Templates

Templates are the core of custom articles, and are therefore a good place to start. To create a new template, head to the custom article dashboard, and click Create Template.

This will take you to the template creation screen, with a blank template. You should see something like the below:

There are a few things to note:

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Template Name

You’ll want to start by giving your template a name. This doesn’t affect articles generated via that template; it’s simply to help you identify the template within Byword.

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Article Template

This is the most important bit, as its where you build your article template. You’ll see there’s already one block created for you (your Article Title) - we’ll come back to this shortly!

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Writing Instructions

This is where you can provide high-level guidance to Byword that you want to have an effect over your whole article. You can see some examples of good writing instructions below.

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Examples of Good Writing Instructions

Below are some examples of good writing instructions:

As I said, the article template itself is the most important part of this page, so let’s dive into that!

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Article Template

Once you’ve filled out the above, you’re ready to build your article template. Think of this as a way to build your articles from the ground up - specifying how you want each of your articles to look. Each template is composed of multiple blocks, which you can add using the column on the left hand side. A block roughly corresponds to an H2 heading, followed by some form of text (what text this is depends on the block type!).

In this section, we’ll go through each of the blocks available in the article template builder, and explain how each of them work. The most important ones are the first and third (Article Title and Text Section), so I’d recommend at least reading those sections in full.

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Article Title

Every article starts with an Article Title block - this can’t be removed and must come at the start of your template.

In your Article Title block you’ll see a few options that you can play with:

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Table of Contents

If you’d like your article to contain a table of contents, you can add this block to your article. Though it can technically appear wherever you’d like it to within the article, it’s highly recommended to have it as the second block, below your Article Title block.

You can tweak the following parameters within your Table of Contents:

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Text Section

Text Sections are the bread and butter of your templates. They start with an H2, and typically contain multiple H3s, which are all fully customizable.

You can tweak the following parameters within each Text Section:

Here’s an example of what a Text Section could look like, in an article titled ‘How to Grow ’:

In this example, we’re telling Byword a few important things:

• The H2 is blank, so Byword will generate that based on the prompt (i.e. it’ll generate an H2 about soil conditions).

• We’ve specified that we want 3 H3s, and that the second one should be ‘The Perfect Soil PH’. Byword will fill in the first and third.

Typically you won’t run into many cases where you’ll want to specify just one of your H3s, so the above is largely for illustrative purposes.

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List

List sections allow you to build multiple types of lists into your articles, and can be useful when you want Byword to present information in a structured format.

You can toggle the following parameters for List blocks:

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Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ sections consists of an H2, followed by a customizable number of H3 subsections which each address common questions around your article’s topic. FAQs are great for winning Featured Snippets, and more generally addressing questions that readers are likely to have.

FAQ blocks are quick and easy to set up, and allow you to customize:

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Table

Table blocks allow you to display information inside of an HTML-formatted table. This can be great when your article compares different things (perhaps comparing different plants you could grow, or different products you could buy for your plants).

Tables are quick and easy to set up, and give you a significant amount of freedom to control how they appear.

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Call to Action

Calls to Action (or CTAs) are what help sell your brand or product to a reader. They typically come at the end of your article, and help relate what you’ve been discussing to the solution that your brand or product offers.

Byword lets you add a highly customizable CTA block to your articles, helping you to convert users from your content.

Experienced Byword users may notice that the available fields are essentially the same as available in the CTA feature that predated Custom Articles. You can in fact import CTAs from there into your Custom Article templates, by using the Load CTA button in the screenshot above.

If you’re creating a CTA from scratch though, you can customize the following parameters:

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Conclusion

A conclusion is a specialized version of the Text Section, designed to sit at the end of the article (either before or after a CTA, if you have one), and summarize what’s been said so far.

Conclusions are quick and easy to build, and can often provide a neat ending to longer-form articles. You can customize:

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Custom HTML

Last but not least, we have the ability to add custom HTML blocks:

To use this, simply insert whatever HTML you’d like into the box. For example, inserting <p>hello world</p> into the box would cause a paragraph saying hello world to appear in your article.

This is of course a very basic example and there are far more interesting things you can do with this. Custom HTML is an advanced feature though, and so it’s only recommended to use this block if you feel comfortable and have experience of working with HTML.

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Advanced Settings

Now that we’ve covered all of the available template blocks within Byword, let’s move onto the final few things we can control within our article: advanced settings.

You can access the advanced settings popup in the top right of the template builder, and it will appear as follows:

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Article Length

You can use this box to specify a minimum length that you’d like all of your articles to hit, between 500 and 2,500 words.

Note that this is a minimum length, and articles can be generated at significantly higher word counts depending on how you’ve built your template. A template with a large number of blocks, and where those blocks lead to a large number of H3s, can significantly exceed 2,500 words. Articles don’t have a maximum word count, but in testing we’ve been able to generate articles of up to 8,000 words.

You may leave this box empty though if you don’t want Byword to force your articles to a specific minimum word count. In this case, Byword will write to whatever length it feels is most natural based on your template.

It’s recommended not to set a high minimum word count on very short templates. For example, if you build a template with an Article Title block and one Text Section block, you shouldn’t set your article length to 2,500 words (Byword may struggle here!).

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Custom CSS

If you’re comfortable writing custom CSS, and want this injected into the HTML that Byword generates, you can do so by writing it in this box. This will get inserted into a <style> tag at the beginning of the article.

Do bear in mind that this is an advanced feature, and you should generally avoid using this unless you feel comfortable with writing custom CSS.

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Errors

Byword will check your template for a couple of possible errors, and require you to fix these before saving your template, or generating any articles from it. You can find details on the possible errors below:

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Finishing Up

Once you’re finished building your article template, you’re good to move on and start thinking about datasets.