Mastering how to create optimized blog posts consistently is the engine driving successful WordPress sites. Whether launching a personal blog, company publication or ecommerce storefront, quality content unlocks site growth flywheels attracting high value traffic.

This definitive guide reveals professional secrets leveraged by leading publishers to compose compelling posts optimized for engagement and search visibility every time. Follow our templated blueprint covering post structures, promotion campaigns, calls to action, and formatting best practices purpose built to hold reader attention while boosting your authority.

Save hundreds of hours avoiding common publishing pitfalls through our hand selected recommendations. Take the guesswork out of content creation thanks to actionable tips from SEO experts with proven traffic building results across thousands of sites. Come read equipped to finally own the foundations of managing a lively blog or content hub that both visitors and Google love interacting with.

One of the reasons that WordPress has become such a dominant force online is how easy it makes creating and publishing high-quality blog posts. Because of this, knowing how to create a post in WordPress is absolutely essential.

This is exactly what the second part of our WordPress basics series will cover.

The beauty of WordPress is that you can create a high quality, professional website with very little investment or technical know-how. However, to make the most of this, it’s important to have a strong foundation in how to use WordPress.

Following on from our tutorial on setting up your WordPress site, today we’re going to cover how to get started with creating your first blog posts.

Specifically, we’ll cover everything from how to navigate your WordPress admin panel to find your Posts section, to how to publish your latest masterpiece. First of all though, let’s answer a fundamental question about why this matters.

Why You Need to Create Posts in WordPress

You’ve likely noticed that most successful websites feature a blog with some description. This isn’t simply for the writer’s enjoyment. Instead, blog articles play a massive role in how your site attracts visitors and converts them into paying customers.

Specifically, an effective content marketing strategy is one of the best ways to improve website traffic through organic search and referrals. Once users enter your site, they’re also one of the best ways to lead them along your sales funnel.

Once you have figured out your content strategy and drafted your blog posts, the final step is to add them to your site effectively and appealingly. This includes giving your post the right attributes, formatting it correctly, and publishing it at the right time.

With that in mind, here’s our step-by-step guide to creating a post in WordPress.

Main types of posts you can create in WordPress:

Standard Posts

• The basic blog post option for publishing long or short-form content
• Most flexible format – supports all content elements from text to media
• Typically formatted latest-first with commenting enabled
• Ideal for news updates, articles, tutorials

Pages

• Used for more timeless, static content
• Often utilized for key site sections like About, Services, Contact
• Pages helpful for more complex page templates
• Comments are often disabled on pages by default

Custom Post Types

• For advanced users, create custom post types beyond posts/pages
• Custom post types tailor content models around specific verticals
• Like a portfolio post type for case studies or a team type for bios
• Requires developer skills – plugins also available

Understanding those available core post types can help identify what format makes sense for new content. Standard posts work well for constantly changing updates, while pages suit standalone critical info. Developing custom post types taps further flexibility.

Step 1: Navigate to your WordPress Posts

The first step to making a post on WordPress.com is to open your site’s WordPress control panel. It should look very similar to the one one below.

Here, you’ll find all the content published on your site’s blog. This allows you to make edits to your articles, as well as check out their performance to date. It’s also the portion of your admin dashboard where you can add new content to your blog.

Step 2: Add a New WordPress Post

In your Posts menu, you can click the Add button to create a new post. Depending on your theme, this might have a slightly different name. For example, some themes may refer to the Posts section as Blog Posts if you have both a blog and a news section on your site, with separate subdomains.

Additionally, there might be minor variations in how the Add Post button is labelled. For instance, under some themes, this might simply say New. In most cases, these differences should be pretty self-explanatory.

In our example site, the posts are represented by the orange-yellow in the image below. You will need to click on the add button to add a post; otherwise, it will take you to all of the posts you have created already.

Step 3: Write a New Blog Article in WordPress

When you click on the add post button, a page like the one below should be displayed. Depending on your theme and plugins, this may look a little different, but any differences should be minor.

Here you can write your post and give it a title.

You will have access to many different text features including bold, italic and a strike-through feature, which puts a line through parts of the text. The three-dot icon also offers more features and rich elements to add to your article.

There are several ways to enter the copy for your new article into WordPress. Many people choose to draft their articles directly in the WordPress editor.

Some companies with more complex publication pipelines prefer to have writers draft articles outside of WordPress and then copy and paste them into the Posts editor once all revisions have been finalised.

Step 4: Add Categories to a WordPress Post

You can also add categories, tags, and many other options to the post under post settings. To add the categories and tags to your posts, go to the settings button at the top bar, as seen in the previous step.

Once you click the settings, you will see a panel in which you can add tags, categories, a featured image, and choose if you would like the post to be automatically shared on your social media. This panel is shown below:

The image above shows the settings panel and all the options you receive with the personal plan. We have added multiple categories, which is very simple to do by clicking on ‘Add New Category’.

Categories are used to filter your posts. If you have many interests that you are talking about in your blog, it is best to sort them by categories.

This is because not everyone would be interested in gaming posts, for example, but could be interested in all your music posts. So, this just makes it easier for your audience to find content that interests them.

Step 5: Add a Featured Image in WordPress

The next step in creating a post is to add a featured image. This is also very straightforward. In the settings panel shown in step 4, just click on the featured image button, and you will get a panel like the one below.

Here you’ll find the section of the settings panel in which you can set a featured image. Once you are here, click on ‘set featured image’. A panel will show that will allow you to choose your featured image.

Step 6: Upload or Choose a Featured Image

You’ll be offered the option of choosing an image already in your media library or uploading a new image. Your theme should also give you the optimal dimensions for your featured image.

This image will be used as the main image on shares of your post and the main image on your blog page. This is very important, as your image should always be relevant to your post to draw in more readers.

You will be shown a panel like this. You have the option to choose an existing image that is uploaded to your site or to add a new image. Most of the time you will add a new image.

Step 7: Double Check your WordPress Post

The final step before publishing your post online is to double-check the accuracy of all the information in it.

This includes your spelling, punctuation and grammar. If you find mistakes, correct them because the more mistakes in your article, the less believable it becomes to a reader.

You may choose to use WordPress plugins to make this step easier. Many sites use an SEO plugin like Yoast to check their copy for SEO optimisation, readability, and metadata issues.

Step 8: Publish your New WordPress Article

This is the final step—publishing your post. First, always preview your post to make sure it looks good. If the post does not fit what you would like, go back and edit it. In particular, look out for design issues relating to text size and image dimensions.

If it’s good to go all you need to do is to hit the publish button.

The button is located beside the preview and settings panel buttons.

Alternatively, you might use the calendar function below the publish button to schedule your post to go live at a specific date and time. This is useful, as how your articles are published can often impact their success.

How to Create a Post in WordPress

Creating a post in WordPress is a very simple process. Indeed, this is one of WordPress’ biggest selling points. By following the above steps, just about anyone with an internet connection can publish and manage a successful blog.

Once you have published your post, it’s time to relax and start your next post. While you are writing your other post, be sure to check its statistics and popularity.

This is one of the fundamental skills in running a successful site. To continue building your WordPress skills, check out our next guide, dealing with how to add and edit content on the permanent pages on your site.

Tips for optimizing WordPress post content:

Titles

• Keep under 60 characters for best SEO
• Incorporate target keyword phrase toward the beginning
• Use emotional triggers like “How to” or “Top 10”
• Test colon formatting like “Getting More Traffic: 10 Tactics to Try Today”

URL Slugs

• Keep slugs short and include the main term (like my-keyword-post)
• Avoid special characters or stopping words that might truncate slug
• Use hyphens-over underscores for separations

Imagery

• Featured images should be at least 1024px x 640px
• Seek interesting photos from free stock sites first
• Ensure all images have descriptive alt text
• Compress images without losing quality
• Caption photos and appropriately attribute

Optimizing those key elements not only amplifies engagement for visitors but also helps search engine crawlers better process and index content for discoverability – increasing traffic

Tips on promoting published WordPress posts:

RSS Feeds

• Take advantage of built-in RSS feeds to distribute new content
• Drive users to subscribe to feeds on your site and via email
• Services also allow syndicating RSS content to other channels

Social Media

• Share every blog post across relevant social media accounts
• Tag any relevant hashtags, groups, or people in your industry
• Post consistently 2-3 times about new content for visibility

Scheduled Content Alerts

• Use editorial calendar plugins to organize and space out promotion
• Schedule social posts for the best times using Buffer or Hootsuite
• Email subscribers personalized post highlights like “New article you may like based on past reads.”

Driving as much upfront visibility as possible to your newly published WordPress posts gives maximum opportunity for discovery via shares, links, and search traction. Treat every piece of content like a campaign.

WordPress content formatting best practices:

Formatting Elements

Moderately incorporate formatting elements like:

• Numbered or bulleted lists
• Blockquotes for impactful passages
• H3 or H4 subheadings to break up the wall of text
• Social media embed codes to display relevant posts

Spacing Readability

Utilize proper line spacing for enhanced readability:

• 1.5x line height instead of single-spaced lines
• Paragraph breaks between distinctive ideas
• Clear transitions between header blocks

Style Variety

Distribute different approaches throughout posts:

• Mix paragraphs ranging from short 1-2 line components to more extended 5-6 line elaborations.
• Share both brief snippets of stats as well as extended anecdotes for flavour.

Responsiveness

Checking formatting responsiveness across device sizes through WordPress is advised:

• Review line length, font sizing, and spacing for desktop versus tablets
• Verify layout reflows properly down to mobile screens
• No horizontal scrolling is required, which ensures a good mobile experience

Proper formatting and readability directly impact visitor engagement as well as content indexing.

Tips for effectively integrating calls-to-action (CTAs) into WordPress posts:

• Strategically place the initial CTA after the intro section or background setup to make the first ask
• Keep CTAs concise – a single sentence or short paragraph at most
• Outbound link CTAs to external sites using strong action phrases like “See Live Demo.”
• Internal link CTAs to related content with softer asks like “Read related post.”
• Break up lengthy posts with intermittent CTAs to re-engage readers
• End each post with a final summary and CTA to guide the next steps
• Use bullet points or numbered lists for CTA clarity
• Bold key trigger words that compel clicks
• Test CTAs both inline within paragraphs as well as separated into block elements

Avoid overloading posts with excessive CTAs. Limit to 3-5 strong appeals per piece – intro, middle, conclusion. Ensure destination pages deliver content that is relevant to what is promised. Conduct A/B testing on phrasings to optimize performance based on clicks and conversions.

Create a post in WordPress FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions on Creating WordPress Posts:

Q: What is the ideal length for a blog post?

A: While there is no fixed answer, 1,000-2,000 words balance depth and engagement.

Q: When should I publish new blog content?

A: Post consistently on an editorial calendar based on user behaviour – at least 1-2 per week.

Q: What main post elements impact SEO visibility?

A: Titles, URL slugs, images, metadata like tags. Format content for both users and search.

Q: How can I get more eyes on blog posts?

A: Promote new content via email and social channels. Enable internal linking.

Create a post in WordPress Conclusion

Creating compelling WordPress posts is a masterable skill open to all, with some guidance around optimization best practices. Formatting content in readable ways using site architecture elements like titles and imagery enhances visitor interactions.

Promoting completed posts via multiple channels, including email and social campaigns, ensures that content is discovered. Maintaining an editorial calendar helps keep publishing consistent for return readers.

Measure what post formats and topics resonate to double down on those areas. Well-crafted posts that inform or entertain visitors lead to an invaluable long-term content asset able to attract new visitors for years thanks to organic search visibility.