In this post, we will be covering what GrooveBlog is, it’s main features and whether it would be the right fit for you.
GrooveBlog is a platform within the Groove ecosystem that allows anyone to build and maintain a blog for their online business. It is user-friendly and intuitive for any new blogger to set up and start using. It doesn’t have advanced features like you would find with WordPress and is mainly used to supplement an already existing online business.
If you are new to Groove, read this article where you can learn everything you need to know about it: Everything You Need To Know About Groove.cm.
Let’s now take a look at how to set up a blog with GrooveBlog.
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Start a blog website with GrooveBlog
First of all, you need to sign up for a free Groove account in order to start using GrooveBlog. If you haven’t already, go ahead and click the button below to sign up.
Next, select the GrooveBlog tile in the main dashboard area under “Quick Links” or alternatively, hover over the Groove logo and select GrooveBlog.
Then press “New Blog”.
Give you blog a name and also create a unique URL name for your blog. For now, your blog site will be {subdomain}.grooveblog.com. Later on, you can switch this out to your own domain. Once you’ve filled in the details, press “Done” and wait till your new blog gets created.
Once it’s created, you will be redirected to a preview of your blog. In another tab, go to the URL that you created in the previous step to confirm that your blog is live and running.
Back on your Groove portal, you’ll notice there are more menu options on the left panel. Here is where we can manage our newly created blog.
Click through each of them to get an idea of the major functionality.
Let’s look at each one starting from the top.
Home
Returns back to the GrooveBlog home dashboard where you can see a list of all your Groove blogs.
Publish
Publishes the latest changes you’ve made on your blog to the live website.
Posts
Displays the full list of all your blog posts where you can view, manage and delete any post associated to your Groove blog.
Categories
A place to maintain all the different categories for your blog posts which can help organize your blogs better. Works pretty much exactly the same way as the categories in WordPress.
Themes
Change the look and feel of your blog website overall.
Gives you the ability to customize the header and footer links of your blog posts.
Settings
Provides the overall blog website settings. Here is where you can manage SEO settings, upload a favicon and also setup a custom domain.
How to change the look and feel of my GrooveBlog?
Go to Themes and select “Customize Theme”.
On the right panel, go through and play with the settings to change the appearance to how you want it. You can change colors to match your preferred palette.
There are 2 tabs on the Customize panel; Appearance and Layout.
Appearance allows you to change mostly the colors and fonts. Layout allows you to customize the elements on your blog site. You can customize the Home page, Blog post pages and the Categories pages.
Once you’re happy with everything, press “Save” and navigate to your blog site URL to make sure everything looks good.
How to create a new post in GrooveBlog?
Go to Posts on the left hand panel and then press “New Post”.
The rest is fairly straightforward.
You would write your title and content in the main canvas area.
If you press the “+” icon, it will give you 3 more icons. This allows you to upload images, embed videos and add custom HTML respectively.
Once you’re done writing your post, git the gear icon (Settings) to and fill in the info that comes up in the right panel. This metadata is important to help your content get found easily, especially for SEO purposes.
You can choose to “Save Draft” if you want to come back to finishing your post later. Or if you’re done, you can press “Preview” to see what your post would look like when published. If it’s all good to go live, you can then press the “Publish” button and view your blog post by visiting your site directly.
Latest GrooveBlog update
As of now, there is only GrooveBlog theme called “GrooveBlog Classic”. There are plans to add a library of themes, similar to what you would find in WordPress. At the moment though, we have to make do with the one theme for now. You would have to customize the appearance and layout considerably to get rid of that GrooveBlog-ey feel.
There are also plans to integrate GrooveBlog with the other apps in-built into the Groove suite. This will allow you to modify your blog pages using GroovePages which is a significantly more powerful page builder and customizer then what you can find with GrooveBlog.
If you’re interested in building a website from scratch using GroovePages, then follow this tutorial: Build A Landing Page Using GroovePages.
Is GrooveBlog right for you?
If you’re looking to set up a supplementary blog as part of an existing online business that you run, GrooveBlog would be a good fit as people can land on your blog to learn more about you and your services.
If you’re looking to build small dedicated websites that are hyper-focused on small niches, GrooveBlog would be a good fit as it’s quick to build and set up and also the pages load super fast compared to WordPress. Google loves pages that load fast and this can provide benefits in terms of SEO.
If you’re looking to start a full-time blog, then GrooveBlog is definitely NOT the right fit. You are better off using something like WordPress as it has a lot more features, plugins, and advanced customization that you won’t find with GrooveBlog. WordPress has simply been around much longer and has a lot of people building templates and tools for WordPress. There are so many SEO tools you can integrate with WordPress that would be more beneficial to a full-time blogger.
Similarly, if you need a blog website that looks unique, then GrooveBlog is also NOT a good fit as of now. There is only theme available and there is only so much customization you can do. You would be better off using WordPress (even though it’s slightly slower), since they have millions of templates you can use.
So all in all, GrooveBlog is a simple blogging platform that is used to help you quickly and easily build out a blog for your online business. You will need a Groove account in order to use GrooveBlog. Go ahead and sign up for a free Groove account by clicking the button below and start using GrooveBlog.
