Blog Tips

Various blogs are used as samples here, often Lantern's own.

The blog is made up of four types of pages.

The main blog page is the repository for all entries, and the list of blog categories. The most recent 15 entries will show on this page, with a link at the bottom to older entries.

Blog entries are associated with a calendar, and appear in reverse chronological order. The newest entry will always appear first.

Blogs look great when they include images, rather than just being a huge chunk of text. The use of interesting images (named well) also bring a lot of traffic to sites. It's also nice to use the !--readmore-- feature in long blog posts. That way, the blog overview page presents an introduction to many subjects, and users can pick and choose which they click through to in order to read the whole post. (For example, on Lantern Books, when you see a link to [Continue Reading...], the blogger has kindly used the !--readmore-- tag.
Category pages (like this Brooklyn category) are similar to the main blog page, except only posts within a given category appear: like product category pages!
Blog detail pages exist for every post. Posts are archived automatically, and are always able to be found through by searching and browsing. A merchandising feature of blogs on ecommerce sites is that relevant books can be associated with each post. That way, people who read an entry on a topic they are interested it will be exposed to your books on that topic. Any topic is relevant to blog about, as long as you can find a product to market with it!

Comments from blog readers are also visible on this page.
Blog author pages exist for every blog author. Like book author pages, they include a photo, a bio, and they also have an archived list of all of that person's blog entries.

Posting your blog entry is easy, but here are a few tips:

Follow the bullet pointed instructions on the blog entry form. They cover most situations that will arise. For special occasions, like posting videos, feel free to contact us and we'll help you out. Hint: posting your videos to YouTube makes life easy. There, many people will find your video that wouldn't have otherwise, and will then see the link to your site. Also, YouTube provides the code for embedding the video in your blog. Viola!
If you are serializing a topic, use different titles for each post. This makes the topic easy to follow, and more accurate. Rather than "Michael Jackson 1" and "Michael Jackson 47", use "Michael Jackson: Child Sensation" and Michael Jackson: Autopsy".

On this same topic: don't go back and update old blogs with new news—create a separate entry, and refer back to the previous post with a link to provide the background. Your readers will not know to backtrack to look for new material. And it's considered bad form in the blogging world! When old posts are updated, bloggers take special care to retain the original information, and note what has been updated and when. (http://www.homegrownevolution.com/2009/07/great-greywater-debate-pvc-or.html)
Blog categories do not have to be a strict reflection of your book categories. For example, Lantern has found categories "Brooklyn," "Sports," and "Travel" to be commonly used, even though they don't have much to do with our publishing program. It's best to build a couple of categories you know you'll use (like Author Events), and let the others grow organically.
Blogs can be scheduled to go live whenever you want. We write spur of the moment blogs, but we also have some important dates pre-programmed in. We forget to blog on September 11th nearly every year, even though we have several book that address the events of that day. Now we pre-program a blog to go live on that day.
It's not a bad idea to come up with some guidelines regarding image size, for all blog authors to follow.
Oh, why did I wait until #6 for this one—it's important! Write the text of your blog in a text program, not in the blog update tool. Collect all your link information in advance, and only enter the info into the tool when you're finished. Why? Because if two people are entering info into the tool at one time, one could lose their work. Don't let your moments of brilliance be lost: do your work in a text file. (Word introduces funny characters to the web, so better to use TextEdit or BBEdit or another plain text program.)
Don't mention websites (or books, or authors, or other blogs) without linking to them. Links are a great benefit of the web, and your readers expect you to use them. If you are having trouble writing links (based on the instructions on the blog entry form), try copying the code and replacing pieces of it rather than typing the link elements.
Image names cannot have spaces in them. "Allen Ginsburg.jpg" will break the page. Use "allenginsburg.jpg" or "allen_ginsburg.jpg" instead. Use the image alt tag! Blind people use the web, and the alt tag (and voice software) tells them what's there. ALSO, people with a need for speed have their browsers set to not load images. They also see your alt tags.
Use the "preview" function to make sure everything looks good before publishing your post. If you do publish it with mistakes, you can easily go back and fix them.

Have fun!