Follow my blog with BloglovinWhat is BlogLovin ?
Bloglovin in short is a RSS reader. You can add your favorite blogs that have rss to your profile and see them all in one place! Best of all is if you used Google Reader you are able to import your list.
Bloglovin has this to say about what they are all about:“Reading blogs can be a pain in the ass. We created bloglovin´ so you wouldn’t have to visit un-updated blogs, open ten windows in your browser, or forget your favorite blogs web-addresses. With bloglovin´ we wanted to make your blog reading fun and easy.”Add Your Blog to Blog Lovin
What is Blog Lovin & How to Setup & Use
Sign up for BlogLovin Account
Visit
bloglovin.com and sign up for an account, you are able to use your facebook profile or an email address. The perks of using a facebook login is that bloglovin can publish your new blog posts to your blogs facebook page.
Once you have signed up and verified your email (if you choose that option) you are asked if you would like to import your google reader list. You are then taken to your “home page”. My page is empty because I did not import anything from google reader.
Setup Your BlogLovin Profile
You then want to setup your bloglovin. Click your Profile in the top right corner and then on settings.
Under settings you are able to change your email and password as well as your profile info. Pick a user name based on your blog if you have only one blog or use your name or an alias if you have multiple blogs. I found that even though my profile was setup via an email address I could pull the picture from my facebook profile because I am signed in on my browser.
Fill your about out so that people know who they are following. Then click to add your blog.
Add Yout Blog to BlogLovin
Click on “Claim Blog”
Type your domain in the search field and click on one of the results that pop up.
Now you need to verify that you actually own the blog by adding some code to a blog post. Copy the code and paste it in your newest blog post or make a completely new one informing your followers that you are now available to follow on bloglovin (paste this code in your HTML view). Once you have updated or published your post. Click on the “claim blog” button.
Your blog is now available on your profile!
Further down the setting page you might want to setup the other settings before leaving. I love to receive an email daily with new posts simply because I haven’t yet set myself up in the routine of checking bloglovin daily. It can get very overwhelming if you don’t check for a few days! My routine for looking at my email is already firmly set in place.
Once you have claimed your blog you will want to set it up. Click on your name in the top right and on “my blog”.
Click on the edit blog info button.
A new window pops up and you are able to fill in all your details. You can also use this to just update your blogs thumbnail as it doesn’t auto update currently.
To connect your blog to facebook click the “connect your blog to facebook” link and follow the requests for authorization on facebook.
You all setup for your profile.
You can either give out your profile link which leads to this page displaying all your blogs or the individual blogs link. Get this by clicking on the name of your blog and copying the url in the address bar.
Again via your name in the top right corner, select “follow buttons”.
Here you have a choice of buttons. I would recommend the classic one which is the first one as everyone is using it and as such is recognizable for people to follow you.
Click on “get this icon” and copy the code to insert into your side bar. I use a plain Text widget to add it in my word press blogs.
This is what the icon looks like on the blog after I add some extra html to center it.
I use <p style=”text-align: center;”> in front of the code and then </p> at the end to close it off.
Now you are ready to add some blogs to follow! At the top in the search box, type the url of the blog you would like to follow then click the search icon. We use this if the blog does not have a button which will take us straight to the blogs profile.
On bloglovin you are able to also setup groups for the blogs you follow. You can either setup a new group when you follow someone new, add them to an existing group or edit the group later via the “following” option in your profile menu.
Once you click the blue “follow” button it will turn to a grey “following” button and an “add to a group” button will appear next to it. This only happens once, when you first follow the blog. To edit late you can go to the “following” option as previously said.
Add the new blog to an existing group or create a new group in the field provided.
Blogs that are not in a group are filed under “unsorted blogs”. You can edit this once again under the “following” menu option.
Below we can see a few things. Here I have selected one of my groups to read. Notice how the top post compares to the second post that is grayed out? That’s because I have read it or marked it read.
On the left is a little menu of all the groups you have made. (Bloglovin is busy with a beta where this menu appears on the right instead.) At the top you can select all your unread posts, or even those that you liked so that you could re-read them later.
In general the display is simple enough to click around and see what happens
Bloglovin also has an app on the app store for your idevice.
I hope you have found this rather lengthy and full of screenshots post helpful! Please do leave me a comment if you have any questions!
About the Guest Author
SAHM to 3 little ones, 4 years and under. I do most of those mommy things like bake, craft, sew, I even crochet on occasion. I have a passion for writing mothering and kid related posts at Powerful Mothering and Sharing my blogging knowledge at Blog Hangout.
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