Creating a Blog Post with HubSpot

Resources:

A quick tour of the blog tool:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/cos-blog/a-quick-tour-of-the-blog-tool 

Get started with the blog tool:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/cos-blog/get-started-with-the-blog-tool 

Full Transcript:

To get to your blog, simply click on Marketing > Website > Blog. From here you’ll notice the layout of the main blog interface with a few key differences. First off on the right you will find the name of your blog. If you have more than one blog in your account, this is where you would switch between blogs if you want to manage one other than your default blog. Below that you find the blog “state” filters. This includes draft, scheduled, published, and archived. Keep in mind the “All blog posts” tab does NOT include archived posts.

Below that you find several items that are unique to blogs themselves. Let’s talk about each one individually. The comments section will list out every comment ever made on your blog, in the order that they were made. Including the name and email of the user, the post they commented on, and the content of the post itself. From here you can also reply to comments, mark them as spam, reject them, or delete them entirely.

Next is tags. Here you will find all of the tags you have available to you when creating a blog post (more on that later). It will also show you how many posts are using that tag, and if you want to view them, simply click on the tag itself and you will be taken to a page that lists them all out. Unlike comments however, tags are not limited to just the blog you are working but are available to all blogs you have in your account. However you can filter by a specific blog if you only want to see the tags that blog is currently using. Tags can also be combined with other tags, have multiple language variants, or be deleted if no longer in use. To add new tags, simply click this button here and give it a name. 

Quick sidenote, it’s important to make sure that you aren’t creating too many tags or tags that are too specific to an individual post. The point of tags is both allow the user to get a quick understanding of what the blog is about, but also find other similar blog posts with the same topic. If most of your tags are only used on one or two posts, this becomes nearly impossible to do. My recommendation, try to limit each blog to about 10 relevant tags.

Next up is Authors! Authors are also available across all blogs, not just the ones you are working on but the blogs filter is still available. Here you will find a list of all authors currently available for use, as well as how many posts they have authored. To see those posts, simply click on the name to be taken to a page listing them all. You can also edit their information by clicking Actions > Edit full profile, and updating any of the information you want. To create a new author, simply click “Add new author” and at the very least include their name and author slug.

The remaining options include filters to filter your posts by author, campaign, or tag, as well as some blog analytics tools and a link to the blogs live homepage. 

Now let’s talk about creating a blog post. You can edit existing posts by clicking Actions > Edit, or clone a blog post to create a new one (there are also options to unpublish, archive, or delete a post), but we are going to try creating one from scratch. To do so simply click Create > Blog Post, select the blog you want, and click create. From here you’ll be brought to the editor where you can start building out your post! You can edit the title here and add content to the main body here. Body content can include text, as well as images, videos, links, and many other kinds of content. The body editor also includes this standard text editor toolbar, where you can do things like change colors and font sizes, add lists and change alignment, and insert forms of media like images as I mentioned before.

One particularly special item to insert is your Read more separator. This is especially important because anything above your read more separator can be included in your blog notification emails, while everything below it will be excluded. It sort of determines how much of the post you want to include in the mail preview.

After adding all your content, you can move on to the settings section where you will have additional options for adjust your title and URL, select and author, add one or more tags, and include the all important, meta description. Lastly you have the featured image, which in the case of this blog template will add the image to the top of the post, but it will also determine which image shows up on your blog listing page, as well as the image that will show up on social media posts.

After adjusting the setting you can go to the optimize tab to make some improvements, and finally the schedule tab where you can either publish the post now, schedule it for later, or schedule it for a date in the past. If you do the latter, just keep in mind that no blog notification email will be sent if you do so.

Speaking of which! To create blog notification emails for your subscribers, go to Settings > Blog. This also where you would create a new blog if you so choose. Then go to subscriptions, and there you’ll find three notification email options. Turn one or more on, and then make sure to edit the emails themselves. Here you need to adjust things like the email details, some unique email body features only available in this kind of email (such as how much of the post you want to show and the size of your image) as well as adjusting settings, sending test emails, optimizing them, and more. Check out our HubSpot emails video for everything you need to know about creating and editing emails.

Once you have finished this, simply publish the email and you are good to go!

And that will do it for the HubSpot Blog Tool. Please leave any questions you have in the comments down below and check the description for additional resources. See you next time!