Import blog posts into HubSpot from any CMS with Smart Copy

[lpleva]

We know exporting and importing XML files is tedious and error-prone. That’s why, for the last several months, we’ve been hard at work building a new tool to allow you to import your blog into HubSpot from virtually any CMS. We call it Smart Copy.

Smart Copy scans (“crawls,” in technical terms) the HTML of your live blog post to identify all the key features necessary for import, like the post title, featured image, author, and more. We try to identify these features automatically. And, more often than not, we are successful. 

But because we rely on web scraping, our success rate is directly related to how well the blog is built behind-the-scenes. This means, sometimes, our guesses aren’t correct. And, sometimes, we don’t generate any guesses at all. 

In those cases, you can tell us where the feature we’re looking for is located in your blog template by specifying the feature CSS selector.

How do I get started?

To get started, we strongly recommend reading this KB article. If you have questions or run into issues not addressed in the KB article, post them in the comments section below.

I need help finding some of the features. Smart Copy didn’t identify them automatically, and I can’t find the right CSS selector. 

Check out our CSS selector how-to guide here. Be sure to link to the sample blog post, and tell us what selectors you’ve already tried.

I tried using Smart Copy and have feedback I’d like to share. 

We love feedback (good and bad!). Please share your feedback in the comments section below. 

[JosephBamber]

I am having an issue with the Smart Copy finding the CSS selector for my Categories and tags. Here is an example blog post. I have tried lots of css selectors to no avail 🙂

.Blog-meta-item-category a, etc

Appreciate any suggestions you have!

https://www.wavwatch.com/blog/emotional-immaturity-how-to-enhance-emotional-intelligence

[jwiedenheft]

I imported my existing blog using Smart Copy, but once imported, the blogs use the existing URL structure and not the URL structure determined by Blog Settings. For example, our existing URL structure is /about-us/blog/* but the new blog structure is /blog/* .

1. Is there a way to change the URL structure of all the imported blog posts aside from manually editing individual posts?

2. Is there a way to reimport with the correct structure?

[IngridCloud]

I am using Smart Copy to migrate my company blog to Hubspot. It gives a great impression, it's very easy to map the content.

However, Smart Copy fails to find all blog posts. More precisely, it finds 17 out of 71 blog posts, but does excellent work of importing those 17 it finds.

Is this an issue that others have run into?

[lpleva]

Hi @IngridCloud - so sorry to hear you're having trouble. Would you mind sending me a direct message with a link to the blog import, so I can take a deeper look?

The link looks something like this:

https://app.hubspot.com/site-importer/<number>/wizard/blog-import/<number>/selector/explanation