Sharing Your News With The World
Transcript
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Hi, I’m Allie, our AI-powered, training personality.
Does your business struggle when it comes to content-marketing? Are you ever at a loss for ideas when it comes to generating good solid content to send out to the world? Well, one of the great ways to harness the power of content marketing is by starting a regular blog of all of the events, offers, and products your company has to offer. And what better platform to use to host your blogs, than Word Press, the original blogging platform! Today we are going to dive into how to create a blog so you can give your company a great content boost! Let’s see how it’s done!
First of all, let’s head on over to Posts in the left-hand sidebar. This will take you to your blogging dashboard. Here is where all of your blog posts will reside. Let’s go ahead and click on add new to start the creation process. This will open up the post editor. The first box at the top of the page is where you will add your title. So let’s start out with “My First Post”. The box underneath is your post editor. Now, there are two different methods for creating your post. You can either use the visual or text editor. The visual editor is like any word processor, With some slight variations of course. Everything is done in a “what you see, is what you get fashion”. The visual editor is the input method most people will want to use. On the other end of the spectrum is the text editor, this is an editor that uses basic text and HTML. This type of editor is best for anyone with previous website experience and a functioning knowledge of HTML. Today, we are going to concentrate on how to use the visual editor.
Now, instead of having you all sit here and watch as I write out a blog post, which would be incredibly boring, I am just going to insert some text into this box. There we go. Now let’s edit this text! I’ll just highlight this first paragraph, and go through the basic functions. So first of course, we have the font family and size selector and other normal things such as bold, italics,bullet points, hyperlinks etc etc. Then we get to the different functions, such as the text style.
Here we can select what style we want the text to be displayed in. From paragraph all the way to heading 6. Whoever created your website will have set these to align with your brand. If not, you can ask your website-developer to do this. As you can imagine, the paragraph option is used for a body of text, and the different headings are for different sizes of titles, with 1 being the largest and 6 being the smallest. Allowing for headings sub headings etc etc. Basically, the function is here so that you can adhere to your brand image, by using predetermined sizes and fonts. This also helps all of your posts to look the same, creating continuity on your site. Next, we have block-quotes, this is used for making quotes clearly stand out from the rest of your text. To use this function just highlight the text and click the button, there we go. Then we have the read more tag, this function determines how much text is displayed on the blog page for each post. You only want a very short sample so that your readers will want to click on the post to read the rest. So just click where you would like the sample to end and then click on “read more”. And don’t worry, this won’t be visible on your post, just in the editor.
Next, let’s look at adding images into your post. This is done via the add media button at the top left of the editor. First click on where you want the image to be then click add media, this will take you to your media library, here you can either use a picture you have used previously or upload a new one. For now, I am just going to add something I have already uploaded. So, let’s make sure the image looks good within your post. If you click on the image you will see options, for text wrapping. I am going to align the picture to the left for now. You can also edit the picture with the pencil icon changing its size, adding in any alternative text, a caption, or even attributions.
After this, it’s time to set an image for the post, this is the image that will be displayed above the text on both the blog page and the post page. To do this, let’s scroll down to featured image on the right-hand side of the editor. And click on “set featured image”. This will once again take us to the media library to upload a picture or use one from earlier, I am just going to use the same image again.
When you have finished editing your blog post, it’s time to preview what it will look like, let’s scroll back up and hit the save draft button under publish on the right-hand side. Then click on preview, this will open up a new page so you can see what the post looks like before you post it. If you are happy with it, close the page and go back to the editor.
Now it’s time to set a category for your post, so that people can easily find the type of post they are looking for. It is always good practice to check in case there is already a tick on any of the categories and un-tick it just to avoid any posts ending up in the wrong category. Then, you can either select a category from those you already have, or add a new category by clicking “add new category”. Then you can type the name of your desired category. I am just going to call it, examples. If the category you are creating is a subcategory of any of your existing categories, click parent category and choose the existing category then click add category. Great! Now your post is edited and categorized.
Lastly, it’s time to set your publishing settings. Currently this post is a draft, but you can set it to either publish immediately, or schedule it to publish later, by clicking the edit button here and choosing a date and time. As this isn’t a real post, I am just going to leave it as a draft. And there you have it! Now you know how to edit and publish your own blog posts. Time to share all of your news with the world! Happy blogging!