How do I create a blog for my BigCommerce store

Okay, how do you create your blog on Bigcommerce? Well, you guys are in luck. It's super easy. And I'm going to show you guys how in this video, before we get started, my name is Kal, I'm a developer, a store owner, just like you and I run the E commerce growth community, a

free community for store owners, I'll leave the link in the description below. Alright, let me share my screen and I'll show you guys how to do it.

When you go into the backend of your big commerce store, you'll be here under um, and Bigcommerce is blog is built in you have it no matter what you have it even if you haven't been using it, it's there. And you know, it may it may need to be dialed up, look quiet. But I'm going to show you guys how to get to it, how to see it working on your store.

And you can always improve it from where it starts. So to get there, you want to go to storefront, just like you're going to webpages except go one blip down to where it says blog. And then here, you can write a bunch of blogs.

So if you don't have anything in here, which you probably don't, this is probably toggled to off, and you probably just don't see anything in here. So let's start out by writing your first blog, just click on the plus sign to create your first blog, call it my first blog. And here's where we can type some stuff. And this would be where the body of your post goes.

So type in as many paragraphs as you want. You can put an author in here if you want, you don't have to, you can put tags in here if you want. And you can use tags like categories, basically, where they're clickable to other things that are tagged the same thing. This right here is your summary thumbnail image, think about this as your like featured image in WordPress talk.

And you can you don't have to choose something but I'm going to just choose something I'm gonna choose this big old picture of an owl, or here. Yeah, let's do that. And then it's automatically gonna put a URL in here. And you can put a meta description if you like, for good SEO, I'm gonna leave that blank. And I'm just gonna hit publish, or you can see where it basically brought in the picture, the URL that I that I uploaded.

All right, click publish. And that blog is now live. Now, the post itself is going to be live as soon as you make that post, right. So here's my post. But if you click into the blog in the thumbnail, well, if I wasn't logged in as an administrator, then this wouldn't be able to show. So we do need to enable our our blog, right to actually show up for the rest of the world.

And we do that by hitting the toggle right here. Now, if we come up to our Web Pages menu, see the other thing that we need to do is actually make sure that it's in the menu. So in web pages, you'll see it listed here as blog, there is a checkmark. And basically, if you have it toggled on, then it should show up here with a checkmark. And whether or not it shows up in your menu depends on whether or not you have web pages set to show up in your menu in your theme.

Looks like at the moment this one doesn't. So I'm going to show you guys where to get to that. So you go to storefront themes. And on Cornerstone at least, this could be different if you're on a different theme. But if I go into cornerstone and click into theme styles, and then header and footer, there's a there's a toggle here that says Hide links to webpages.

And if I and toggle that and click publish, you can see now that it shows up in the previewer. And that's because basically it was set to not show any of our web pages previously whether they were set to visible or not.

And so now because I toggle that on, you can see it showing the about us and the contact us both with which had the green checkmark in the Web Pages menu, as well as the blog. So if I go back to the front end, and click refresh, now we can see it now we can navigate to it. Now we can click into the individual posts.

And so we've turned on our blog, we've made a sample blog, we've put a beautiful picture of an Al into our sample blog. And let me show you one more thing that you probably are going to want to know, which is if we go back into the customizer, and we click into let's see, I think it is global. Global. Where is it blog? Yes.

So under Global, again, this can be different on a different theme. But in Cornerstone on that global tab, we go to blog size of images and it says optimized for that theme. And it's never optimized for that theme because it puts them in crazy crazy small.

So I would come in here and change this to something like you know 800 And by 600. Okay, so what we're doing is we're setting the maximum size of that featured image. So if I come back in here into the preview mode and click into the blog perhaps I didn't upload this image big enough, but that's where we change that setting because by default, Cornerstone shows the tiniest, the tiniest blog images in the history of man.

And so you want to upload bigger ones, and you want to set that, you know, set that setting here so that you can so that you can see bigger images here on your blog. Let's see here, specify Oh, I see it didn't save it somehow.

That's what that's why it's not showing up. Right. Okay. Let's, let's really set it to 800 by 600. Now we got a big picture of it out perfect. Perfect when we polish that before fat finger anything else and we'll go back to the front end.

Beautiful big picture of an owl now, this is a big old picture of an owl with lots of whitespace you're probably not going to use an image like this but if you're gonna set this to 800 by 600, use Canva or whatever it is to create actual images the right size and they'll end up looking beautiful. Alright, so if you guys are just getting started Be sure to check out my course up there and leave me a comment below let me know what you guys are stuck on. You know I make these videos to help you guys out so the more you guys tell me the more I can help you. Alright, thanks so much.