesson and scroll all the way to the bottom and they say, oh, there's a blog, who knew.

Steve Knots  15:07  
So go into the left side, click on appearance, scroll down, click on footer. And where's my blog link. So here's my link my whole blog, I'm going to copy that. Go over here, go down to footer settings, links, expand, disclaimers and stuff, add link, name, the MXT blog, and post my URL in there. And then you would just click outside to save that, just like that saved.

Steve Knots  15:38  
Now, I don't have my real music blog set up on this site. So I don't want to offer them a recipe about chocolate pudding experiences. I'm using my own personal envy site for demonstration so you can see what's going on. And add it to your footer. And it'll show up all the way at the bottom of your site. Down here in links. And that is what you do to set up your blog the first time, make some new posts and share them.

Steve Knots  16:03  
And this has been the User Experience podcast on the new blog feature. Now there is a audio only podcast version of this that you can listen to, which you will find as a link in this number of blog posts. And I'll be adding this video as a link to the knowledge base articles on the topic of how to create a blog. So that anywhere you're coming in, and then the universe, if you like reading the text file, listening to the audio, watching the video, we got you covered.

Steve Knots  16:25  
We're doing these interactive tutorials where you can actually build stuff along with me inside your member vault to get through the tech questions of where does it show up? When I enter the content field? What's the CTA link, I'm just here to help you build that stuff and see where it shows up. So you make the connection between Oh, there's my blog URL. Oh, there's my blog title. Oh, there's my episode title. There's the post content. The CTA image, the CTA link the CTA text description, so that you know when you're entering these things in on your dashboard, you know where they're going to show up on the users side. So you're 100% sure that your people are going to come in and have a great experience playing with your member vault so they can get some engagement points and take one step closer to working with you in your business in your community and being successful.

Steve Knots  17:10  
And that's what it's all about when success when I say success, I don't mean only you making money with member vault, I mean your students and customers and clients achieving the success that you're bringing them to, because then they're going to talk to their friends and become a marketing channel to bring other people into what you're doing. It's all about the user success on the layer going through you for longer vision. That's what's so much fun about that we are all about relationships and helping you do better with what you do. Thanks for listening. I'm Steve knots and I'll see you next week for another episode.