Write Your First Blog Post – Text Editor Explained

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WordPress Text Editor

Click on “add new” and you will be inside of your visual editor.

I’ve labeled everything to make it easier for you to follow along. Let’s start at the very top with the Site title to help you understand how to write your first blog post.

Post Title

Here is where you’re going to take your long-tail keyword and turn it into an SEO friendly title that will make people want to click.

Here’s an example:  “How To Write Your First WordPress Blog Post – WordPress Visual Editor Explained”

It specifically tells you what this blog post is about.

Post URL

Directly under the site title is the post URL. You can click on the edit button and change the URL if you want to.

As you can see on my blog post I made sure that mine says “how to write your first blog post”

This is the keyword that I am trying to rank for this blog post. Be sure to add your keyword in the Post URL.

Adding Images and Media

Every blog post on my website gets at least one image. I think images make my tutorials easier to understand.

If you’ve seen any of my other tutorials, you know I am a huge fan of creating picture walk through tutorials.

 
If you haven’t read my other tutorials, be sure you check out the one that walks you through step by step tutorial on starting a WordPress blog.

Maybe you need a tutorial on WordPress plugins?

When you’re ready to add images or media click on the “add media” button and browse to your compute to upload your files.

It’s as easy as that.

A Look At the Visual Editor

I like to think of this section like Microsoft Word. You can use the visual text editor to add different types of styling elements to your blog post. If you’re familiar with Microsoft Word, you won’t have any issues using the visual editor for writing your blog posts.

Row 1

I will run through the kitchen sink features quickly so you can better understand what they do. To be honest, I really don’t use all the features.

1. Bold Feature: This tab allows you to bold your content. Highlight your text and bold it like this.

2. Italicize Content: Style your content by highlighting and it will look like this.

3. Strike Through: here’s an example of how strike through works.

4. Lists: Creating lists on your WordPress blog is easy.

This is what an un-ordered list looks like:

Social media network sites I need to join to market my content:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Pinterest

 
This is what an ordered list will look like inside of WordPress.

Things to do this week:

• write a blog post
• publish my post
• take care of social media

 
If you want to learn more about using lists in your content, you can read about them here.

5. Break in Content: This adds a break in your content. You can read more about using the br tag.

6. Blockquote: Add some content in blockquotes.

This is some content wrapped in blockquotes

7. Horizontal Line: This adds a break in your content. You can read more about using the hr tag.

8. Align Left: Just like in Microsoft Word, these alignment styles will align your content.

9. Align Center: align your text or images in the middle of your post page.

10. Right Align: This will align your content on the right side of your post.

11. Add an anchor text: Highlight the text you want to create an anchor text. Click on the link and input the link to create an anchor text.

12. Remove or edit your link: Click this to remove or edit the link.

13: Read More Tag: If you don’t want to show all your content, use this feature to show a read more tag.

14. Kitchen Sink: Click on this to open up the bottom row for more styling elements.

15. Distraction Free Writing: If you don’t want to be distracted by the sidebar widgets, click on the distraction free mode. This option hides all the widgets on the post page.

Here is what the distraction mode looks like on my demo site.

Row 2

Lets dive into row two of the visual editor.

1. HTML Elements: The default is set to paragraph. Click the drop down arrow to use any of the heading elements. You will find H1 – H6 heading elements inside of WordPress.

2. Underline Text: Highlight your text you want to underline and click the button. This is what underline text looks like.

3. Justify: Use this feature to set the content to justify, you can read more about this element.

4. Text Color: Click on the drop down arrow and pick a color or add your own custom color.

5. Paste as Text: This will remove any type of formatting from your content. Word Document tables are notorious for adding HTML elements to your blog posts.

6. Clear Formatting: The clear formatting button removes all the formatting (bold, underline, colors, italics etc) from a highlighted section of your text.

7. Special Characters: Click on it to add characters such as (square roots, trade mark sign, copyright symbol and etc)

8. Indent Right: Use this to indent your content to the right.

9. Indent Left: This will indent your content to the left.

10. Undo: If you make a mistake inside of your editor, you can click on the undo arrow and it will take you a step back before you hit on the undo arrow.

11. Redo: If you accidentally clicked on the undo button, click the re-do button to bring back your content.

12. Keyboard Shortcuts: Click on the question mark and an image will popup that will show you all the available shortcut keys inside of WordPress. Here are some awesome keyboard shortcuts that will help you product content easier.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The visual editor has several hotkeys, or keyboard shortcuts built in. I have a few of my favorite hotkeys I love using that seem to make write a blog post more enjoyable.

I recommend playing around with them to familiarize yourself with some of them. Some of my favorite ones to use are:

Ctrl + Alt + 2: Highlight your text and change it to a H2 heading.

CMD + u: This will underline your content.

Command + v: This will paste content into your text editor.

Tour’s Over What’s Next

I’ve taken you step-by-step and shown you how to use the visual editor to get a better understanding of how it works. As you can see, it kind of works like a word processor.

The next step is to actually start writing your content.

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Final Take Away

If you’re growing a blog, you are going to need to publish new content on a consistent basis. Hopefully, tutorial gave you a better understanding the visual editor, so you can get your editorial calendar loaded with tons of pillar content you can share with the world.

Do you use the distraction mode? Maybe you don’t even use the text editor to write your content? Let me know your method of operation for writing new blog posts.