Presentation on the use of the Agro-Know blog aimed at the Agro-Know team; it could be adapted in order to fit other purposes, if it is found useful.

1. Using the Agro-Know blog
How to prepare my first Agro-Know blog post
Agro-Know Specialized Trainings
29/9/2014, Vassilis Protonotarios
Business Development: Marketing & Networks

2. What to expect today
• (short) Introduction to blogs/blogging
• Why the WordPress platform?
• Getting ideas for your blog posts
• How to create your first blog post
• How to embed images, videos and other
interesting stuff available online
• Disseminating your blog posts

3. (short) introduction to blogging

4. What is a blog?

6. Why bother blogging?
Personal
• Create own “web space”
• Describe your activities
– daily routine,
– work achievements,
– describe trips
– jot down ideas
• Photo-blog;
• Keep track of important
events;
• Expose yourself to the world;
Corporate
• Promote the company;
• Informal, more direct
presentation of company;
• Show the company culture;
• Present company’s updates;
• Let team members express
their work;
• Create a space for
discussion;

7. Yes, but do you blog?
• Wrote my first blog post back in 4/11/2007!
• It is still online 
• I am using Wordpress, Blogger and Tumblr
• At the same time
• I have tried other platforms, e.g. Posterous
• Currently trying to main 3 blogs
• Personal, professional, AK corporate
• Not enough time
• I am not extroverted
• At least I am less than average

8. The AK social media ecosystem

9. Connecting with other social media

10. The Agro-Know blog

12. Based on Wordpress
• Free & open source;
• based on PHP and MySQL;
– Easy to set up in a standard server
• The most popular blogging system in use on
the Web
– at >60 million websites
– Extensive support
– Wide variety of available plugins/themes
• Easy to use but not as attractive as others…

13. Agro-Know blog stats
(1/12/2013-26/9/2014)

14. Agro-Know blog stats
(1/12/2013-26/9/2014)

15. Under the hood

16. Access the Agro-Know blog

17. http://blog.agro-know.com
Last blog post in blog
home page
Bottom of the blog home
page
Click here

18. Enter your credentials
(let me know if you don’t have an account!)
After you enter
credentials, click here

19. Customize your profile

20. http://blog.agro-know.com/wp-admin/profile.php

21. Creating a blog post

22. What can I blog about?
Indicative list: Don’t feel restricted!
Anything related to Agro-Know
fits in the blog!
• Green topics;
• Start-ups;
• Team management;
• Internal trainings;
• AK events;

23. 1st step: Define the concept
• Some ideas:
– An update in the office
• Event, new project, new
process
– An update outside the office
• Your recent trip;
• Project meeting;
• Participation in event;
• Some related news or events;
• An interesting video, news
item etc.
– Describe your daily work
• In an interesting way!

24. 2nd step: Write the post!

25. The (tweaked) WordPress text editor

26. Insert image
Three options:
1. Already available online
• Copy-paste the URL of the image
2. Already uploaded in the blog
• Search for commonly-used terms
• Avoid duplication
3. Need to upload it to the blog
• Resize if needed; please not >1MB per image!
• Rename it to something that makes sense
• Respect copyrights; mention source in the post/caption

27. Insert Media: Available options

28. Slideshows from AK Flickr
• If you have lots of images from e.g. event,
consider uploading them to AK Flickr
– Contact me about that
• Creating a slideshow from specific Flickr set is
easy but needs a trick!

29. Click on save after selecting set & size

30. Insert video

31. Presentations from SlideShare (1)

32. Presentations from SlideShare (2)

33. Embed tweets
• Just copy-paste the embed code in your post

34. Embed Facebook posts
• Just copy-paste the embed code in your post

35. Before you submit!
• Preview the blog post and fix any issues
– Spelling errors, links not working, large/tiny
images;
• Categories: Select at least one of the available
categories for your post;
• Tags: Define at least 3 tags (=keywords);
• Featured image: Set one of the images used in
your post as a featured image!

37. Tips for your posts
• Add hyperlinks (URLs) where applicable;
– Your contribution to a linked-data based world!
– Linking to existing AK blog posts is more than
welcome
• Add related images, videos and presentations;
– Much more interesting than plain text
• Use headings for longs texts
– Makes reading easier

38. Disseminating your post
• Vassilis checks out the AK blog on a daily basis
– I will use the AK social media channels for
promoting your posts
• Everyone is invited to use his own social
media channels
– Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc.

39. Take-home messages
• Get ideas from everything related to AK 
• No need for long posts; short ones with
interesting concept & visual “candies” are fine!
• Respect copyrights but feel free to reproduce
with acknowledgement
– Text, videos, images
• The first post is the hardest!