For those of you anxious to get some content into your site, here’s look at how to Add a Post.

The first thing you’ll need to do is login. I’ve already covered the login process in a previous video, so I’ll assume you are starting from your Wordpress Dashboard.

Once you are in your Wordpress Dashboard, there are a couple of ways to start a new post. At the top is a handy button that says ‘New Post’. Clicking this will open a new post window and you are ready to begin adding your content. Note that this button is contextual, so depending on where you are in the Wordpress Control Panel, this button may say something different. You can always get to ‘New Post’ by clicking on the arrow and finding ‘New Post’ in the dropdown menu.

You can also start a new post by clicking ‘Posts’ on the left navigation and then clicking ‘Add New’ in the sub menu that appears below the ‘Posts’ heading.

I am now in the ‘Add New Post’ window and am ready to add my content. I’ll keep it simple on this time through and show you some advanced features later on.

The first thing I’ll do is add the title of my post here in the box at the top. I am calling this post ‘Latest Post On Top’.

Next, I’ll add the body of my post in the text box just below the title. You can type your post in here from scratch, or simply copy and paste from your favorite word processor.

Note that you can open what Wordpress calls ‘The Kitchen Sink’ by clicking this button in the tool bar that has all the little squares on it. The Kitchen Sink includes import tools for pasting plain text or from Microsoft Word. The import tools are important to use, especially when pasting from Microsoft Word because they will interpret a lot of hidden code that is included in your text and thereby avoiding a formatting nightmare.

I’m going to import from a text file, so I’ll use the text import button to show you how it works; I’ll click the button in the toolbar that has the clipboard and the ‘t’ on it, paste my text into the resulting window, and then click ‘Insert’. This is the safest way to import text into your post.

For the most part, we are finished. However there are two other things you should do with every post, so I’ll show those to you now as part of this lesson.

On the right you have two sections of the Post window; one called Categories, and the other called Post Tags.

Categories are important to assign because they will help you keep your site organized, and can be helpful to your readers as they navigate your content. I recommend assigning a Category to every post. Simply select from one of your preset Categories, or add a new Category here at the bottom of the Category box.

The other thing you should do for every post is add Post Tags. Post Tags are another way to organize your content, and are a helpful tool for your readers as well as an important way to let the search engines know what your key topics are for each post. Simply type a few keywords from your post into this box, separating them with a comma, and then select ‘Add’.

At any point in this process I can save my work as a draft by clicking the ‘Save Draft’ button here at the top of the form. When I ‘Save Draft’, I am saving my work into the Control Panel. After I ‘Save Draft’, I can walk away from my computer or even log out of my Wordpress Control Panel and my draft will be saved and ready for me when I come back to work on it.

Content doesn’t go live to your blog until you select the ‘Publish’ button, here on the right. Once I select ‘Publish’, my post will be saved and will appear on my blog for everyone to see.

There are some advanced features to learn after this, but this is the basics of how to publish a new post to your Wordpress blog.

We are providing access to your blog account as well as a new ability to manage your own graphics. We have added a new Twitter and Facebook feature that allows you to link your accounts for automated re-posting of your blog articles to your social accounts.

You’ll also find links to how-to, video and social media training.

To visit your control panel, visit our login page.

Perhaps as a testament to the remaining opportunity on the Web Frontier, us bloggers have to remind ourselves that even though we have made some incredible leaps and bounds over the past ten years, the industry is still young and there are still a lot of people at the earliest stages of learning about blogs.

In the spirit of revisiting a simple-yet-elegant look at answering the question ‘What is a Blog’, I hereby submit this wonderful video from Common Craft, the people who help us understand things in simple terms:

Here’s a quick rundown of the SEO.com top ten from the ListPipe perspective: (For more information about the SEO.com top ten article, visit the Utah Valley Business Blog, or head straight over to SEO.com.)

1. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – ListPipe is all about ‘organic content’, in fact we just released a new feature that allows us to deliver unique articles to a wider range of customers within a specific category. If you are a franchise organization or a corporate group with a large number of sales representatives and distributors, ListPipe can help you achieve an organic profile across your entire organization while delivering individually customized content for each participant.

2. Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn – Each ListPipe article includes a sharing tag for one-click sharing of your customized content into your social accounts. Most of our users are Facebook and Twitter users, and we have made it easy for them to share content from their blog to a wider group of people through their social networks. We also include with each ListPipe account an informative online training experience that teaches the basics of sharing content into social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

3. Keyword Research – Our custom content is chock full of keywords that we have researched for you. Keyword research can eat up a lot of valuable time, but we recognize (as does SEO.com) that it is critical for any online marketing strategy. Get yourself a ListPipe account, and we’ll take care of this tedious task for you!

4. Video Marketing – Like SEO.com, we saw this one coming; and for this reason each ListPipe account hosted on our servers includes an easy to use plugin that allows you to add your own video content to your blog. In addition, an increasing number of our posts include video content from your proprietary sources as well as from popular video sites such as YouTube.

5. Online Public Relations – Because we are working with the corporate umbrella for many of our blog networks, we have direct access to news and announcements that we republish into your blog so that you can repost to your social networks with the confidence that any readers will be able to find their way back to you with customized links and contact information designed to lead readers to your door.

6. Link Building – This is one of the primary reasons we invented ListPipe, and remains one of our cornerstone strategies. Every ListPipe post includes a strong linking strategy designed to direct traffic to your main site as well as lend Authority to your site from the keywords and phrases we are linking from.

7. Blogging – Need we say more? ListPipe is a blog content service; we publish content each week into your blog for you so you can focus on the important aspects of selling your business. And for you eager bloggers, we provide full administrative access to your Wordpress blog so that you can add supplemental content and keep your readers informed at a more intimate level.

8. Conversion Web Design – Our articles and the keyword linking strategy we employ is designed to lead visitors to your blog directly to your site for more information. Links, encouraging language, and a ready-built Contact Me page direct your readers back to you every time.

9. Paid Search Marketing – We don’t offer Pay-per-click advertising services; we’re all about the organic content side. If you are interested in adding PPC to your blog marketing effort, we recommend SEO.com, the original publishers of this awesome top ten list.

10. Email Marketing – Communication is what blogging is all about, and for this reason we occasionally publish your email address within a post to help your readers find you. More importantly, we include with your blog a full-featured Contact Form that allows you to collect leads right from your blog. When a visitor contacts you with their email address from your Contact Form, add them to your marketing list and keep them informed!

ListPipe provides professional blogging services for sales and marketing organizations who want to increase their presence in search engine results. Contact ListPipe for more information.

Thanks to SEO.com for providing this great top ten list.

When a new customer signs up for a blog using our automated system for any of our vertical categories (including dentistry and real estate), our system will automatically create an About page, and a Contact Us page. Both pages are fully editable, of course, and can be modified by the user simply by loging into the blog control panel and making any necessary adjustments.

Square Compass created a new Simple Contact plugin for Wordpress expressly for the new feature. The new plugin provides a simple way to add a contact form to your Wordpress blog. The no-frills contact form will be available in the Wordpress plugins library soon. I’ll keep you posted.

As for the new Pages feature in ListPipe, users now have the ability to capture more search engine attention with an automatically customized About page. The About page includes a short, custom paragraph about you based on your input during the registration process. Though simple, the About Us content is designed to give search engines a customized glance at who you are, and provides a more mature position for your ListPipe site.

The Contact Us page is also customized, and includes an automated form that allows your visitors to contact you by completing a simple contact form. The form is customized to deliver the feedback directly to your email address, and includes a Captcha for security, and error checking to help assure you do not get spammed. The form is optimized to ensure, also, that your visitors provide you with at least one method of contact, and warns them if they do not complete the comments field.

We are excited to announce this new feature, and thrilled that we now have a complete solution for those who use ListPipe to capture business leads through Internet marketing.

We have come to rely on links to get us from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ in a relational context, and to provide a sum of information greater than the single page we are visiting. This concept is important in search engine marketing…

Search engines deliver a product to their customers, and that product is a list of search results based on keyword input. If you type into a search engine the words ‘tooth whitening’, you would expect to receive a list of web sites that are relevant to ‘tooth whitening’. Search engine companies know that you will be frustrated with their results if the list does not satisfy at least three basic requirements:

1. Relevant: The resulting sites listed have to be relevant to your keyword search request; in this case ‘tooth whitening’;
2. Current: The resulting sites listed need to present information that is current and not outdated;
3. Informative: The resulting sites listed need to be informative.

Search engine companies work very hard to satisfy these requirements. It is a hard thing to do, and it is difficult to perfect. For this reason there are a few clear leaders in the search engine market, and they are pouring millions into measuring these factors accurately so they can continue providing a good ‘product’.

One important factor in demonstrating relevance, currency, and informativeness is linking.

There are two types of linking strategies you should employ, each of which is important and should not be considered without the other. One is ‘incoming’ links, and the other is ‘outgoing’ links.

We have all heard that incoming links are important, and they are. Search engines are interested in the number of other sites that are linking to yours. This helps establish a certain degree of popularity and relevance. The thinking goes that if your site is linked to from many other sites, then your site must me important to the sites within your category.

Search engines are wary of incoming link strategies because there are so many ways to ‘cheat’. For instance, some marketers have essentially carpet-bombed the internet with links to their own site. There are tools and services that make this easy, but there is a risk: carpet-bombing your URL all over the web means that you will be receiving links from sites that are not relevant, and therefore dilute your site’s relevance factor.

To explain: Imagine your site about ‘tooth whitening’ receives links from sites that specialize in ’saddles’, ‘hunting’, and ‘political commentary’. Search engines will measure these factors and may determine that your site is not relevant to any of these items, including ‘tooth whitening’. Your site appears to be the equivalent of a ‘dictionary’ to the search engines, with no clear or specific subject (at least based on the links).

Your best rule of thumb with incoming links is to cultivate links from relevant sites, and to reject links from sites that are too disparate. Links from social bookmarking sites are the exception, and simply indicate popularity without focus on relevance.

The second linking strategy you need to consider is ‘outbound’ linking. Perhaps even more important that inbound linking, outbound linking considers the links you have created on your site, and to which sites they point to.

There has been general reluctance on the part of our clientele for linking to other sites based on a desire to contain visitors to their own site. This is an important consideration and there are, of course, appropriate and innapropriate times and places to place outbound links. For bloggers, who’s primary product is ‘information’, outbound links are critical.

When a search engine measures your site for relevance, currency, and informativeness, they look at the sites to which you are linking for a ’second opinion’ of who you are and what you have to say.

Most importantly, outbound links tell the search engines that your visitors will be introduced to additional relevant content that is beyond your site. Think about it: when a search engine delivers their ‘product’, they want to present sites that are relevant, current, and informative. How better to add value to this objective than to include additional destinations in your presentation?

Put a different way: Search engines would rather deliver a relevant starting point in a search result than a ‘dead end’. Is your site a ‘dead end’, with no exits to relevant pages? Or are you a ‘great place to get started’ with lots of relevant places to go?

Which site would you rather get in a search result? …See what I mean?

Bottom line: Cultivate lots of links from relevant external sites, and don’t be afraid to create links within your content that reveal relevant, interesting places to go. You will literally help others while you help yourself. It’s a network, after all.

Tip: Make sure your links open the destination page in a new window or tab so your visitors don’t loose you.

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In fact, more often than not, a couple of paragraphs is all you need to get your point across clearly and effectively. No need to write more than is necessary, and in most cases filler will be detrimental rather than helpful.

How long should each post be? As a rule of thumb, 300 words is plenty. There is no specific penalty for writing more, although you may loose your customers after the first few hundred words. The search engines are happy with as little as a few paragraphs. 300 words is a good number because it is short enough to write quickly, and long enough to include some good human-readable content with lots of relevant keywords.

In a pinch, don’t be afraid to write a few sentences. The SEO value of the content will, of course, not be as strong, however you will be keeping the search engines on their toes as far as being seen as ‘fresh and active’. When it comes down to it, frequency is pretty important. If your choice is between being able to write something now, or having to wait until you have time to produce more; always write now.

By the way, this post has 261 words in it. Just about right.

You can view our recommended top ten wordpress training videos here. Just click on the headline for each numbered item to go to the video page.

You can also dive straight into our ListPipe Wordpress video library from this page.

Our how-to videos are presented in high quality Quicktime on the site, and are available on YouTube if you want to see them in a smaller version. When you get to YouTube, do a search for ‘ListPipe’ and ‘Wordpress’ to find all the videos. There are currently 13 of them, covering topics such as logging in, and inserting images.

Each video on our demo blog includes written instructions on how to complete the task in the latest Wordpress version. Each video is designed to teach you a specific task in between two and three minutes. For those of you new to Wordpress blogging, this is an excellent way to become familiar with the basics of your Wordpress system.

Take a look and let us know what you think. Enjoy!