For New Bloggers – A Starting Guide

Hurrah! You have become an author for the Mythical Horned Horses Blog. Congratulations on this excellent choice. As the administrator, I have set up this little guide to help you out.

Content

The most important thing in any of your posts will be content. It should be interesting, fun to read, and above all: about unicorns. The connection to unicorns can be as strong or as weak as you like, from centering around the beast to merely having a passing reference.

Your work will never be deleted from the blog or edited without your consent.

Categories

Besides content, the two next most important things are categories and tags. A category is a broad label for your post. It should be relatively straightforward. For example: I write a poem. I put it in the poetry category. I write the first chapter to a unicorn novel. I put it under the novel category.

What if you have a post that doesn’t fit into any of the categories? Feel free to make a new one. But remember, categories should be broad. Don’t make a category for “unicorn love poetry.” Just put it under poetry.

Why worry about categories? To put it simply, they’re just one more way to categorize the posts. It’s useful for navigational purposes, organizational purposes, and for the purposes of the reader.

Edit: I have since found out that authors on the blog cannot make their own categories. However, if you want a new category made, contact me and I will happily make it for you.

Tags

Tags are where you can be more specific. A tag is a label that helps WordPress understand what the post is about. Therefore, a poem about two unicorns falling in love could be tagged “unicorns”, “love”, “love story”, “poetry”, “poem”, “heartbreak”, “happiness”, etc etc. While some of it may seem redundant, remember that WordPress is not a human, and cannot understand that “poetry” is pretty similar to “poem”.  So make your tags specific and to the point. WordPress likes blogs with around 5 to 10 tags – too many more and they’ll ignore the post altogether.

Why worry about tags? You may have noticed that some of your posts on the Mythical Horned Horses Blog have a list at the end that is titled “Possible Related Posts (Automatically Generated).” WordPress creates this list by comparing the tags from your post with tags from posts on MHHB and from blogs all over WordPress. In this way, all WordPress blogs are interconnected. Your post could be read by someone who followed a link from another blog out there, and vice-versa.  This helps build traffic to your posts and the entire blog.

Tags also help in search results, from the search on this blog to the big dogs at Google.

Commenting and Reading

I hope that all authors will take the time to read other author’s posts. Not only will it provide entertainment, it might even give you some inspiration! I encourage everyone who does read a post on this blog to also take the time to comment on it. Comments let authors know that their work is being read and appreciated. Think about how you feel when you get a comment, and be generous.

You should also try to follow the comments that are being posted on your blogs. Entering into discussions gets those readers to keep coming back to the blog, and that is always a good thing. There should be a setting somewhere on your dashboard that allows you to get an email whenever someone comments on the blog. I encourage everyone to do that.

Questions?

If you have an issue trying to figure out something with the WordPress platform, check out WordPress’ support documentation. Otherwise, comment on this page or email me at arcvt123[at]gmail[dot]com.