[How to] Get Facebook’s instant articles for your website or blog
Facebook has finally opened Instant Articles – Facebook’s own mobile publishing format for publishers all over the world. However, at initial days you needed to sign up exclusively to get the early-bird’s access to IA. Now that things have got easier and everyone can get Facebook’s Instant Articles and even comes with plugins for popular CMS including WordPress.
Start Using Instant Articles
If you haven’t already, you can get started with signing up with Facebook’s Instant Articles feature for your Facebook page. Which Page Would You Like to Use for Instant Articles? As a first step, select the Page you’d like to use to access the Instant Articles tools.
Keep in mind, anyone with an admin role on that Page will also be able to use the tools. Next, you’ll configure your articles, design your style and submit for review.
After signing up, head up to your website or blog say WordPress powered website where you should install free WordPress plugin named “Instant Articles for WP” authored by Automattic, Facebook and others. This plugin adds support for Instant Articles for Facebook to your WordPress site.
There are other plugins as well for WordPress. Facebook Instant Articles & Google AMP Pages by PageFrog are both good one but seems like they have deserted the further plugin development. So better stay with the official plugin.
Instant Articles Configuration
Activate the plugin and start configuring Instant Articles from WordPress Admin Dashboard. A successful deployment of Instant Articles WordPress plugin passes thru 4 stages:
- set up and login with Facebook Developers App to connect your plugin – you are going to create a new Facebook app from their Developer interface if you haven’t already (don’t worry this isn’t a difficult task at all),
- select the page you publish in Facebook – you need App ID and App Secret key of your Facebook app or associated one with the page,
- next you can customize your Instant Articles published articles via Style Editor, and
- the final most important step is submitting your IA posts for Facebook team and start publishing the Instant Articles.
Both API publishing and RSS publishing is supported by the Instant Articles.
Monetization thru Instant Articles
Facebook along with their Instant Articles feature they have also started Audience Network advertising options for the publishers of all size – however earning depends on traffic nature and more factors. You can check the impact of monetization thru Instant Articles from the Audience Network Performance.
You can place your Audience Network ad placement codes either in Mobile apps in Android or Play Store, or even in Mobile version of your website. However, you need to verify the domains by placing the ads initially. The optimization goal include optimizing for CPM, balance for CPM and fill or optimizing for the fill only.
This allows many publishers and bloggers earn directly from Facebook.
Learn more about the technology of Facebook Instant Articles at their official blog here.