Blogging With WordPress: How to Post on Your Website in 5 Easy Steps

Everybody knows how important blogging is for your website marketing efforts. It’s the best way for companies to talk about customer concerns, answer the big questions pointing to your product as the solution, and add shareable content to their websites. Statistics show that when companies blog regularly, they get 97% more inbound links to their site (see the linked infographic at websitemagazine.com). That means that you only have a 3% chance that anyone will ever post a link to your website if you are not blogging, it’s that important.

As I work regularly with new and established authors for HBE Publishing, developing websites and consulting on building a web presence, I’ve found that in many cases, blogging is a new concept. I’ve developed this how-to to address the need to know what to do after you’ve written your blog—namely, how to get your work into your WordPress website. Follow these simple steps and you won’t go wrong!



STEP 1. LOGIN TO YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE

Step 1. Login to your WordPress website

Typically, your login page can be found by going to your website and adding /wp-admin to the URL. You will be prompted for your username and password. Your username can also be the email address used in your user profile. When a user is added to a WordPress site, it will send an email to the new user with login details. Sometimes this ends up in your junk mail box. Be sure to watch for that if you are expecting access to your new site. It will have the specific link, username, and password to use.

Enter these into the login page and click Log in.

STEP 2. GET A LOOK AT YOUR WORDPRESS DASHBOARD

Step 2. Get a look at your WordPress Dashboard

After you login, you are taken to your WordPress Dashboard. The Dashboard gives you access and an overview of the site. Depending on which plugins are installed, you may see site stats and other information about your site pages and connections. If you are not managing the pages of your site other than your blog, you won’t ever need to get into most of what you see in the sidebar. From here you can add new posts, pages, images, and such. You can also view comments others have left on your blog posts. And further, you can get into the layout and design of your website through the tools on the sidebar. If all you are doing is adding blog posts, you can safely ignore the majority of what you see.

STEP 3. ADD A NEW BLOG POST

Step 3. Add a new blog post

From your Dashboard, hover over Posts until the side menu opens. The options are All Posts, Add New, Categories, and Tags. By clicking All Posts, you will see a list of all previous blog posts on your site. You can edit or delete posts from that page. Categories shows you a list of your blog categories. You can create new categories as you post new blogs, or you can add or remove them from this page. Categories are used to separate your blogs into broad topics or blog types such as book reviews or upcoming events. Clicking Tags shows you a list of content tags that you can add to your posts. Tags are more specific than categories, but function in the same way by allowing readers to sort your blog posts using tags, etc. Add New will take you to a page where you can enter a brand new blog post. Click Add New.

Step 4. Enter your blog

You may write your blog here or you may write it in your favorite program before coming here. Personally, I use a note/blog writing app called Bear, and I sometimes use Word as well. I recommend writing your new post before coming to WordPress. Write, edit, revise, and finalize however you are comfortable, then use WordPress to post it for the world to see.

STEP 4. ENTER YOUR BLOG

These 10 points are the keys to entering your blog:

1. Title

Enter your title here. Remember that a title need to catch attention. Should be neither too long nor too short. And don’t trick your readers with a misleading title. This puts you into click-bait territory.

2. Content entry window

This is where you enter your text, images, etc., the body of your blog post.

3. Formatting tools

These formatting tools are mostly the same as what you would find in Word. You have bold, italic, bullets and can add links to your text for readers to click on. There will be others depending on which plugins are installed in your site.

4. Add Media

If you want to add an image, video, or even audio, you set your cursor in the text where you want it to show up. Click this Add Media button and it will open a window where you can choose from what’s already uploaded or you can upload new images. Once the image is selected, you’ll come back to this page where you can change alignment, drag to a new position, or resize.

(Remember to add alt text to your images in the media window when you upload—for more on alt text, see my blog on SEO)



STEP 4. ENTER YOUR BLOG part 2

5. Post Format

Differing WordPress themes and plugins use differing types of posts. All use “standard” as a typical blog post. It’s preselected for you and you can just leave it as is and all will be fine.

6. Yoast SEO area

This section is not standard and may not be installed on your site. I recommend Yoast SEO as it is so easy to use and helps you get your pages and posts setup for optimal SEO results.

As you fill in the title of your blog, the title will show up here. You can edit the SEO title if you like. Google will show about 60 characters of a title. Us it to your advantage!

As you fill in the content, the “snippet” will start to fill in here. What you want to do is change the snippet to the best 155-character or less elevator pitch for reading this blog post. What’s it about and what will the reader get out of it. This snippet is what will show up in a Google search. Make it count!

You can also enter varying focus words to see how well you have used the keyword throughout your post. While you don’t want to be stuffing keywords everywhere anymore, it’s good to see that you are using it in places like the URL, the title, and in your post. Some good stuff to follow that helps your SEO.

7. Categories

As mentioned earlier, categories are the broad topics separating your blog posts into, well, categories. You can select previously used categories or add a new one. This post is in the category “How-tos.”

8. Tags

Also as mentioned before, tags help add a sort of index to your content. Tags are more specific than categories. This post is tagged with “WordPress” and “Blogging.”

9. Featured Image

I can’t say this enough. Always, always, always add a featured image to your blog posts. The featured image will be picked up by most WordPress themes and used as a thumbnail with your post. The featured image is also what Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms will use along with your post when it gets shared. Consider it like a book cover that goes with this specific post.

10. Save Draft/Publish

This is the last step. If you are ready to publish for the world, click Publish and it’s out there in the blogosphere! If you want to save and come back later, click Save Draft. You can also preview what it will look like on your site by clicking Preview. Adjust or edit as you like before publishing

Step 5. Publish Your Blog!

Once you have all the content entered and formatted as you like, click that Publish button and let it fly! You’ll of course want to share the post on all of your social media outlets so others can read it. You may have plugins setup to share it for you. If you can take the time, create your own posts. People get turned off by automated looking posts. Keep it personal and use the post to make people want to come read your wonderful work!

Now Sit Back and Rest

If you are producing great content, readers will come. Hopefully, they will even leave a comment or two for you. Use this blog space to engage with those who leave comments. They will become your biggest fans if you do.

So there you have it. Any questions? If so, drop me a line here. I’m happy to answer. Need help posting your blogs still? I can do this for you, too! Let’s chat.