In Part One of this step-by-step tutorial on how to create a new WordPress Post, we covered the following areas:

• Types Of Content You Can Publish In WordPress
• Features Of A WordPress Post

To review Part One of this comprehensive step-by-step tutorial, go here: How To Create A WordPress Post - Part One

WordPress provides an easy-to-use, powerful and flexible CMS platform to publish information about your business online.

The more you understand WordPress, the better you can use it to grow your business online.

As you will see very shortly, creating a new WordPress post is very easy. In this tutorial, you are going to actually create a post in WordPress that will help you grow your business.

What's covered in this article

Let's start by reviewing some helpful guidelines for adding content to WordPress posts.

WordPress - Content Guidelines

The following are useful guidelines and best practices for posting content:

• Practice Accessibility: Stay compliant with web standards for accessibility and help your users by including ALT and TITLE descriptions with your links and images (e.g. <a title="Add Descriptive Title Here" href="https://yourdomain.com/">Linked Text</a>).
• Use Paragraphs: Make your content more readable by breaking up your writing into paragraphs. Tip: If double spacing is used between your paragraphs, WordPress will automatically detect these and insert HTML paragraph tags (<p>) into your writing.
• Use Headings: If you plan to write long posts, then use headings to break up your post sections. In HTML, headings are set using tags like h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on. You can also insert headings by highlighting content in the body of your post, and then selecting one of the heading options from the "Format Style" drop-down menu in your WordPress Editor.
• Use HTML: You don't have to know HTML to create richly formatted content, as WordPress will automatically do this if you use the Content Editor. Having some basic knowledge of HTML, however, allows you to control different styling elements in your content (e.g. boxes and tables).
• Spell Check & Proof: Check your spelling and proof everything before hitting the publish button. There are a number of spell check plugins available for WordPress.
• Focus On Content Quality: An excellent way to focus on writing quality content without distractions is to compose your post drafts in a text editor, then copy and paste this into WordPress.
• Think Before You Post: Anything that you publish can be seen by lots of people and logged by search engines, making it harder to take things back. Take your time to plan and think about what you are planning to write and review your posts before you hit the publish button. Don't rant ... think!
• Consider Your Target Readers: Think about who will read your posts and take any appropriate measures or precautions that you think may be required when writing content to ensure that your privacy and the privacy of others is protected.
• Make Use Of Commenting: Comments let site visitors interact with you and share their ideas. You have control over your site's comments and you can delete any comments that you don't want published on your site, so consider this fact when deciding whether you will or will not allow people to comment on your site. Also, make sure that people can contact you privately if they need to (e.g. use a contact form).
• Worry About The Design Later: How your website looks is important, but it's often not essential to getting your point across. In fact, because WordPress is so flexible as far as web design is concerned, you can just start writing to grow a readership, and then change your entire site's design with just a few clicks of the mouse anytime you want, using Themes. Remember that it's great content that attracts and keeps your readers engaged, so focus on publishing great content and worry about little things later - With WordPress, you can change anything and everything you want any time!
• Use Videos And Pictures: Images and videos help make your posts and pages attractive and can help readers engage better with your information. We provide additional tutorials on inserting images and embedding videos to your posts and pages.
• Save As You Go: Save your posts frequently to prevent losing your work to accidents or computer errors. You can even do this without publishing your content, as the section below will explain.
• Publish Regularly: We have created an entire email training series designed to help you come up with limitless content ideas for your site:

Saving A Post In WordPress - Options

Once you have added content to your post, the next step is learning how to save it.

WordPress autosaves your posts at regular intervals ...

(Your work is autosaved at regular intervals)

Autosaving helps to prevent losing your valuable content if something should unexpectedly go wrong with your computer or internet access, or if you click something that accidentally closes your post, or close an application while you're working.

The date and time of your post is automatically recorded when the post is first auto-saved.

You can modify this in the values in the "Published on:" module ...

(Post Publishing - Published on: feature)

Until your post is published, your content will not be visible to site visitors. Instead, the post will be saved as a "Draft" post until published ...

You can save your post as a draft or publish it live using the "Save" and "Publish" functions in the Publish section ...

To save posts as a "Draft", go to the Publish > Status section of your Post screen and click on Edit ...

Select Draft from the drop-down menu and click OK...

With Draft displayed in the "Status:" field, click the 'Save Draft' button...

Your content will be saved and updated as a draft post. Click on Preview post to preview your saved content ...

In 'Preview Mode' you can see what the post will look like when published, but the content is not made visible to online visitors ...

(In 'Preview Mode' your content is not visible to your online visitors)

You can also preview your content in a new browser window without first saving or publishing it by clicking 'Preview' in the "Publish" area ...

When your content is ready for publishing, click 'Publish' ...

Once your post has gone live, click View Post to open it in a new browser window ...

The published post will now be visible to site visitors and can be accessed via its unique URL ...

Make sure that all of your content has been added and formatted correctly ...

Note: Once publishing a post, the button changes from 'Publish' to 'Update' ...

You can revert the status from 'Published' to 'Draft' or 'Pending Review' just by clicking on the Edit link in the Status field and selecting another option from the Status drop-down menu ...

For example, to resave your published post as a 'draft' post, go to the Publish > Status section of your post editor and click on Edit ...

Choose Draft from the drop-down menu and click OK...

In the "Status:" field, click the 'Save Draft' button ...

Your post will update to a 'draft' post and no longer be available to blog readers.

Note: typing in the web address of posts that were previously published will lead to a "not found" error message (this is called a '404' page) ...

('404 Not Found' error page)

Creating A Post In WordPress - Quick Summary

In this final tutorial section, we briefly review the steps involved in creating and optimizing a new WordPress post.

As mentioned in Part One of this tutorial, with WordPress, getting your content published online is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Think ...
2. Write ...
3. Publish!

After deciding on the topic you plan to post about, the next step is simply to write the content, and then get it published. With WordPress, publishing content is easy.

Note: Optimized posts help your site perform better with search engines. We address WordPress Post SEO in separate articles and tutorials.

The image below provides a quick summary of the steps involved in creating, optimizing and posting new content to your site:

(Posting Content In WordPress - Quick Recap)

1. Select Posts > Add New in your WordPress dashboard menu to bring up the 'Add New Post' panel.
2. Add your post content (title & body). Also, make sure that your Permalinks are already set up and modify the Post Slug if required.
3. If you have installed an SEO plugin, type the search engine optimization metatags into the SEO fields in this area. This should only take an extra minute or so, but it can help your content to rank better in the search engines.
4. Enter your Post Excerpt into the 'Excerpt' section.
5. Select a Post Category to save your post under.
6. Add tags to the Post Tags section (tip: you can use the same keywords you entered into the SEO section in Step 3).
7. Publish your post.

Congratulations! Now you know how to create and publish a new post in WordPress! In a separate tutorial, we'll show you how to edit and delete WordPress posts, in case you need to make changes to your content or remove a post that you no longer want to display on your site.

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