Using the MSN Pro Plugin | iMark Interactive

You reached this page because you have purchased or are considering purchasing our MSN Pro plugin. This plugin was developed to help WordPress site owners create MSN Start galleries easier right from inside of their editor.

Important – you need to be using the block editor for this process. This will NOT work on classic editor.

What is MSN Start?

In order to use this plugin, you need an active MSN Start account. You have to be approved for these. If you haven’t been approved, you need to submit your site here – https://www.msn.com/en-us/partnerhub/

MSN Start is a way for you to share your content on the MSN platform. While you can share articles, where most people are getting traffic are through slideshows/galleries.

These typically consist of 10+ slides that are images with a short description and a link.

These typically perform the best on MSN Start and they can easily be created in WordPress with our MSN Pro plugin.

Installing MSN Pro Plugin

To properly configure the MSN Pro plugin, there are a few steps. We will walk through each one here.

Step 1 – Download the plugin from our customer dashboard under Downloads. The latest release will be at the top. This will download to your computer as a zip file.
Step 2 – Go to your WordPress site dashboard to install the plugin. You will go to Plugins > Add New Plugin then click the “Upload Plugin” button. Browse for the zip file download on your computer, then hit Install Now. Hit Activate Plugin after installing.
Step 3 – A new left menu will appear after activating with “MSN Pro License”. Click that to enter your license. This is from the order email, but also can be found in our customer dashboard under Downloads. Once you locate your license key, enter it into the field and hit “Activate License”. This will redirect you to the new MSN Pro interface.
Step 4 – Under the MSN Pro settings page, make sure to look over the items in there. There is a link to this guide showing you how to create a post. There are also items on this page which we will over shortly.
Step 5 – Create a new category for your MSN related posts. This needs to be a new category or one with no posts in it. You can create a new one under Posts > Categories. The Add New Category option is either to the left of the category list or below it. You will name your category whatever you want. We suggest something like “Trending” or “Best of” or “MSN Slideshows”. The name is up to you. This category will only have the MSN gallery related posts. Click “Add New Category” once you have chosen a name.
Step 6 – Go back to the MSN Pro settings page (under MSN Pro menu in your dashboard) and in the first box, select this new category. If you want more than one category, you can follow Step 5 again to create a new one then add it in the first box.
Step 7 – Choose if you want to noindex your new MSN posts. This is your own personal decision. If you noindex, Google will ignore them.
Choose if you want to hide your posts from the home page and blog pages. This will keep your MSN gallery posts off these pages.
Choose if you want to remove these MSN posts from your main RSS feed. If you have a RSS to email campaign setup or have a default feed in your MSN Start account, then this would be a good idea to check.
Step 8 – Check your MSN feed. You can click on the box and it will open in a new window. If you don’t see code like below, then you need to follow these steps:
Go to your Settings > Permalinks page in your WordPress dashboard. Click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Do not change any settings. This forces the server to create feed.
Go back to the MSN feed box on the MSN Pro Settings page. Click it and it should look like below
Step 9 – Follow the rest of this guide to create a new post.
Step 10 – Submit your new feed to MSN after you publish your post.

Using our MSN Pro Plugin

Once the plugin is installed and configured, we will provide you with a new feed URL just for MSN. You will need to create one post to be able to test it with MSN.

MSN checks the feed every 15 minutes, so new slideshows will be pulled in automatically after you post them.

The new category you created can also be set to noindex in Yoast or RankMath so Google isn’t checking on the category archive itself. You don’t want to link to this archive in general unless you think your audience will find it valuable. Setting it to Noindex is not required.

A few examples of simple category names are:

Slideshows
Roundups
Galleries
Favorites
Trending
Best Of

To make this process easier once you start building your new post, we created a simple block pattern that you can use to make sure you follow the layout. It’s important you follow the layout as it’s very specific on how your posts are pushed to MSN and they require specific items.

Here is a quick video on how to insert the block pattern

When you are in the post editor, hit the + sign and then hit “browse all” to open the block menu. Click on Patterns, then click on MSN for your site name. Use the first one as it has 10 already set. There is one more pattern as just one block if you want that which you can then just duplicate.

MSN Gallery Post Layout

The layout required for this plugin to work is specific. This is because it’s required by MSN.

The first intro paragraph you put in there before the first H2 heading will be your first MSN slide. This uses your featured image you set for your post. Every H2 heading after will be an additional slide. Do not duplicate your featured image in the rest of the slides. MSN can reject the entire gallery/slideshow.

Each “slide” consists of:

Heading – Required to be a H2 heading and it will be the title of the slide shown on MSN.
Image (horizontal works best like 1200 x 800)
Image Caption – you should be giving credit to the site where you got it from (even if your own)
Post Description – this consists of about 2-3 sentences to describe the post
Link – this is how you get traffic back to your site and others in the roundups. Link to your posts related to that video/topic or the site where you got the post. A link is not required.

Basically a slide is the information between the H2 heading and the next H2 heading. Consider each Heading and what comes before the next heading as one slide. It’s recommended to have at least 10 of these slides on the post.

An example of what is shown in MSN can be seen here. The site that created this is currently using our plugin.

MSN Pro Plugin Video

Add Feed to MSN Start Account

Once you publish one post, your feed will be active. It’s always found in the MSN Pro Settings page on your WordPress dashboard

If you don’t see it when going to that URL, make sure to go to your Settings > Permalinks and just click “Save Changes” to clear the permalink cache. This will not affect your site.

Log into your MSN Start Hub, go to Content Management, then Feeds, and hit Add Feeds

Important – Make sure you are in your brand account and not a personal account or the Content Management option will not show.

Then fill out the document with a feed name (this is your own internal name), the feed URL. Select RSS, then Gallery. Answer the other questions and then hit “Start Validation”

*IMPORTANT – Make sure the Type is set to Gallery.

It should validate in a few minutes and once validated, hit “Add feed.” Ignore the percentage results if it says “Ready to add feed”. MSN will check it every 15 minutes for new posts.

If you have another feed in there for your site, make sure you hit the “suspend” option as this will pick up any posts you publish and pull them into MSN as articles. You don’t want this to run anymore automatically. If you want to have normal articles to push in through this feed, then make sure to click the option in the MSN Pro settings page to hide the posts from the main RSS feed.

Using the MSN Start Plugin (from Microsoft)

Many publishers have the MSN Start Plugin which is often set to push your posts out automatically. This can be turned off (and should be) in the Partner Hub settings in the plugin. You go to MSN Start Partner Hub in your WordPress dashboard, then Settings, then Content. Toggle off the “Automatically publish new posts to Microsoft” option and that will stop any content automatically pushing there. You can still use the Start plugin and manually pick which posts are pushed as an article.

If you don’t turn this off, it will automatically push any posts you publish in as articles. So it’s important to turn off this automatic posting option.

FAQ and Tips

Yes, this plugin is not associated with our add-on. You do want to make sure you disable any automatic posting as it will take your new gallery post and push it in as an article.

Links in your headings is not advised as it confuses MSN’s system and the headings won’t show properly. Don’t add links in your headings

This isn’t advised. it can cause formatting issues. Don’t add links or line breaks in your image captions. Stick with simple “Image Credit: Site Name” as the general format

While it can be as long as you want, the intro paragraph in your post will become the first slide in your MSN gallery slideshow. Keep it simple and concise, but use it to help keep people scrolling through the rest of the slides

Once our add-on is active, your feed will be available at https://yourdomain.com/feed/msn
Make sure to replace “https://yourdomain.com” with your actual domain.

No, our add-on is to allow you to publish new posts with a specific format built just for MSN. They require specific items and that is hard to achieve with old post formats. Please create a new post specifically in the format outlined in this guide.

Our add-on can only publish as a gallery (once you have added the feed into your account). Check your feeds to make sure you don’t have more than one. if you do, suspend those other feeds. Also check to make sure you are not setting the MSN Start plugin to publish when you are creating the post. it will push the post in as an article.

This is due to the same issue as above. You either have another feed in your account that is pulling off your main RSS feed or you have set your MSN Start Plugin to publish the post automatically after publish. Those should be disabled.

Sometimes the MSN Start plugin does not follow your auto-disable and you have to check when you are editing the post. This is a bug in MSN Start (which isn’t our plugin). Make sure to toggle off the option to publish to MSN (click the MSN icon next to the publish button)

No, our plugin does not give you the ability to bulk publish posts to MSN. It’s based on you publishing posts on your WordPress site in a specific format. If you bulk publish, they will show in the feed, but our plugin does not provide you with tools to bulk publish posts.

Yes, this is possible. All you need to do is edit the post on your WordPress site and hit update. This will update our feed and MSN should pick it up the next time it checks the feed.

Technically, yes. MSN is particular about republishing content. It needs to be older than 30 days on their platform. It’s best to delete it on your MSN partner hub, then you can republish the post in WordPress like you normally would. It will pull back into MSN as new.

At this time, no. This will cause formatting issues and the feed will not work. We are working on some edits to allow this for better ad placement on the posts within your site.