Okay. Hey everybody, this is another Ask HOF Anything Moment. Really glad to see you.
Today’s question comes from Elizabeth with Ryan Construction Law. And she is one of the most unique people you have ever met. She does construction law, but her passion is in environmental law. Her house is this huge place in Lutz, with geese running around. And anyway, her site’s been up for a while and she wants to start blogging. And I usually end up doing most of the social media and blogging work for my clients. And it’s really exciting for me when a client wants to start doing their own blogging. So she asked me today, “Jeff, how do I start blogging?” And I got to be honest, Christmas got in the way of my answer and we’re late getting back to her. So today we’re going to do the very, very basic, most easy way to start doing your blogs on a WordPress site. And we’re going to use Elizabeth’s site as an example.
Thanks a lot, guys. This is your Ask HOF Anything Moment.
How do I blog in WordPress?
I’m not going to show you how to log in, because this is somebody else’s website and I don’t want to go through the login process and all the rest of that. Elizabeth got her login credentials. Okay? And once you get in, it’ll take you from the front end of the site, okay? And this is her site. Nice little video there. Ryan Construction Law and her main services and that sort of thing. Okay, a couple of review videos saying, “Hey, this is what we do.” It’s a fairly good one-page funnel site for an attorney that is very focused on one area, but she wants to add a blog.
So once you log in, it’s whatever your domain name is /wp-admin. And then you’re going to be challenged with a login name and a login password. And after you do that, you’re going to end up here. Which for most people that have never done this, it’s like, “Oh no.” All right, it’s really not so bad though. The first thing you should know is that all blogs are posts. It makes sense to create a couple of categories. All right, and first thing we’re going to do is we’ll create a couple of categories. Okay, now fast forward. Okay? I didn’t want to have you go through all this, but her four main practice areas, mechanics lien, environmental law, construction law, civil and litigation are now all set up. And so she has buckets to enter her posts into. And her posts are blog posts.
So the easiest way in the world to do this is up here you’ll see the new button and it says, “Post, media, page, project, or user.” So we’re going to create us a new post, we’ll add the title and the title will be new test post. Okay? I like to have a right sidebar layout. Okay? Because that shows the categories on the side. Sometimes you’re going to see this and go, “Ah”, okay, don’t worry about the Divi Builder. I love using Divi, but it’s way more than I want to talk about here. I want to just show you how to do a quick and dirty post.
So if you get this looking stuff here that drives you crazy, just over here, I’ve got text, okay? And that’s if you want to write HTML, you probably don’t. You want visual, so it works just like a word processor. And so we’re going to say, “Just like a word processor.” And then we’re going to say, “But I want a word in bold.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I want to put in an image. So we’re going to put an image in, all right? And add media. Okay, and if one of these images we’ll say that this is the image that we want to use, okay? Now if you had an image that you wanted to use that wasn’t already on your site, then what you would do is go to upload files, and you can drag and drop that image in here, or you can click on select files to grab that image. We’re not going to do that. We’re just simply going to the image library. We’re picking… Where was that judge looking guy?
There you go. We’re going to pick him. Alt text is always really important. It’s used for search and so we’re going to say Tampa Construction Law. Nobody will see that, but search engines will and search engines care about what the image is. So if search engines care, we care. Insert into post. Okay. Now really important, I need to tell it that this article is about construction law. So over here you’ll see I’ve got categories, okay? And then I always, always, always, always like to set a featured image. The featured image is what’s going to display if somebody shares this to social media. And I have some tools to help make that happen. But just keeping it simple, if you were to share this blog post on social media, the social media will show the featured image.
Also, the way I have the blog set up, the featured image is going to show on a grid. So we’re going to select a featured image. And for the featured image, let’s get this one. All right. Nice construction picture. And again, it needs some alt text. So we’re going to say, “Recent Tampa litigation.” That’s because the alt text again attracts search engines. Search engines use it. And if you say, “La, la, la, la”, and then you throw in litigation, it says, “Oh, there’s something new. There’s new content here. I’m not overdoing the same words over and over and over again.
So we’re going to set the featured image. And again, for some reason I unchecked construction law as my category, okay? And then what we’ll do is we can preview it, or publish it. Instead of publishing it, I can say, “Schedule this”, so that it happens at a different time. Okay, but I’m going to go directly to publish, and Elizabeth, I’m going to delete it afterward so you don’t have junk on your blog. I just want to show people how it looks.
So you’re going to jump in, give it a title, give it some content, throw an image if you want. Don’t forget to include a category. If you want a new category, add a new category. Now, not general instruction, but just for Elizabeth. Elizabeth, if you add a new category, please tell me, because I need to add that category to your blog page. No big deal, but just make sure that you telling me and I’ll add it. Okay. And then tags are an alternate way of indexing, so we can call that construction litigation. Don’t overdo it on tags, because Google doesn’t like people doing over SEO-ing, but one doesn’t hurt. And then we’ve got a featured image. Okay? I’m not going to talk about meta and all that. I’ll do that in another demo.
Right now I just want to do the simplest part. And that is how do you get a blog post out? Okay? That’s it. We’re done. I’m going to go here and hit publish. Da da da da da da da, da da da da da … Don’t leave while this was circle’s still going around. Ha, it’s published. Okay, so you’ll see it now. Once I finished publishing, I’ve got this new test post and the original hello world test post. So there are actually two test posts going on. Okay, so from here, if we go back to the menu bar up at the top, and let’s visit the site, and I’m going to open it in a new tab, which is right here. Okay? Sorry, I’m in the middle of your video.
Then we’re going to go to blog and you’ll see we’ve got the sample post, we’ve got the new test post, I can click on the new test post and there we have the featured image followed by the little bit of drivel that I wrote there. Okay? And that’s all there is to it. Starting from the top after you log in, go to posts, add new. Under Add new, give it a header. So some title information. You’re going to put in a little bit of content. You might add a picture or two. Okay? We’re going to make sure that we pick a category, give it a tag and we’ll call that tag important stuff. And that’s just a little tiny SEO bump, and we’ll set a featured image, which will be that one. Okay? When you’re done, we obviously review it, make sure it says what you want to say it and hit publish.
Wait for the little circle to finish and then take a look at the website. Okay? The website under the blog, you’ll see we now have three blog posts. I’ve got a header for Tampa bump, bump, bump. There’s the blog posts that we just created. I’ve got that test post and I’ve got the hello world. Now Elizabeth, I’m going to delete all this, so your blog is going to look empty. And I will do another video in about a week or so that moves you from a, how do you get a basic blog done, which is all we’ve done now, to how do you get a good blog done, okay? And from there we’ll go to how do you get an excellent blog done. But in my opinion, if you get the whole nugget at once, and I start talking about search optimization and backlinks and metadata and, ah, it becomes too much to deal with.
So this is a crawl, walk, run approach. Right now you finished crawling. That’s just how you’re going to make a quick and easy blog post. Thanks a lot everybody. I hope you enjoyed your aha moment, Elizabeth. I hope I got your question answered. And down below, if you subscribe, you’ll get notices when we put new ones of these up. If you leave a question, I’ll answer it for you. We go through and answer these questions all the time and it’s our pleasure to give you a hand. This has been your aha moment.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day. Everyone.
Recent Comments