I recently received a number of messages from Blogger (Blogspot) users asking for help in uploading sample articles for Facebook Instant Articles. Bloggers are required to provide at least ten sample articles before they can submit their application to publish Instant Articles. Below are two methods for doing it.
Submitting articles manually
If you want to quickly submit your sample articles, below is a basic template that you can use. You can always add advanced elements, such as ads and analytics, later on after your application is approved.
Basic template:
The above template is the bare minimum that will get published. If you get an error message saying that your article lacks such elements as a subtitle, kicker, figure caption, etc., just go ahead and add those elements as needed. The main thing to remember is that an Instant Article should match its web counterpart in terms of content.
Post title with subtitle and kicker:
Figure with caption:
Submitting articles via RSS
Another way to submit your articles is by linking your blog's built-in RSS feed (yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml) to Instant Articles. However, the output may need some editing and you will still need to manually add such elements as ads and analytics.
Note that for Facebook to properly import posts from your RSS feed into Instant Articles you must manually wrap your paragraphs in paragraph (<p>) tags by editing your posts in HTML mode because Blogger uses line-break (<br>) tags to create paragraphs. If you don't do this Instant Articles will not detect your text and will show an empty page. Meanwhile, images and image captions must be enclosed in figure (<figure>) and figure-caption (<figcaption>) tags, respectively.
If you get stuck trying to submit articles using this method, delete the articles automatically added via RSS, unlink the RSS feed and just submit your articles manually.
Labels: Blogger, Instant Articles, Internet