There’s almost no need to talk about the huge benefits of blogging today. But just as a reminder, a well-organized blog with high-quality content is the core element of any content marketing strategy. It’s already helping many businesses achieve their objectives – why not yours?
A blog can help you reach a wider audience, show the human face of your company, educate users about your brand, increase your website traffic, and boost your conversion rates. There are many benefits and hardly any drawbacks to creating one. For this reason, in this brief guide, we’ll lead you through the simple steps of creating a blog on Square.
What Is Square?
Square refers to multiple entities.
First, it’s a corporate company that changed its name to Block, Inc. in December 2021. Second, Square is one of the most prominent payment systems or, if you will, platforms. Third, and most importantly for us, it’s an e-commerce solution built by Square, whose full name is Square Online.
Since Square Online is where you can build a blog, in this guide when we talk about Square, we’ll mean Square Online. Square Online became possible thanks to the merger between Square and Weebly, the latter being an already famous website builder. Square acquired Weebly in 2018 and used its technologies and software solutions to develop the Square Online builder.
The Square Online builder continues to coexist with the Weebly builder. Still, unlike the latter, its sole purpose is to enable users and business owners to build e-commerce websites or online stores quickly and very straightforwardly.
Does Square Offer a Blog?
The answer is yes. Square does offer a blogging solution, or more accurately, something along the lines of a blogging functionality called Stories.
To get the taste of the Square Online Stories, you need to log in to your Square account and open your store/e-commerce website in the Square Online builder for editing. You need to add a new “Stories overview” page within the Square Online builder. If you can’t see it right away among the available page types, click “Show more.”
The following image shows how this looks in the Square Online builder:
You can see the “Stories overview” option in the left sidebar, accompanied by a brief explanation of its function. The description implies that the role of a story is approximately equivalent to a blog post. So, as Square describes it, you can publish your Stories to:
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Introduce your company to your audience.
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Promote new sales items.
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Keep your customers and visitors updated.
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Work on other promotional objectives that a blog allows you to achieve.
The Stories overview page contains links to your individual stories, i.e., posts. But to add a new Story, you can use the “Story” option displayed in the image above, right below “Stories overview.” Creating a new Story looks like this:
As the image above shows, you have some customization options at your disposal. In addition to customization, Square Online also allows you to optimize your posts for search engines (SEO). You can set your Story SEO through the “Page settings” option:
Setting your SEO options right and allowing Google and the rest of the search engines to index your Story pages is vital. By allowing you to do that, Square Online enables you to work on achieving better rankings and display your Stories, i.e., blog-like posts, higher on SERPs (search engine result pages).
However, Square Online’s blog-like functionality is rudimentary. It allows you to adjust a few basic SEO settings, but it doesn’t provide significant help. SEO is quite complex, so a tool that gives you feedback on your posts’ SEO performance is a must today. Simultaneously, it should offer practical tips on improving this crucial aspect of your online venture.
Square Online lacks an SEO tool, so you’ll be on your own in this. Don’t even get us started on the absence of a high-quality, fully-featured text editor.
SEO is one of the pillars of online businesses, and blogging is the heart of search engine optimization. Companies need feature-rich, powerful apps concentrated on blogging and content marketing. In addition, these apps need to meet today’s entrepreneurs’ design and practicality demands. Based on this, today’s blog has to:
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Have a modern design and interface that create a smooth user experience.
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Be simple to use and easy to get your head around.
A tool that makes this exact type of blog possible is DropInBlog. So, let’s see how to create a blog on Square with DropInBlog.
Prerequisites
What do you need to know and have before adding DropInBlog to Square? The following two points will help you:
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You need to sign up for a DropInBlog account. There’s a 14-day free trial, which is all you need to try this tool out on Square.
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To integrate Square with DropInBlog, you don’t even need a paid Square account. The Free plan includes everything you need to create a blog on Square.
That’s all you need to get started. Now, let’s see how to add DropInBlog to Square.
How to Create a Blog on Square, Step One: Open Your Square Website in the Editor
Provided that you have already signed in to your Square/Weebly account, the first thing you need to do is click the “Online” option in your Square Online admin dashboard.
Clicking the “Online” option will lead you to another side of the dashboard, where you’ll be able to see and edit all your existing websites. This step may lead you directly to the Square site to which you’d like to add a blog, like in our case. If that happens, just click the “Edit site” button, and you’ll find yourself inside the Square Online builder, which is the editor.
Alternatively, click “Website” on the left sidebar. That will show you a dropdown menu from which you’ll need to choose the “Edit Site” option.
If your target Square website is not the one Square shows you first, click the button right below the “Online” hamburger menu (top left in the previous image). In our case, it’s called “My Business.” However, keep in mind that yours will be something different, depending on the names of your Square-built websites.
Select the website you want to enrich with a blog and then click “Edit site,” just like in the second image in this section.
Step Two: Add a New Page
You’re now inside the Square Online builder/editor. The next step is to add a new blank page. To do that, click the plus sign on the navigation menu, then click “Page.”
Move your mouse cursor and hover over the “[blank page]” option. Select this option and name your page “Blog” or something appropriate. Finally, click the blue “Add” button.
The Square Online builder will automatically present you with your newly-created blank page when you finish this step.
Step Three: Embed the Integration Code From DropInBlog
The embed code step is one of the critical steps of the DropInBlog integration process. To prepare the ground for adding the embed code, click the “Add Section” option while keeping your “Blog” page open.
Scroll down until you see “Embed code” as one of the available sections. Click “Embed code” and pick one of the two suggested layout options. We recommend the first one on the left since it looks slightly better with DropInBlog.
When you click on the “Embed code” section in the middle of the page, the left sidebar will display several new possibilities. The most important for us is the “Code” box.
Leave everything as it is and head to DropInBlog. Log in to your account and click “Code & Layout” in the navigation bar. The next page you’ll see contains the code you need for your DropInBlog integration.
One note before we proceed; instead of the thick blue line under Step 1 between the single quotes after the “var dib_id =” part, you’ll see your unique DropInBlog ID. This information is private, so you shouldn’t reveal or share it publicly. That’s why we’re not showing ours here.
You can see the integration code in the image above, but we’ll show it to you once again, just in case.
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>
Returning to the DropInBlog integration process, you should copy the code from above and paste it into the Square Online builder. More precisely, copy the code from Step 1 and head back to Square. Paste it into the open “Code” box and repeat the same procedure with the Step 2 code. The upshot should be something like this:
You can’t see it from the image above, but we copied and pasted the code from both steps. The Square Online builder shows you instantly how your blog will look. Isn’t that fantastic?
Before saving your changes, you can toggle off or customize both the section title and section description.
When you finish the customization, you’ll have two choices. One is to save all the changes and return to work on your “Blog” page later, while the other is to publish your site with the newly-created blog.
You can postpone working on your blog by clicking the “Done” button in the uppermost part of the left sidebar. To publish your blog, just click the blue “Publish” button on the right.
Step Four: Copy Your Blog Page URL
This step is the last phase of creating a blog on Square with DropInBlog. It’s quick, effortless, and straightforward.
Even if you decide to postpone publishing your website, you’ll eventually have to make it publicly accessible. And when you do that, to complete the integration between DropInBlog and Square, the first thing you should do is copy your blog page URL and paste it into DropInBlog. We’ll show you how.
When you click “Publish,” you’ll see a popup like this one:
The highlighted part shows our website URL. We’re using a Square subdomain with our free account for illustrative purposes. You may buy a new custom domain or use one you already own. However, keep in mind that you’ll need a paid subscription to use a custom domain name. Whatever the case, the important thing is that it’s here in the popup where you’ll see your website URL.
To see your website and blog, click the blue URL in the upper part of the popup. A click on the URL will lead you to your website and show you how it looks on the web. The next thing to do is click “Blog” in the navigation menu, and you’ll see your blog in its splendor.
You must have noticed the highlighted URL in the image above. That’s our blog’s URL, but yours will look different. Copy the blog page URL and head back to DropInBlog.
Once inside your DropInBlog account, open the settings page by clicking “Settings” in the navigation menu. Paste the blog URL in the—you’ve guessed it—“Blog URL” field.
After you paste the URL, scroll down until you see a “Save All Changes” button. Click on the button to save your Square blog URL in DropInBlog. When DropInBlog confirms that everything went well, you’ll know you’re all set and ready to write a new chapter.
Things Worth Noting
As we saw, it only takes four simple steps to create an uber-cool, modern, robust blog on Square. But there’s much more you can do in DropInBlog to make your blog and blogging even more awesome and convenient.
Custom CSS
One of those things is you can add custom CSS to style your blog the way you want. To apply style changes directly from within your DropInBlog account, you need the “Code & Layout” page again. After you open the page, scroll down until you see the “Custom CSS” section under the rubric “Advanced.” If you click on “Custom CSS,” you’ll see the following:
You can write your custom CSS code in the specified area and beautify your blog page. DropInBlog even gives you an example of the syntax you can use.
Recent Posts Widget
Another great thing to do in DropInBlog is to add the recent posts widget to your website home page (or any other page that makes sense). As its name suggests, this widget will allow you to display your latest blog posts. The number of the blog posts is adjustable, so you can choose to show “any number of items that you want”—as DropInBlog says.
You only need two lines of code to show your recent blog posts on your Square site. As you might have expected, you’ll find the recent posts’ code on the “Code & Layout” page. Just like “Custom CSS,” the “Widget Code” falls under the “Advanced” category.
The procedure for adding the recent posts code is the same as the blog integration code. Let’s say you plan on adding this widget to your site home page. To do that, just add a new “Embed code” section to this page and copy the entire code you see in the image above into the “Code” box, just like in the image below:
The var dib_recent_posts = 3; part is where you can alter the number of posts you want to display. As you must have noticed in the image, we set the number of recent posts to two instead of three. That makes more sense to us, considering the page layout. You can do the same for your site.
The only thing you need to pay attention to when adding the recent posts widget is to place it in the most suitable and logical place on the page. You don’t want it to interrupt the existing sections’ order or logical sequence, so take note of that when adding this great DropInBlog tool to your website.
SEO Analyzer
The SEO Analyzer is not a tool you can add to Square or, for that matter, any other platform. It’s a native DropInBlog tool that analyzes your blog posts, evaluates their SEO score, and gives tips on how to improve your posts’ SEO. The SEO Analyzer is based on current SEO best practices. You can learn more about this tool in “Get better search engine rankings with the DropInBlog SEO Analyzer” and this entry from the DropInBlog support center.
Thank You, and Happy Blogging!
We're at the end of our guide on creating a blog on Square with DropInBlog. Thank you for sticking with us until the end - we hope you enjoyed the journey. If you'd like to ask us anything, don't hesitate - we're always here for you. Happy blogging, and all the best with your online venture!