Help

Below are simple instructions for getting started. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to e-mail us at editor@smartdatacollective.com

• Add an avatar image to your profile
• Add your blog to our incoming feed
• Create a post
• Changing your username
• Activating full RSS feeds | Feedburner | WordPress | Blogger | Typepad
• View, edit, or delete your feeds

Add an avatar image to your profile

Uploading an image for your profile (or avatar) is especially important because, without it, your posts cannot be considered for posting on our site. Your avatar also appears in comments placed on articles.

Once you are signed in as a registered member…

1. Click the Profile link on the top right
2. Click “Edit Profile” in the light gray user menu
3. In the tabs on the left, click “Business Card”
4. Next to the existing image, click “Remove” (optional)
5. Click “Browse” and chose the image you want to use from your hard drive. It’s best to use a small (800 pixels or less), square JPEG image for the avatar. These images are automatically resized and cropped so make sure you’re in the center with a bit of a margin for it to look its best.
6. Now click “Upload,” then scroll down and click “Save”
7. Give it a few minutes for the image to appear across the site.

Add your blog to our incoming feed

You can add your blog feed to Social Media Today to have your posts automatically sent to our content managers for approval. Please note that posts approval is not guaranteed and you must have an avatar image uploaded to your account to be considered.

1. From the navigation bar, hover over Post Here in the top navigation and click Add a Feed. You must be registered and logged in for this link to be active.
   
2. In the title field, enter the name of your feed or another way to identify it. Keep in mind the actual feed title will be pulled in as well.
3. In the “Feed URL” field, paste the URL of your RSS feed. Note: This is not the domain address of your blog but a separate “feed” address.
   • Feeds for Blogger accounts can be found by appending /feeds/posts/default?alt=rss to the site address
   • Feeds for WordPress accounts can be found by appending /?feed=rss2 to your homepage URL.
   • Information about feeds for Typepad accounts can be found here: http://support.typepad.com/cgi-bin/typepad.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=86

1. Now click the Save button and your feed will be pulled into the system on the next cycle.

Once the feed is established, the system will automatically pull in your latest posts which will be reviewed by an editor. Please note that posts are not automatically published to the site.

Don’t forget to review our terms of use.

Create a post

We love to partner with bloggers who provide exclusive content to us by posting directly on our site. The benefits for bloggers include:

• Access to our audience
• Increased visibility and recognition
• We promote our authors and their content
• Preferential page position

Be aware that material posted directly to our site is moderated for quality just like all the submissions we receive. We ask that all posts created directly on our site be provided to us on an exclusive basis for a minimum of 14 days after the post is completed, and that authors honor this exclusive time frame even if we do not publish your post immediately.

1. Click hover over Post Here on the top navigation and click Create Post.
2. Type a title of your post in the Title text box.
3. If your post is exclusive (meaning that the content is brand new and will not appear anywhere else for at least 14 days), click the Exclusive checkbox.
4. In the main text box, write or paste your post and add formatting including headlines, styles, and links. If you wrote your post in Microsoft Word or another word processing program, make sure to use the “Paste from Word” button to remove embedded styles.
5. You can leave tags and categories blank; our community managers add these attributes to make sure your posts are easy to find.
6. When you are finished, scroll down and click Save. This will add the post to our moderation queue for approval. Please note that all posts are not published on the site.

Don’t forget to review our terms of use.

Changing your username

Once you are signed in as a registered member…

1. Click Profile on the top right
2. Click Settings on the second navigation row
3. Change the “Username” field
4. Scroll down, click Save

Setting your RSS feed to “full” (instead of “summary”)

In order to publish your post, we need to have the complete post come to us via RSS. You may have your feed set to summary and not realize it. To check:

1. Log in to your account.
2. Click the Profile link on the top right.
3. Hover over Your Posts in the navigation and click Unpublished.
4. Click on the title of the post at the top. You should see your most recent post in its entirety on this page. If not, we are only receiving a summary of the post.

Summary RSS feeds can be generated in a number of different places depending on how we get your feed. Depending on what blogging platform you’re using, follow the steps below to set your RSS feed to provide complete posts.

Feedburner users

1. Log into Feedburner.
2. Click on the feed name that you’ve added to this site.
3. Click on the Optimize tab.
4. On the submenu on the left, click on Summary Burner.
5. This service should be Inactive. If it is active, deactivate it.

WordPress users

1. Log into your WordPress blog.
2. In the menu on the left, click Settings.
3. Below the Settings option, click on Reading.
4. “For each article in a feed, show” should be set to Full text. If it is not, make the change and click Save changes at the bottom.

Blogger users

1. Log into your Blogger account.
2. For the blog you’ve sign up on our site, click the Settings link.
3. Click the Site Feed tab.
4. “Blog Posts Feed” should be set to Full. If it’s set to anything else, make that change and click Save Settings at the bottom.

Typepad users

1. Log into your Typepad account.
2. Go to Settings, then Feeds.
3. Make sure your “Feed Content” setting is Full Posts.

View, edit, or delete your feeds

If you added an incorrect feed to the system or need to change your feed URL, the steps below will help you fix your feed issues.

Once you are signed in as a registered member…

1. Click the Profile link on the top right.
2. Click “Your Feeds” in the light gray user menu.
3. All the feeds you’ve added to this site will appear.
4. If you need to change the URL or title, click “Edit,” make the changes, and click “Save.”
5. If you need to delete your feed, click “Delete” and confirm the change.
6. If your feed URL is correct and you don’t see your latest post published here or unpublished here, click the “Refresh” link.