How to Create a Blog Post in WordPress

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how to create a blog post

Today we’re talking all about how to load your blogs into WordPress. If you don’t have a WordPress website and you’re looking for a website walk-through, make sure you check out my recent 5 day series, Website Roundtable.

How to Create a Blog

[Video Transcript]

I’m going to show you how to take an article that you wrote and have the rights to and post that on your own website on WordPress.

So Steve is one of the counselors at Mental Wellness Counseling. So we want to post this blog post that was on Psych Central on Mental Wellness Counseling’s website. So we’re going to first log in here.

  1. Add new: Then go to posts, add new. I previously copied Steve’s bio so I’m going to post that in right there. I had an issue a minute ago when I was making a video recording, and I’m wondering if it was because I opened a second tab. I think that actually might be it.
  2. Copy the post: So we’re going to copy all this. We have permission from Psych Central to reuse his content because Steve still owns it, and I have Steve’s permission to use it. You never want to steal people’s blog posts. That’s really bad form, and you can lose lots of money if they sue you. So just don’t do it.
  3. Give it a title: All right so “The Family’s Role in Addiction and Recovery.” We’re going to keep the title the same there, and we’re going to put Steve’s info, all of these letters after his name. All right.
  4. Make the blog look good: So now we’re going to go through and we’re going to just look at how the formatting is. Looks like there’s a little bit that we have to take out there.
  5. Modify headers: We’re going to switch this over to be all Header 1, not Header 3, because people tend to scan through a blog post rather than you know, like reading every single word, and so you want to make sure that it’s easy to scan so that they can quickly go through.
  6. Make sure to use bullet points in blog posts: Steve did a great job with bullet points there. When you’re doing blog posts, you always want to try to use bullet points, numbers, so that people can really quickly scan through and they’ll scan through it and then they’ll decide if they want to actually read it in-depth. And so you want to make it very easy for people to do that.

We’re going to do that. And then right here, let’s put Steve’s picture in. We’re going to add media. Last time, this is something that screwed us up. Let’s see if it works this time. Boom! There’s Steve. So he’s a muscle man.

If you ever want to change the size of an image, you can just do this. It’s going to be the original size, that’s why it’s kind of blurry, and so if you want to make a little bit smaller, like I’m going to do that. And then I’m also going to say, “Contact Steve at 231-714-0282 and his extension, 701.”

How to Categorize a Blog Post

So we’ve got the info in there. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to put it under Family Stuff and Recovery and Addictions. This is labeled Joe’s Blog where we switched it to Counseling blog. And then we’re going to pick a couple of tags here. So we’re going to do it based on what just came through in regards to like the actual articles. We’re going to do a drinking, addictions, family. And this is going to pop with different keywords. So let’s just type in addictions and see if anything pops up.

Video game addiction. That is not one that we want. So let’s also do, ‘how to help family’ so I’m just thinking of things that people might search for that would be helpful there. We don’t have a featured image right now, and so we’ll do that in a minute. And then we’re going to also write a meta description here. And so we’re going to look up top and see. It looks like the words, ‘recovery’ were used quite frequently. So let’s put this in, ‘recovery’. And then it’s going to tell us how strong our website is or our webpages in regards to ranking in Google.

Use Compelling Words in Blogs

Use words like “discover” and “reveal” instead of “teach.”

So Steve Greenman – if you’re not sure it’s right, take the title and turn it into a couple of sentences. So ‘Steve Greenman helps you discover’. You don’t want to use the word ‘teaches’. People like to have things discovered or revealed. So ‘Steve Greenman helps you discover a family’s role in addiction and recovery. He reveals the four stages that will help you help your family’. All right.

So that’s a little thing that meta description that shows up when someone googles something. So we want to always type something in there. Then when we look in here, we don’t have the feature image yet. Now before we save it, this last time we had something funky happen. We’re going to just go into text instead of visual. This is all the HTML. I’m going to just copy this because I had an issue when I was just making this video. So I’m going to copy all of that in case we lose our blog post like we just did a minute ago. So now I’m going to save it and hopefully it just saves. All right. Perfect.

Okay. So now I’m going to find an image that I can use for free. I’m going to go over to unsplash.com which has free images that we can use for whatever we want without getting sued. Let’s see something that might connect to family. All right. We don’t really have a search function. Just find any cool image. Haha. A lama. All right. See they’re all really cool images. Let’s use this one. I think I already have that one. I know that I already have that one.

So feature image, I’d saved as typewriter. Save it as something easy to find. Now upload it. We’re going to change the name of it to ‘Traverse City Counseling’, so it helps our keywords and then we’ll add something to it like ‘recovery for family’. Go ahead and copy that. We’re not going to add anything to the caption. We’re going edit to all text in description so we get higher ranking in Google. We’re going to set the feature image Boom! It’s there. All right.

So now if we wanted to publish immediately we could just hit ‘Publish’. Right now we’re going to – I’m going to show you how if you wanted to publish it tomorrow, you just change the date, and then set the time that you wanted it to go live.

For the sake of showing you what just happened, I’m going to publish it. So it moves to update and once it’s published, let’s go to mentalwellnesscounseling.com to check our work. All right. So if we go to our counseling blog, we put it under recovery and addictions. It should be number 1. Boom! There she is.

Add Awesome Pictures to Your Blog

Now, it does have my picture here because we didn’t have Steve upload it, but I did put by Steve Greenman. So that’s obviously a little flaw in our system, but sometimes we want to do things faster rather than 100% perfect. But we’ll change that out, eventually.

That’s all for now. You guys have an awesome day, and I will talk to you later.