Hi friend!! Who is excited to jump into the details about How to Write your First Blog Post?? If you’re new around here but you’re interested in learning about this, please be sure to check out the prequel posts to this one, listed below in order:
- How to Start a Blog: The First Five Tips
- How to Setup WordPress.org and Bluehost
- How to Select, Install, & Customize Your WordPress.org Theme
- Freebie! Want my “Starting a Blog Basic Checklist” sent straight to your inbox? Click here to join!
Alright, let’s make some blogging magic happen 🙂
How to Write your First Blog Post
Step 1: Login to your WordPress.org Dashboard
I know this is an elementary step but I wanted to remind everyone how to locate their dashboard. Simply go to “http://yourblognamehere.com/wp-admin” and enter your username and password.
Step 2: Locate “Posts” and “Add New”
On the lefthand side of your dashboard is a menu. Locate where it says “Posts“. Hover over it and click “Add New” to begin writing a new blog post. A new, blank post will open just ready for you to write on it. It will look something like this:
Step 3: Begin Writing
Whether or not you like to start a post with a title or prefer to title a post after you’re done writing is completely up to you. I personally already generally know what my blog post is going to be about before I start, so I like to go ahead and title it. If you chose to wait to Title it until after you’ve started writing, WordPress will save drafts for you as you write and in order to do this, it will assign the blog post a generic URL that is automatically applied, that will generally consist of your blog domain name, the date, and then a series of numbers. See below:
You can also edit this later using the edit button next to the link. Just don’t forget because that can harm your search engine results. A helpful plugin I use to help with SEO is Yoast SEO. If this is way over your head, don’t worry. I will come back to it, and it’s not going to make or break your ability to post. It’s just a helpful tip for when generating traffic is your goal.
So, in that same picture above, you can see the right handside of the text box has 2 tabs, one says “Visual” and one says “Text”. The visual tab is where you will primarily be writing. The Text tab is where you will see the HTML for your post displayed. So whereas you may see an image that you upload in the visual tab, on the text tab it will only be HTML code of that image. This will automatically populate at the same time that you write, so you don’t have to worry about it, but I did want to point it out.
Step 4: Uploading Images
Adding imagery to your blog posts is so important!! Who wants to just go see a bunch of words on a post? Not me!! Adding good quality imagery (that topic I will have to be another post!) will help your readers connect with you so much better. To do this, you will click the “Add Media” button at the top lefthand corner under your title. Here you can upload files directly from your computer. Be sure your cursor is where you want the image to upload otherwise it will just go wherever your cursor is clicking, and that might not necessarily be where you want it to be!
Another note about uploading images, when you upload them to your media gallery, once you click on them to select, you will see the information for that picture show up on the right hand side, like this:
Here you can name the image, give it a caption if you’d like, change the alignment, the size, and even have it link to a custom URL if you want. For example, if you want someone to click a picture and take them to another website, you would enter that website’s link under where it says “Custom URL”.
Step 5: Hit Publish
This is exciting!! Once you are ready for your post to go live on your blog, you’ll go over to the righthand side of your page to where you see something like this:
Here you can also choose to save as a draft, make the visibility public if you want everyone to be able to read, and to either publish immediately or you can schedule a post to publish automatically at a set time. That is one of my favorite features. Great for when you go on vacation!
Step 6: Share!!
Sharing our blog posts is obviously a crucial step if our goal is to gain traffic and readership! I know it can be kind of scary at first, but trust me, it will be worth it.
Share the URL of your new blog post in emails to your friends, share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc!! Anywhere you feel comfortable! I have more tips and workflows for how to share to these platforms and optimize your traffic, but that is for another time.
xo,
Bess
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