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If you have your blog post written, you’ll want to get it up on Strikingly. Here’s some easy steps you can take to make sure it’s done right.
Easy Steps to Create Your Blog
- Open the Strikingly Blog Editor - You can do this from the dashboard by clicking on the Blog icon, or go inside the site editor itself and click on the blog section to bring up your blog posts. This will bring you into the blog editor.
- Write New Post - click on the green Write New Post button to create a new post.
- Copy and Paste your content as Plain Text - To get your content in, simply copy and paste it into the blog page. Click on the white text section to do your paste and make sure to paste it as Plain text. If you’re copying from Google Docs or MS Word, the formatting will NOT carry over correctly. By pasting as plain text, you will bring over all the text and can add formatting yourself.
- Add formatting to text. If you had bullets, headings or bold or italic text, add them now.
- Add links. If you have links in your text, add them now.
- Add your Blog Post Title and subtitle if you have one.
- Add an image for your post. Uploading it to the background of the post will give you a nice image of the post that is displayed on the website page. Images should relate to the post and also help to reinforce your brand. Using new but related images to what you have on your site will help your site feel fresh. 1600 x900 pixel size works best.
- Add images within the post if desired. For images in the post, you can use almost any size. I typically find 600 x 400 pixels to work well.
- Add a Call To Action (CTA) at the end of the blog post. If the visitor found the information useful, they want to contact you or they want to discuss, a CTA will give them the information they need to be able to get in touch. Tying the CTA to the blog post and what you do is a good idea.
- Add categories if you want. Categories allow you to display only certain blog items in certain areas on the page. For example, I might have blog categories like Services, News and Tools. This will allow me to, for example, display only articles for Services on my Services page.
- Decide whether you want to show the date or not.
- Save and publish. Note that you can choose to publish straight away or publish at a later date and time. If you ever see a red exclamation mark on the publish button, it means you have updates to your blog that have not yet been unpublished. Saving the blog does not make it go live. Make sure you also publish it!
There’s a number of things you should also do which will help with being found and SEO. This can be especially useful if you’re producing evergreen content.
Other helpful things you can (should!) Do
- Use a custom URL - customise the URL so that it reflects the main purpose of the post but is also easy to remember. For this post, I will use the URL ‘blog-post-updates’. If you use specific keywords, it can also help with SEO. Just remember to keep the main focus on what the post is about.
- Add meta description for the post - this provides a short bit of information to Google about what the post is about. Make sure to keep this short. You can usually find one or two sentences in the beginning of a good blog post which tells the reader what the post is about. You that! Then review and adjust if needed. This will help with SEO so you can consider keywords to help. But, again, make sure the main focus of the description is on what the post is about.
- Add Alt Text to Images - This tells Google what the image is about. 30% of google searches are image searches. So it helps a lot if you can add Alt Text to your images. I always add in my company name as well as a short description.
If you found this helpful and want help with you Strikingly website, you can get in touch with me here or on whatsapp here.