Okay, so we've written a blog post, we haven't published it yet, we've formatted all the text and images. And we're happy with the way it's looking in the preview. So I'm going to explain what is happening here on the right hand sidebar. We're aware of this box here, we know we can save draft here and publish. We can also turn things from public to private, from public to draft. There's also something called revisions here, and I'm going to come back to that later.
We've also got an option to shedule a publish. So if you just click the button there, it will publish it immediately. However, you can set a time in the future if you want to stagger your posts for some reason. Now the format I would only ever choose standard. For this box. This box won't always appear depends On the theme you're using.
For me as a content marketer, I would always like to produce a blog post with more than 1000 words, because those are the ones that tend to get shared socially, and also tend to do better in the search engines. But if you wanted to use these options, you could do very easily. Now categories are very important. At the moment, we've only got one category, you should have at least 10 or 20 categories in a mature blog. So for example, I have sections on email marketing, WordPress, website, design, design, business, these are my categories. So if you add a new category here, let's call this one productivity, and then you would uncheck uncategorized.
And now this blog post is in productivity. However, that isn't actually sufficient for categories. You need to edit the categories here by clicking on posts categories. And I'm going to Command or Ctrl. Click this now to open that categories editor in a new window. And what we have here is the ability to put in a description for our category, edit under productivity.
And here you need to enter a keyword rich description in there as well. Let's go back to our posts. And we should also delete the uncategorized category because obviously that is not going to help anybody in tags, these don't carry any particular SEO bang, there's very little benefit in doing them. There we go as a couple of tags there. Now featured image. Again, you may not see this, but it really helps if you do featured images tend to appear as thumbnails next to your blog post, in social media, and in your blog itself.
So maybe when you see that 10 most recent blog posts, they all come with a little thumbnail image. And that would be your featured image. So I'm going to set featured image now. And I'm going to choose the one that we used as the main image and set featured image. So that will be the image that is used as a thumbnail for this particular blog post. Now, we're not finished here, because you can actually customize the boxes that you can see in this right hand sidebar.
If you go up here to Screen Options, I'm going to check revisions and I'm going to check author. You can also check any of these which will show you other boxes, which will give you options to change functionality in your WordPress post editor. But if we scroll down now, we now have two boxes at the bottom that we didn't have before. This is the revisions and remember, you can access them by the Publish box as well. But the revisions are quite useful. If you need to go back to a version you saved earlier.
So basically, all the versions you've saved as draft are saved in the database and you can go back to them at any time. And also author if you have a multiple author blog, and the person who entered the text wasn't the person who wrote it, then you can change the author there. So once you have done all these things, and specifically the category and the featured image is very important. Then you can publish. So I have published and it's live on the worldwide web now. So now we're going to go back to the blog page and refresh and there is our most recent blog post and look at it, it's looking a bit daft, we've got a huge great image here, and then we've got that image repeated there.
That is because we chose that image as the featured image. Now normally, that will be featured as a either a smaller or a larger image but you'd only ever get an excerpt with it. But in 2016, this free theme you get with WordPress, unfortunately, they show the whole of the blog post on the blog page. So we'll go back to the post, and we'll edit that post. And down the bottom here, remove featured image, and then updates. And now if we look at the blog page, you only see the image once and you can read the whole of the article there.
And then beneath that one, you've got the two old articles, dummy articles that we have puts in. So I hope you enjoyed that. That's how to publish a new blog post whilst remembering all of the metadata, like the keywords, categories, and featured images if you want to use them. My name is Rob I'll see you in the next video.