Consistently publishing blog posts on your WordPress website is an excellent way to share valuable information, engage with your audience, and boost your online presence.

This blog post is intended to give existing clients a resource to add a new blog post to their WordPress website.

In this guide, we will walk you through 5 essential steps to write and publish a blog post on your WordPress website. Let’s get started!

Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or just starting out, it’s essential to have a systematic approach to ensure your blog posts are well-written, optimized for search engines, and published seamlessly.

Log into WordPress

First step is to log into WordPress! If you don’t remember your WordPress login, remember that you can always add the following at the end of your website to go to the login page:

/wp-admin

This stands for WordPress-Admin (your dashboard). When you’re logged into your site, that is also the address where you’ll see the main dashboard.

Now this is unless you have a plugin to protect this URL, it should direct you to the login page. For example, for Made at Dawn, I always log into https://madeatdawn.com/wp-admin

Now if you happen to loose access to your account or can’t reset your password, that’s when your website host comes in to help. I personally use Kinsta as my website host, but there are lots of other hosts you can look into!

For clients and fellow Kinsta users, if you have issues with resetting your /wp-admin login, Kinsta has a great article here that walks you through resetting your password using PHPMyAdmin.

Add a New Post

Now that you’re logged in, click on Posts then click on Add New.

This action will open the WordPress editor, providing you with a blank canvas to add your post content into.

The Add title section you see is where you add your blog post title – once you insert the text and save your post as draft or publish it, the title should always appear in that section.

Below the title, where you see Type / to choose a block – that is where you’ll add the content. You actually don’t have to insert any block when you start writing, as it will automatically generate a paragraph block for your paragraph.

The blue button on the right corner will allow you to publish a blog post once you have all the content prepared.

Write Your Blog Post Content

Research & Generate Post Ideas

If you haven’t already, take some time to work on coming up with blog post ideas to write about. Depending on your site and the site’s purpose, this is going to look very different.

Here are a few examples that you can think about:

• What question do people commonly ask about the topic?
• What are the top three tips you give to your clients?
• If someone can’t afford your services/products, what should they do?

You could also use a free research tool such as Answer the Public to brainstorm more topics and ideas for your blog post.

Create a Thorough Outline of Your Blog Post

If you have your own way of writing and would like to stick with that for writing your blog post, feel free to go for it!

However, for blog posts, you might want to still outline the main headings you’ll have so that you can plan for H2, H3, and H4 tags.

For example, if you are using RankMath, the plugin will suggest that your inserted keyword for the post should be in one of those headings inside your post.

Headings allow your readers to easily consume your content.

With that in mind, if you plan on creating an outline for your post, you can write down the headings that you’ll write about (the main points), add subheadings as necessary, and create bullet points on what should be there in each heading.

In WordPress, instead of having to publish a blog post, you can save your post as a draft so that you keep your outline and come back to it in the future.

Turn Each Point into Headings & Paragraphs

Once you have your outline, you can then write detailed information for each subheading using paragraphs.

Although you can write long paragraphs if your blog content is more about storytelling and includes long sources, writing shorter paragraphs (1 or 2 sentences) allows the reader to skim through your post easily.

You’d want to include images in the blog post that are relevant to the context and provide links to additional resources if there’s an opportunity to learn more about a certain topic.

Optimize for SEO

You shouldn’t publish a blog post before optimizing the content for search engines, which we call SEO.

You can, of course, but before you publish a blog post, it’s usually recommended that you ensure that your desired keywords and blog post structure is well set-up.

Within Made at Dawn and our clients, we use a plugin called RankMath. Although we use the Pro version of it, we used the free version for years before deciding to upgrade.

Aside from using it as a guideline to write a blog post for SEO, we also use RankMath for its table of contents block, which we actually have on this very post.

Publish Your Post

It’s finally time to publish a blog post — the one you’ve been working hard to write!

Before you press the publish button, just check below for the following:

1. Does the permalink look good? (in case you changed the blog post title a few times)
2. Do you have a featured image, and is it optimized for search engines?
3. Are categories and tags correctly set?
4. Does the blog post look legible / good on mobile & tablet devices?

Once you check that everything is good to go, you can hit that “Publish” button!