How to Create a Blog
Blogs exist as a great way to centralize a film’s information such as screening times, photos, videos, press releases, and more. Blogs can help legitimize and improve the overall appearance of your promotions as they offer a high level of visual customization.
Most blogging services offer a series of tools that will help improve the function and appearance of your blog. The most common features you will utilize for your promotions are posts, pages, themes, and widgets.
Blog Services
There are several free services for hosting blogs, such as Blogger and WordPress.
Blogger
The most well-known free blogging service is Blogger. Blogger offers a simple web address (yourfilm.blogspot.com), a large community of users, as well as ease of set up. If you sign up for a Google account (which includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and more) you are automatically given a Blogger account.
Check out a full list of Blogger features.
WordPress
Another popular and powerful blogging service is WordPress. WordPress offers free hosting and a simple web address (yourfilm.wordpress.com) in addition to several advanced features over Blogger.
Check out a full list of WordPress features.
Blog Basics
Posts
Posts are dated news entries you can use to update your audience with new information. This is typically the primary function of most blogs.
The first area a user comes to on the blog for the film Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides is the news posts.
More on posts:
Pages
Pages are intended for static content such as screening times, contact, press, etc. Blogger and WordPress will automatically create a navigation menu for the user to access these static pages.
More on pages:
Be aware that static pages are an “in development” feature on Blogger and you will need to be in “Blogger In Draft” mode to use them.
Themes
Themes (called Layouts on Blogger) allow you to customize the look of your blog. The content of the blog will remain the same but the visuals will change.
The blog for the film Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides uses a rather standard WordPress theme. However themes can be used to make a blog look vastly different.
More on themes:
Widgets
Widgets (called Gadgets on Blogger) are movable pieces of content that can add functionality and help you to easily customize your blog. For computer programmers, the term Widget means a chunk of computer code that can be easily installed in your blog or webpage to perform a particular function.
Widgets can be anything from calendar of events to a news archive, RSS feed, or even an empty box for you to add any content you want. Typically you can add widgets from the settings area of your blog.
More on widgets:
Additional Help
Linking and Search Engine Optimization
If some other blogger creates a link to your blog, the reader can click on that link and go to your blog. Similarly, when a reader types a search into Google, you want the link to your blog to be among the first few sites that come up. Here is a post about the ways you can help to make your blog one of the top responses when someone is searching on Google.
Search engines (like Google) rank all the possible responses to a given search. The most highly ranked sites are the ones that are connected to other highly-trafficked sites by links. In other words, Google pays special attention to blogs that link to other blogs and websites. And a blog with lots of links from quality sites will get a higher ranking than a blog without any links.
You should also pay close attention to the “headlines” and “tags” you create to describe your posts. Using words that are likely to be searched will tend to increase your ranking on search engines.
And, perhaps most importantly, you should try to get other bloggers to link back to your site. Traffic from quality sites to your site is one of the key indicators search engines look for when deciding whether your blog is going to show up when someone searches on a topic.
One way to get other bloggers to link to you is to write an email to the webmaster of a particular blog to let them know that you’ve created a post that they might want to link to. Give them the URL and tell them how much you like their blog. If they like what you’ve written, they may post the link. Once their readers start to click on your link, your search engine ranking will go up. If another blogger links to your blog, you get a shot at his or her readers checking out your site. And search engines (e.g., Google) will notice that other quality blogs are linking to you.
General Blogging Help
For general assistance refer to:
Getting a Domain Name
You can purchase a domain name (yourfilm.com) through both Blogger and WordPress. Having your own domain name is ideal for promotional material, as it indicates a higher level of legitimacy, is shorter, and easier to remember.
More on domains:
Hosting a Blog
When using the free version of WordPress you will have access to a limited number of resources provided. However, if you install WordPress on your own server you can install additional third party themes and plugins that provide even more customization.
More on hosting:
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Licensed by Randy Finch and Nick Martinolich under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. This license allows you to copy, distribute, and transmit this work as well as create derivative works. Any copies or derivative works may not be used for commercial purposes, must be distributed under a same or similar license, and in addition must contain the following language: “The Film Fest Marketing Project was developed by Randy Finch, Nick Martinolich, Sam Torres, Alex Bowser, Morgan English, Masha Murakhovsky, Jeph Alexander, and the faculty and students of the University of Central Florida’s Film Department, working with the Florida Film Festival, and with the support of the Sarasota Film Institute.”
