In this brief tutorial, we’ll walk you through the steps of integrating DropInBlog with Kajabi. Adding DropInBlog to Kajabi is a quick, fun, educational, and rewarding experience. As a fully-featured blogging platform with a built-in SEO Analyzer, DropInBlog can help you achieve multiple objectives:
- Implement your content marketing strategy more efficiently.
- Spread the word about your business.
- Extend your reach to new audiences.
- Bring more traffic to your Kajabi site.
- Translate this traffic into conversions.
The emphasis here is on help. Because, in the end, any software, no matter how good, is just a tool in the hands of a craftsperson. How you use it is crucial. But, without an adequate tool, you can’t create art. So, let’s see how to add this blogging tool to your Kajabi toolbox.
What Is Kajabi?
Just as a reminder, Kajabi is an all-in-one web platform that allows you to create websites, landing pages, membership sites, courses, podcasts, sales pipelines, and more. Needless to say, as an all-in-one platform suitable for building a strong online presence, it includes analytics, automation, marketing, and payment processing tools.
Can You Blog on Kajabi?
Yes, Kajabi comes with a native blogging solution. You’ll find it on your admin dashboard under the Website option placed on the left sidebar. It’s a decent blogging tool with the usual blogging features that allow you to:
- Set a publishing date.
- Attach a video or audio to your posts.
- Add a tag, page description, page title, and an image alt attribute.
- Choose a social image, and more.
However, since Kajabi is far from a full-fledged blogging platform, its native blogging solution has limited capabilities and falls short in certain areas. For instance, the Kajabi blogging tool is not ideal for entrepreneurs and marketers who’d like to emphasize content marketing.
In contrast, this is where DropInBlog shines. DropInBlog gives you significantly more control by:
- Making it easier for you to add categories.
- Allowing you to optimize SEO for each post.
- Allowing you to add multiple contributors that collaborate on your blog without giving them access to your entire website.
- Enabling you to optimize your content in line with the best current SEO practices through the previously mentioned SEO Analyzer, and more.
DropInBlog offers so much more to entrepreneurs and marketers who prioritize content marketing than the built-in Kajabi blogging app. The best way to see this is through hands-on experience with this blogging platform.
Prerequisites
Speaking of hands-on experience, DropInBlog allows you to kick the tires of the platform for 14 days for free. Setting up an account and starting a free trial is all you need in order to add DropInBlog to Kajabi.
As far as Kajabi is concerned, you can integrate this platform with DropInBlog regardless of which plan you subscribe to – Basic ($149/month), Growth ($199/month), or Pro ($399/month).
Two Ways to Use DropInBlog with Kajabi
There are two ways to use DropInBlog with Kajabi:
- Completely substitute DropInBlog for the Kajabi built-in blog.
- Add DropInBlog as a secondary blog to Kajabi along with its built-in blog.
One of the main advantages of replacing the Kajabi blog with DropInBlog is that this allows you to have your blog located at the /blog URL, as you’ll see very soon.
In this tutorial, we’ll be primarily concerned with explaining how to replace the Kajabi blog with DropInBlog. However, we won’t leave out a description of how to add DropInBlog as a secondary blog either.
How to Replace the Kajabi Blog with DropInBlog
Hide the Elements of the Built-in Blog
Since we’re replacing the Kajabi blog, the first thing we need to do is hide the elements of the built-in blog. To do that, log in to your Kajabi account, click Website, then Pages. Find your Kajabi blog page and click Customize, just like in the picture below:
Next, click the Blog Listings option located on the left sidebar:
Scroll (down) until you see Sidebar. Uncheck all four items under the name Sidebar and click Save. The purpose of this step is to hide the sidebar of the built-in blog.
Remove the Posts Shown on the Built-in Blog
To completely remove any trace of the built-in blog, you need to either unpublish or delete the existing built-in blog posts, if there are any. This requires you to go a few clicks back and then click Blog under Website. When you do that, you’ll see a table of all the existing blog posts.
Clicking the Edit icon will show you the Visibility panel under which you’ll see two options: Published and Unpublished. Select the latter and click Save if you want to get rid of the posts without deleting them.
If the opposite is true and you prefer not just to hide, but to completely remove the built-in blog posts, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page until you see Delete Blog Post. Click this option and confirm your choice. Kajabi will automatically delete the post, so there’s no need to save the changes.
Unfortunately, there’s no possibility to delete the blog posts in bulk, so you’ll have to repeat the same process for each of the remaining posts.
Copy the Custom Code from DropInBlog
We’ve cleared the way for DropInBlog, and now it’s time to go over the few steps that will allow us to integrate it with Kajabi.
Just like before, head back to Website and click Pages. Find the Blog page again, and click Customize (the palette icon that shows up to the left of the System icon when you hover).
Your blog page should now be blank, aside from your website header and footer. If there's anything additional on the page you'd like to remove, just go ahead and delete the sections. We're now ready to integrate DropInBlog!
Click Add Section, scroll to the bottom, select Custom Code, and click Add.
You’ll notice a new content block with a blue Edit button in the middle. Click the button. When you do that, you’ll see a Code section on the left side.
This is where you need to execute the most important step. Leave Kajabi open, open a new tab in your browser, and head over to DropInBlog. Log in to your DropInBlog account, then click Code & Layout in the navigation bar.
This will lead you to the following page:
Copy the code from Step 1 and Step 2, and paste it into the Code section in Kajabi. One caveat: on the line where it says var dib_id = ‘ ’, instead of a blank space, you’ll see a combination of uppercase letters and numbers – this is your unique DropInBlog ID (we hid ours here for privacy reasons).
Just in case, here is the code again:
Step 1:
<script>
var dib_id = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';
</script>
<script src="https://io.dropinblog.com/js/embed.js"></script>
Step 2:
<div id="dib-posts"></div>
And this is what it looks like when you paste it into Kajabi:
You’ll notice (top of the sidebar in the image above) that by default the width of the block is set to six columns. You can adjust it in line with your taste and preference by clicking the gray squares. For instance, if you want your new block content to take all the available space (12 columns), just click the last gray square as in the following picture:
You can make other changes as well, such as modifying the background, experimenting with the layout, playing around with animations, etc. When you’re happy with the adjustments, click the Save button at the bottom of the sidebar, and head back to Pages.
Add Your Blog URL to DropInBlog
You’re one step away from finalizing the integration of DropInBlog with Kajabi. The last thing you need to do is copy your blog URL and paste it into DropInBlog. Click the three dots right next to System, then select Copy URL from the dropdown menu.
When you do that, you’ll see a short message in the bottom right corner saying “Text has been copied to your clipboard.” Now go to DropInBlog again, click Settings in the navigation bar, and paste your blog URL in the indicated field on the Settings page.
For these changes to take effect, scroll down the page and click Save All Changes.
And just like that, you have successfully integrated DropInBlog with Kajabi, replacing the built-in blog with a modern, elegant, and powerful blogging app. Congratulations! 🥳
To see your blog in its full splendor, head back to Kajabi, click Pages, and preview your blog home page.
Finally, this is your blog home page:
If you notice that there’s some extra white space at the top of the page, like in the image above, you can easily change this by adding custom CSS in DropInBlog. Just head over to your DropInBlog account and click Code & Layout in the navigation bar. Scroll down until you see the Custom CSS section. This is where you can add your own styles to customize the look of your blog.
How to Add DropInBlog and Keep the Kajabi Built-in Blog
To add DropInBlog and keep the Kajabi built-in blog, you need to create a new page in Kajabi where you can insert the code from DropInBlog.
As we mentioned before, one of the main downsides to this method is that you won’t be able to use the page slug (URL) /blog because it’s already used by the built-in blog. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use the name “Blog” for your new page in the menu bar or can’t have the page title be “Blog.” You’re free to use whichever name you want; it’s just the page URL that can’t contain “blog” in its name.
The process of adding DropInBlog as a secondary blog is almost the same as when you’re replacing the built-in blog. For this reason, we won’t go into detail when describing this process. Instead, we’ll single out only the major differences and outline the integration steps. So, let’s see how to add DropInBlog as a secondary blog on Kajabi.
Create a New Website Page
The first step is to create a new page. From your Kajabi admin, click Website and then click Pages. Click the blue New Website Page button in the upper right corner, and give your new page a name; we’ll call it “Articles.” After you enter the name, click Customize Page.
Make Room for DropInBlog
This will lead you to a familiar place: the Kajabi editor. Similar to when replacing the built-in blog, what you’ll want to do here is get rid of the unnecessary content blocks and clear the path for DropInBlog. This is what we see currently:
To remove a block, just click the Edit button (usually in the middle of the block) then scroll down to the bottom until you see Delete This Block. Click this button and you’ll have the block removed.
An alternative and somewhat faster method is simply to delete a whole section. Instead of clicking a specific block, click somewhere inside the section you want to remove, scroll down to the bottom and click Delete This Section, just like in the following image:
Regardless of whether you decide to have a blank page or keep certain existing blocks/sections, keep in mind to click Save whenever you delete a part of the page. Otherwise, you’ll have to repeat the same process over again.
Further Steps
All the following steps are virtually the same and in the same order as when you’re completely substituting the DropInBlog for the Kajabi blog. In a nutshell, the process looks like this:
- Add a new section.
- Add a Custom Block.
- Edit the block that appears.
- Copy the Step 1 and Step 2 code from DropInBlog.
- Paste the code into the code field.
- Save the changes.
- Adjust the page width as you like by increasing the number of columns (optional).
- Copy your newly-created page URL.
- Paste the URL into DropInBlog Settings.
- Save the changes (in DropInBlog).
We almost forgot: In case you want to update your home page heading, you can do that on the DropInBlog Settings page, and then click Save All Changes. This is optional, so it’s completely up to you whether you update the page heading or not – it won’t affect the integration process.
Happy Blogging!
Now you know how to integrate DropInBlog with Kajabi and use it either as an exclusive blogging solution or as a secondary blog. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us – we’ll be more than happy to help. Until next time, happy blogging!