How we built a blog platform with AEM | AEM Community Blog Seeding

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How we built a blog platform with AEM by Ruolan Ji

Abstract

Blog platforms are ubiquitous today as a crucial part of many organizations’ marketing strategies. Since blogs house a variety of original and sponsored content over time and help to build your brand equity, it’s important to structure them in a way that is aligned with your business goals. Luckily, there are tools like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) that can help you build, integrate, and maintain your blog platform with efficiency and ease.

What functionalities do we need in a blog platform?
Blog platforms should offer hosts the ability to publish and edit articles, as well as placing ads on the platform. General users should also be able to navigate the blog, search its content, view author profiles and information, comment on and share articles to social media, and sign up for a newsletter to receive regular updates.

Why build a blog platform?
Blog platforms can provide your business with valuable revenue generation opportunities that tend to compound over time. Some of the main benefits include:

Gated content: Content that is accessible only to paid subscribers.
Lead generation: Content that is accessible once visitors have entered their contact information, generating leads for your business.
Sponsored content: Banner ads or sponsored articles that are paid for by an advertiser.
Traffic generation: Utilizing blogs to lead users to another page or call to action.


Before building a blog platform, there are some key decisions to consider:


Should the blog platform be an independent platform, or part of the main site structure?
In our case, we made the blog platform part of the main site structure. When we use AEM to build components for an existing website, we can then use these components to build the blog platform, without building new components from scratch.



Should the blog structure templates use a responsive grid or rigid column control?
We recommend using a responsive grid, which is a built-in feature of AEM and offers greater flexibility and ease of management when it comes to updating content.

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How we built a blog platform with AEM

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