Quick Overview of 3AM Blog

[00:00] Hey John, happy Monday man. So, got the blog stood up. I'm excited to show you this. Hopefully I won't ramble for too long.

[00:10] So, the blog kind of consists of a few different pieces. There's a template page, which is what every blog post actually lives on. Then there's a blog index, which is what we're looking at now.

[00:20] And then that is connected and powered by a CMS, which is the blog CMS. So, I'll just kind of quickly go through the pieces, give you a sense of what's what, and then kind of how to edit some of the different things.

[00:30] So, keeping it really simple, of course, there's text that probably needs to be edited. This is not the most compelling thing in the hero here, so that's probably worth taking a look at.

[00:40] Generally, you guys like fairly minimal design language, so I try to keep this really simple and really plain. But just let me know if you want me to add anything or modify it in any way.

[00:50] If I just jump into one of these, you'll see that this is what the blog posts themselves look like. Again, trying to keep it really clean and simple.

[01:00] I didn't really have to do that much reformatting, frankly, when pasting the stuff in. Some of the things you'll get some hang-up on, like numbered items and stuff.

[01:10] You want to make sure that you're always trying to strike at least one H1 through H3, just for good SEO. So, you already have an H1 there. You never need another one.

[01:20] So, H2, H2, H2, H2, H3, H3, H3, H2. There's a good structure there that helps Google understand that all of the stuff is under that same thing.

[01:30] So, one thing to note. Additionally, these images here that were in the post, they were fine, except they were SVGs.

[01:40] SVGs generally, for the web, are the way to go. But in the case of using a rich text editor, they don't come with a specific pixel size.

[01:50] So, the HTML just sort of makes it too small, basically. So, instead, I exported them as a PNG, which allows me to kind of push on the size.

[02:00] I'll show you that in a second. So, you can see all that's there. And then, at the bottom, we have the two, kind of the CTA section and the about 3 a.m. section.

[02:10] So, I'll show you some functionality on that as well. But, yeah, okay. So, that's pretty much the two pages. So, how does this all work?

[02:20] So, there's a CMS called Blogs, and that has all the fields in it that populate each of the index cards and the post itself.

[02:30] And for that matter, it pushes stuff to Google and shares it with the world or whatever, right? It puts it into the sitemap and some other different things. So, what are the fields? We have the name at the top.

[02:40] It's going to be used as the title and the slug. That's going to basically build where the actual post lives on the Internet. And then, the rest is the custom fields. So, we have a vanity date.

[02:50] That's basically going to be the date that you want it to appear that it was published. Yes, Google can see when new items showed up, but they're not checking frequently enough on sites that they don't sell a lot of ads against.

[03:00] So, the vanity date is a good way to just kind of put the date out there such that it puts a date next to it. It's good in this instance, too.

[03:10] If the thing was already published somewhere else and you want a back date, it's easy to do. The type. So, I have general and case study just based on what the two were.

[03:20] We can add more here later. This is only for back end use at the moment anyway. I'm not doing anything with it yet. So, I sort of assume that at some point there might be some sort of filtering or other functionality where we would need to know kind of like what something is.

[03:30] So, for now, just populate it, but don't worry about it showing up anymore. The blog summary.

[03:40] So, I generated a summary for each of the two blog posts. Just used GPT and had it make a summary of the entire body down to 160 characters, which is sort of the ideal for SEO.

[03:50] The summary itself shows up on the blog cards on the index there and then also in the SEO meta description for where the page is pasted and the little description shows up below it.

[04:10] That would be this text. Then we have, of course, the post body, which is a rich text editor. If you've never used one of those, you probably haven't used the internet. They're pretty standard.

[04:20] So, you have like your bold, italics, all these sort of fancy styles. You can switch between headings or not. If you want to add new things, you can just go to hit return and then you'll get the list.

[04:30] So, some of them are the same. You get the formatting one at the top there and then you have image, video, rich content, HTML, embed, and a code block.

[04:40] So, you can do lots of stuff in there if you want to really build some things out. Okay, so now the other custom fields.

[04:50] So, at the bottom, we have a meta image. Right now, only one of these has a meta image. It looks like you guys made this via maybe Canva or something like that.

[05:30] There is also a call to action, so on each of the blog cards there is a read now, a little bit of text. If you swap it here it will change that read now text on this item's card on the homepage

[05:40] there. So if you need to use that. Then at the bottom of each of the posts is also a CTA.

[05:50] So we have this CTA, I pulled this off of the LinkedIn text but then kind of built some functionality around it. So if you just leave it alone it will look like this on every one of the posts and this

[06:00] takes you to the getting started page. If you decide no, I want to change this, I want it to be something more specific, then

[06:10] you can go ahead and change out what the CTA button text is and the large text is.

[06:20] So if you want to hide it all together you can do that as well, but if I were to do like hello world, that would be one, and then button text is good day, and then the link

[06:30] would be to google.com. If we go ahead and look at that you'll see that's what shows up there.

[06:40] So an easy way to kind of override it, I don't know if you're doing some sort of collaboration post or you have a deal or some sort of promo or something, you might want to use that there.

[06:50] Otherwise it will default to the getting started page. Okay and then about 3 a.m. So that's similar, always the same at the bottom of the page, this piece here.

[07:00] You don't want that there, then you can hop over here and hit hide, it should be all good to go.

[07:10] So that's pretty much the build, easy enough. Right now these two are currently live, you know, pop in there, see if you want to change any of the text or whatever. I checked the site's traffic right before I published it anyway, there's almost no traffic

[07:20] on the site at the moment. It looks like you guys have some referral stuff when you do like different campaigns or blasts or whatever, but there isn't any organic.

[07:30] That could be because we only had the one page, so there's not really enough cloud necessarily. I also, now that we have the blog, multiple pages, I enabled the site map functionality.

[07:40] So that will basically tell Google a map or whatever search engine, a map of all the

[07:50] pages on your site, make it a little bit easier for it to understand the structure and how to serve up the right things to the right folks who are searching for it. So that should be that.

[08:00] Let me know if you have any other questions. One big other thing actually, before I get off, if you want to have cloud work on this, right now we'll have to figure out how that will work.

[08:10] I have Codex work on my Webflow sites all the time. It can certainly handle anything in the CMS. So all of these basically turn into an endpoint in the API.

[08:20] So it can easily go and update, publish things, change out copy and all that sort of stuff. The hiccup will be around the ownership of the site because I basically have all my stuff

[08:30] authorized with my workspace, which your site is part of. So if you want to bring it out of your workspace, I'm happy to do that.

[08:40] You can still have maybe your agency contact to basically get in and have managing ability, but it will give you your ability to have your own credential set.

[08:50] So you could have your cloud code or cloud or whatever connect to it and do what you need to. Yes, otherwise there are some other kind of more tedious ways we could go about it, but

[09:00] let's start there. So yeah, let me know if there's any changes you want, design, you know, text function, whatever it is. Let me know.