How to set up your blog with Bullet
Before you read this please check out and understand Bullet’s Blog Notion structure using this link.
Creating a blog using our templates
Bullet has a gallery of templates for you to start with. You can duplicate one of these blog templates to get started:
A step-by-step procedure to duplicate a template to your Notion page can be found here.
Adding a blog to an existing Bullet website
To add a blog to your existing Bullet website, follow the steps below.
- First, create a new page (a new row) in your primary database and set the page type to Blog.
- Simply use any of our blog templates as a reference to build a similar database structure in your newly created blog page. Check this link.
- Update and add all the corresponding details in the authors and tags database.
- Next, go to Bullet’s dashboard and publish your website. Your blog will be published under the URL you’ve mentioned.
Understanding the Bullet blog structure in Notion
Bullet’s blog comes with a pre-defined notion structure for managing your blog data like posts, tags, and author information. Bullet parses and generates blog pages once it identifies the blog page type.
Changing Heading and Sub-heading
You can change the blog heading and sub-heading by editing the Page Title and Description property of the root blog page in Notion.
If there is no Description field, it will be fetched from the meta description field.
Posts, Tags, Authors
- The blog page contains the main blog database, which again contains secondary databases listed below to store necessary information.
- All the databases contain different properties associated with which are managed using the columns.
Posts: This is the Post database within which all your blog articles are stored and managed. You can add a new article by creating a new row here. Check this link to understand more.
Tags: Another database which contains a list all of all the tags you want your blogs to be categorized into. Check this link to understand more.
Authors: One more database contains the details of your authors with their names, websites and social media links. Check this link to understand more.
Featured: This database contains a comprehensive list of all the blogs you've pinned to the top of your blog section.
Post database properties
This page details the various properties you can manage for your blog posts in Notion.
Managing your blog post details in Notion
- Here, each row represents a single article and is represented as a page in your posts' Notion database.
- To write a new article, all you need to do is create a new row and fill in all the associated properties like slug, author, tags, and meta details.
Details of Post Database Properties
The posts database has multiple columns where you manage different properties of your blog posts, listed below.
- Page Title: Used as a title of the blog post.
- Cover image/Thumbnail: You can add a cover image of your choice to your Notion page. This will be displayed as the thumbnail of your blogs on your blog page. You'll have a default thumbnail if you don't add any image here.
- Slug: This is the last part of your URL. Set this to be unique and related to the content of the page. Your page title will automatically become your slug if you leave this slot empty.
- Publish: You have to check this before hitting "Publish" in the Bullet dashboard.
- Description: This description is to summarize your blog. This will be displayed below your blog thumbnail on your blog page to let the users know what the blog is about.
- Meta Title: This is the text that is displayed on search engine result pages and browser tabs to indicate the topic of a webpage.
- Date: This Date field represents when the article is published. If this date is in the future, Bullet understands that this post is scheduled for a later date and won't publish the post. All the posts in the list pages are sorted by the date field in descending order.
- Meta Description: This is to interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch to convince the user that the page is exactly what they're looking for. Your meta description will be taken from your description if you don't enter anything in this slot.
- Meta Keywords: Meta keywords are meta tags that you can use to give search engines more information about a page's content.
- Author: Choose an author from your list of authors or create a new author from the main database
- Tags: Choose relevant tags from your list or create new tags from your main database
- Related Posts: It is a self-referencing relation field to the Posts table. You can select up to 3 posts that will be populated under related posts for the current posts. If you leave this empty, Bullet will automatically pick related posts based on tags and authors.
Make sure to fill in all of this before publishing your blog post. This helps boost your site SEO!
Note: you can add other properties like status, image creation, content cluster, keyword(s) targeted in the column for your own purpose, and these properties won't affect or reflect within the actual blog properties like meta details, slug, and tag(s) while publishing it.
Managing the authors of your blog from Notion
The authors’ database is very important for Google’s EEAT score. You can add and manage your authors’ data in the Authors database.
Authors database properties
Icon: You can add your photo in the icon slot by clicking on “Add icon” - “Custom” - “Upload” and add your picture.
Author name: You can add the author’s name as the page title. In the above image, “Aswin Kumar” is the author.
Description: You can add the author’s description in this field. The value will be added below the author's name on the article page and inside the author's page.
URLs: You can then fill in all of the author’s available URLs in the respective slots. This includes website URL and social media such as LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook etc.
After creating an author here, you can automatically access and choose your author from a dropdown in your posts page as well as the post database column in your Notion.
Managing Tags for Blog Posts
The tags database contains the list of tags you assign your blog posts and categorize them and synced to your blog posts database.
Tags Database Properties Explained
These tags help describe a blog and allow it to be found by searching for those specific tags.
Name: Fill in the category/ topic you’re writing about. This could be general or niche-specific
Slug: This is the last part of the URL. You can find all the blogs that you’ve tagged using that tag through this URL.
Posts: The posts field is synced with the blog posts database and is fetched directly from there when this tag is assigned to a blog post.
Color: This is the color of the tag that shows up when assigned to a blog post.
Blog Settings
More settings
Navigate to the Bullet dashboard and select 'Blog' from the 'Site Settings' section to customize your blog page.
Hero Section Embed
You can now have the ability to embed any kind of Newsletter Signups, CTAs, and more by directly pasting their respective HTML codes into your Hero section.
Pagination & Infinite Scrolling
The pagination option allows you to specify the desired number of blogs to display per page.
By enabling infinite scrolling, you'll seamlessly load up the next batch of blogs as you reach the end of your scroll.
Post footer embeds
Adding comment/upvote widgets, newsletter signups, and call-to-action buttons helps users interact, stay informed, and take action, improving their experience.
Like embedding a Disqus comment widget or a CTA at the end of the post
Users can now embed comment/upvote widgets, newsletter signups, CTAs, and more at the end of the blog post.
Localization
The words mentioned below this feature will remain in static language unless they are changed by the users.
Made with Bullet