How to Start a Blog (Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners)

hey there i'm ben from blogwithbin.com and welcome to this tutorial on how to start your very own self-hosted wordpress blog in this video i'm going to show you step by step how to build grow and monetize a professional digital platform using the free wordpress theme blog stream specifically we're going to be building a personal finance blog in this video but this theme is extremely customizable and can be used for any industry or niche as you can see you'll have the ability to get really creative when it comes to designing your blog and overall brand by the end of the tutorial you'll have a professional and responsive blog that can be viewed on any mobile device or desktop while also being optimized for the search engines allowing you to publish fresh content online and share your ideas with the world as an added bonus you'll also be able to earn a passive income with it as well just last year i was able to generate over six figures with my wordpress blog and this video will teach you how to implement the exact same revenue stream on your blog now if you're new to my channel welcome i'm glad you found me here you'll find full-length step-by-step video tutorials on how to build grow and monetize wordpress blogs and if you haven't done so already i would love it if you would subscribe to the blog with ben youtube channel that way you could stay up to date with all the videos that come out in the future i would also love it if you would subscribe to my mailing list and i'll put a link to that in the show notes below the video that way you could gain access to my free ebook the blog starter kit so with that being said i'm glad you're here we got a lot to cover so let's get started in this portion of the tutorial i'm going to show you step by step how to set up your very own self-hosted wordpress blog using bluehost web hosting i personally use both of these services for the majority of my web properties and just know that after this tutorial you're going to have an extremely powerful digital platform that will allow you to scale and monetize your blog very quickly and speaking of monetization as an added bonus you're also going to learn how to monetize your blog so that you could start earning money with your digital platform specifically i'll be teaching you some of my most successful strategies that helped me earn over six figures in 2020 and 2021 and this is important because blogging has become a billion dollar industry and the sooner you can get your foot in the door the quicker you'll be able to start generating revenue with your blog now this tutorial will be taking you through my bluehost affiliate link and all that means is that if you decide to make a purchase i'll earn a commission but by doing so you're helping me keep my blog up and running and you're helping me provide for my family so for that i truly thank you plus this link is an exclusive offer for wordpress users bluehost has partnered with wordpress and as you'll see here in a few moments this offer is packed with some amazing features for wordpress bloggers it really is a phenomenal partnership that they developed and one final note this offer comes with the 30-day money-back guarantee so rest assured that you can get a full refund if you need to so with that being said let's get started alright the first step in this process is to sign up for web hosting and in order for you to take advantage of bluehost's exclusive offer for wordpress users you have a couple options if you're watching this video on youtube simply open the show notes below the video and click on my affiliate link it'll be the first link listed there and this will give you access to bluehost's exclusive offer or if you happen to be watching this video on blogwithben.com simply click on the resources tab in the menu at the top of the screen and this will take you to my resources page i list out all the tools and resources that i use on a daily basis that have helped me find success online and whenever you have some extra time i really encourage you to take a closer look at everything on this page but for this tutorial we're going to be setting up your web hosting account so to get started simply click on the try bluehost button and again this button is also an affiliate link and as you can see this is a special offer for blog with ben viewers by using my affiliate link you'll get a free domain a free ssl certificate an automatic wordpress install access to bluehost's new user dashboard which is an amazing new feature over 175 dollars in free advertising offers from google and bing and 24 7 technical support all for only 2.95 per month i should also mention that the 295 per month price is exclusively for blog with bin viewers so just know that you're saving a ton of money on web hosting by using my affiliate link plus because this package is optimized for wordpress your web host servers come with proven performance reliability and functionality that will give your website a strong foundation for long-term success bluehost web hosting coupled with wordpress.org software is by far one of the strongest website platforms available so to get started simply click on the green get started now button and that's going to take us to the select your plan page and as you can see you have a few options here the basic plus and choice plans then there's even a gopro plan and again this is all personal preference and your choice really depends on how you're running your website and online business but for this tutorial we're going to be using the basic plan which allows us to host one domain and i should also mention again that bluehost gives us this domain for free which is pretty cool however if you plan on having multiple domains and websites then i highly recommend going with either the plus or choice plus plan these plans allow you to host unlimited websites and also come with over two hundred dollars in advertising offers from google and bing then if you have the budget for it i also highly recommend going with the gopro plan this includes all the features in the choice plus plan as well as a dedicated ip address a high performance server and much much more however for this tutorial we're going to be using the basic plan so once you've decided on what plan you're going to use go ahead and click the green select button within that plan and that will take us to the domain setup page where you have a couple of different options on the left hand side of the screen is where you'll sign up if you don't have a domain name and on the right hand side of the screen is where you'll sign up if you do have an existing domain now i should mention that if you're signing up with an existing domain there are a couple of extra steps that you'll need to do in order to transfer that domain however for this tutorial we'll be signing up with our brand new free domain name so if you have an existing domain you'll still follow along in this video but after you're done with this tutorial there are still a few extra steps that you'll need to do in order for your blog to be hosted with bluehost luckily i've made a separate video that walks you through that entire process it's titled how to point a domain to bluehost and you can access it in the show notes below this video alright so we're going to be using our brand new free domain so on the left hand side of the screen under new domain just type in your desired domain name and click the blue next button and then if your domain is available you'll get a green notification on the next screen letting you know that it is and you can begin to create your bluehost account so this is the account information page and it's pretty self-explanatory but this is where you'll enter your account package and credit card information now if you have a gmail or google account you can bypass this part and just sign in with google but for this tutorial i'm going to create a new account through bluehost so i'm actually going to blur it out while i enter in my personal information but i wanted to take a second to reiterate why bluehost is so helpful to the wordpress community and their users for starters bluehost has a 24 7 wordpress support system in place so if you ever need any additional help or have any questions they are there for you they also have a one-click wordpress installation feature which we're going to go over in a couple of minutes but this makes getting your blog up and running a cinch they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee no questions asked so if for any reason you're unsatisfied with the service you can get your money back and finally bluehost is actually recommended by wordpress bluehost and wordpress have worked closely together since 2005 to create a hosting platform that's ideal for running a wordpress website so you honestly cannot go wrong now the next thing you're going to select is your package information and as you can see from the drop down menu you have a couple of options here one thing to keep in mind about the pricing is that the longer the subscription the lower the monthly price so if you opt to purchase the 36 month plan your monthly rate will only be 2.95 per month and you'll lock in that rate for three years however if you purchase a shorter monthly plan then your monthly rate will be a little higher so for this tutorial we're going to be going with the 12-month plan which is only 4.95 per month but that's still a great deal you're getting a ton of value for less than a cup of coffee per month then once you've selected your plan you have the option of adding some additional features to your plan these are 100 optional but i highly recommend that you at least select the domain privacy protection add-on reason being anytime you purchase a domain your personal information is viewable on the who is directory meaning anyone can find your personal info online however with the domain privacy protection add-on it will keep your personal information safe and secure and will make it undetectable in the whois directory so it's totally worth the 99 cents per month in my opinion now the sitelock security code guard seo tools and office 365 mailbox are all optional but for this tutorial we're only going to add on the domain privacy protection so you can uncheck the boxes next to the other add-ons now another thing i want to point out is that bluehost is extremely transparent with their pricing which is why i use and recommend them and as you can see they display your price as you're deciding on which package to purchase this also gives you peace of mind and the upfront pricing assures you that there will be no surprises with your bill right next you're going to select your payment option and enter your billing information and you can either pay by credit card or paypal which is pretty convenient but one thing i should mention is that you'll be billed annually and all this means is that you'll be billed once a year for your hosting plan and as you can see from my bluehost email receipt i purchased the basic 12-month starter plan that comes with a free ssl certificate and a free domain name but i purchased the domain privacy protection add-on and my total cost is only 71 dollars and 28 cents per year which comes out to 5.94 per month that's less than a cup of coffee per month to have your own website and there are design companies and freelancers that charge anywhere from four hundred to ten thousand dollars to build a wordpress website but we're doing it for less than one hundred dollars that is unreal and a huge savings and once you've entered all the required payment information click the small box confirming that you've read and agreed to the terms of service cancellation policy and acknowledge the privacy policy and then click the green submit button and it may take a few seconds to process so let's give it a few moments then the next page is the account confirmation page showing you your receipt and you can download the receipt here but bluehost also conveniently emails you all this information and as you can see from my confirmation email it provides all of the specifics of your hosting account so be sure to keep an eye out for it and always keep this information in a safe and secure location now the next thing you want to do is create a password for your account so to get started click the create account button and then you'll be taken to the page where you'll manage your password so where it says create password simply enter your desired password and be sure to make it strong yet unique and if you're having trouble coming up with a password bluehost has a suggest strong password feature where if you click on that it'll auto generate a strong password for you and then right below that retype your new password now i highly recommend that you copy and paste the password in a safe and secure location like an excel spreadsheet separate file or a google doc it's just a good idea to always have a backup of your password plus you're going to need it in a few moments to log into your new account so keep it handy right after you've created your password you should get two green check mark icons letting you know that the passwords match next go ahead and check the small box confirming that you've read and agree to the bluehost privacy policy in terms of service and click the create account button and beautiful your account is ready to go and it's time to log in so click the go to login button and this will take you to the bluehost login portal now anytime you want to access the backend of bluehost and your wordpress blog you'll do so through this portal and to get here simply go to bluehost.com and click on the login link at the top of the screen and that will bring you to the login portal which is what you're looking at right now now one thing to pay attention to is to make sure that you have hosting login selected there's an option to log into your webmail but we haven't set that up yet so if you're wanting to access your blog make sure the hosting login button is selected then simply enter your email or domain name as the username and then enter the password that you created when you signed up with bluehost and click the login button and again it may take a few seconds to load so just sit tight real quick and there we go this is the beginning of your adventure so next you'll be presented with bluehost's new onboarding process and depending on when you're watching this video these steps may have changed just fyi but either way they're pretty straightforward okay so since we're starting from scratch we'll be creating a brand new blog however if for any reason you have an existing site bluehost offers a free migration service that you can use by clicking this link and they'll migrate your existing site to bluehost for free but like i said we're starting from scratch with a brand new blog so to begin click the create your website button and then the first onboarding question is asking you how much help you'll need with your new blog thankfully you'll be using this tutorial so you shouldn't need any additional help but feel free to choose the one that best suits your situation however for this tutorial we're going to skip this step next bluehost wants to know what kind of site you're creating and we're creating a blog so go ahead and select blog next they want to know how comfy you are with creating websites and again don't worry about what you put here i'm going to walk you through everything you need to know step by step in this video so just put what best suits you and click the continue to theme selection button next and this is a new feature but bluehost wants to know how you would like to build your blog do you want to use wordpress or their new bluehost website builder and again i'm walking you through everything you need to know and we'll be using wordpress in this tutorial so go ahead and click the get started button within the wordpress section next question is what type of site you're creating for this video we're creating a personal finance blog so i'd select lifestyle from this list however the footage that you're watching right now is from my food blog tutorial so that's why i'm selecting food and drinks either way it doesn't really matter what you select here because we're going to be configuring our blog from scratch after we install wordpress then who are you creating a site for for this video i'm assuming you're creating the blog for yourself so select myself and click the continue button next bluehost has a few more questions and will ask you to create your site title and tagline and your site title and tagline are used in a few different places on your blog one being in the tab of the browser this helps the reader distinguish which tab is what and it creates a good user experience next it's used in the search engine snippets for your search results this is important when it comes to seo and it also creates a good user experience so bluehost has conveniently taken care of this step by making it a part of the onboarding process you used to have to change the title and tagline in the backend of wordpress but now where it says what do you want to name your site go ahead and enter the name of your blog and again this portion of the bluehost signup footage is from my food blog tutorial and that's so i didn't have to reshoot this section of the video so the site title and tagline will be food related but i recommend naming your site something that coincides with your blog's content then directly below that just add a catchy tagline there we go and click the continue button next you'll be presented with some wordpress themes that you could choose from but go ahead and click the skip this step link since we'll be installing our own theme a little later on in the video and then that will start the wordpress installation process which usually takes a few seconds and congratulations you're in what you're looking at right now is bluehost's new user experience this is what you'll see every time you log into your account and bluehost has really streamlined the entire onboarding wordpress experience making things easy to find and understand for anyone who is new to managing a blog take a look at this there are companies out there that are charging nearly three hundred dollars per month that's almost four thousand dollars per year to do what i'm going to teach you in this very video again this is one of the many reasons why i love the partnership that bluehost and wordpress have created and it's also why i'm a huge fan of their new backend interface and speaking of the new interface this is what you'll see every time you log in and this is also how you'll access your wordpress blog which has automatically been installed now the first thing i want to address is the domain you're probably wondering why it's looking all weird and funky well that's because this is a temporary domain in order for your new domain to display correctly you'll need to verify your email address and activate your domain and bluehost makes this process super simple and sends you an email where all you have to do is click a button however please be aware that you'll only have to do this if you register your domain with bluehost if you register your domain with a service like godaddy then you'll need to follow a few additional steps in order for your domain to work with bluehost again luckily i've created a video that walks you through that process and the link is in the show notes of this tutorial titled point domain to bluehost anyways keep your eye out for this email from bluehost you'll need to verify your email with bluehost within 14 days or your domain will be deactivated so i'm going to click the verify your email button and as you can see the email has been verified with the whois directory and your new domain should show up in about 24 to 48 hours and if you revisit your bluehost customer portal you'll be able to see that new domain here and again this should show up in about 24 to 48 hours okay another thing i want to point out before we get started is bluehost's list to launch and i can appreciate what they're trying to do here essentially they're trying to streamline the blog setup process by presenting you with a checklist of tasks and this is where you can complete each task before you launch your blog however my only issue with this is that there isn't really any context and lists can seem a little overwhelming to someone who is just starting out that's why i recommend that you don't really worry about it and just follow my steps in this video i can assure you that by the end of this tutorial you'll have a beautiful professional and secure wordpress blog alright with that being said let's start building your blog so like i previously mentioned one of the many reasons why i use and recommend bluehost is that they streamline your blog setup process and automatically install wordpress for you so to get started with wordpress and access the back end of your blog click the log into wordpress button in the upper right hand side of the screen and once again it may take a few seconds to load so let's just sit tight real quick almost there and congratulations you're in you now have one of the most powerful and robust blogging platforms available what you're looking at is the back end of wordpress and this is where the magic happens this is where you'll make most of your changes and it's where your blogging journey begins now before we start making changes i want to give you a quick tour of your dashboards again depending on when you're viewing this video some things may have changed but as of august and 2021 when you log into wordpress through bluehost it will automatically take you to your bluehost dashboard within your wordpress dashboard i know it can seem confusing at first but once you get familiar with where everything is it will become second nature to you okay so first things first the back end of wordpress is pretty basic but that's great because it makes it easy to learn and get around for example you'll always be able to tell that you're logged into wordpress if you could see this toolbar and sidebar menu items we'll be using these a lot so don't worry you're going to get very familiar with them a little later on in the video then towards the center of the screen will be your dashboards or blog depending on what you have selected and we're currently at our bluehost dashboard so that's what you should be seeing here but like i said earlier when you initially log into wordpress through bluehost it will take you to your bluehost dashboard within wordpress but you can always access it by hovering your mouse over bluehost and clicking on home now we honestly won't be spending too much time here at the bluehost dashboard but i can appreciate what bluehost is trying to do with this dashboard so let me give you a quick tour of it so as you can see they have a navigation menu where you could check out things like themes plugins additional services staging site settings and help but again i'm going to be walking you through everything you need to know so we won't be using this dashboard too much now if you need to get back to your bluehost account for any reason you can do so here and if you find that you want some full service help from bluehost you can learn more about that here but this is a paid service just fyi you can also get some additional help here as well and get back to your bluehost account by clicking on that little astronaut icon and once again bluehost has listed out some steps to help you build your site it's a good point of reference but like i said we're not going to be using it in this video okay so that's the bluehost dashboard in a nutshell next let's take a look at your wordpress dashboard so within the sidebar hover your mouse over dashboard and click on home and this will take you to your actual wordpress dashboard and just like before you have your toolbar and sidebar menu items and since we have the wordpress dashboard selected this is what you'll see here i like to think of this as home base for building your blog because along with your customization menu which we'll cover in a few moments this is where we'll be making most of our changes all right awesome work so far you should be proud and pumped that your blog is built on such a strong foundation moving on next let's make some adjustments to your blog so that you can set yourself up for success all right in this portion of the tutorial we're going to actually learn our way around the wordpress dashboard and set up a strong foundation before we start putting content online it's easy to get excited once you finally get set up but a lot of people jump the gun and start publishing content without getting their digital foundation set up properly that's why i always do and recommend these five things before i start any type of blog it's extremely important that we set ourselves up for success before we publish our first blog post so that being said let's make some important adjustments to our wordpress settings that will set a strong foundation for our blog and the first thing we're going to do is reconfigure the permalink settings one thing i want to point out before we get started is that for the wordpress setup portion of this tutorial you may see me using previous footage from my how to start a food blog tutorial so if you see the site title kale and croutons or if i happen to refer to a food blog it's because i'm reusing footage from another video but the reason i'm doing that is because i don't want to have to spend hours recording a video if the steps are going to be the exact same regardless of what type of blog you're creating so just know that the steps to set up your blog will be the same whether you're starting a food blog or a personal finance blog or a health and fitness blog etc these steps will be the exact same all right with that being said let's set up your blog so the first thing i want to go over are permalinks now if you're brand new to blogging you're probably unfamiliar with what a permalink is so let me give you a quick rundown of what permalinks are and why they're important by definition a permalink is a static hyperlink to a particular web page or blog post all it really is though is it's the url of the content that you're publishing on your wordpress blog these are the links that you're going to be sharing with the world whenever you want to share your content online and these are also the urls that people will enter into their browsers whenever they want to view one of your pages that's why it's very important for these links to be set up properly now the wordpress default permalink settings look like this this is not very user friendly as it includes a question mark and the page or post number within the url and i recommend removing that so that your links are clean and optimized for the search engines and the best way to do that is to have a url structure that contains keywords only and i'll show you how to do that right now so in order to change the permalink settings simply hover your mouse over settings on the left hand side of the screen and click on permalinks and this will bring you to the permalink settings menu and as you can see wordpress offers you the ability to create a custom url structure for your permalink now the permalink setting i highly recommend you use is post name this generates a short memorable and seo friendly url that's based off of the title of each of your blog posts for example if your blog post is called 10 quick and easy recipes the url for that post will be binsdemoblog.com 10 quick and easy recipes that's much better than the default setting that wordpress starts you out with so to change the permalink settings simply click on the post name circle to select it there we go and then at the bottom of the screen click the save changes button and the permalink structure has been updated as you can see from the notification at the top of the screen and then let's take a quick look at the change we made so that you could see what your permalinks will look like from here on out so wordpress always starts you off with the sample post so let's visit that post really quick and you can see that the post title hello world is now in the permalink structure so the new link to this blog post is now bensdemoblog.com hello world again this creates a better user experience for your audience and also bodes well for your seo all right now that we've set up our permalink structure let's move on to tip number two which is to update your gravatar all right so if you're new to gravatars let me break it down for you your gravatar is a globally recognized avatar it's basically an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name whenever you do things like comment or post on a blog even if you turned your comments off it's always a good idea to have a gravatar to enhance your online presence and increase your brand recognition here is a quick example of my gravatar as you can see the gravatar displays my image next to my comment and simply put gravatars help identify your comments on blogs and web forums here's how it works basically all you do is you upload an image and create your profile just once and then whenever you participate in any gravatar enabled site your gravatar image will automatically follow you there it's a free service for site owners developers and users and it's automatically included in every wordpress account now to see if you already have a gravatar within your wordpress dashboard hover your mouse over users on the left hand side of the screen and click on profile and this brings you to the user profile settings then scroll down to where it says profile picture and if your actual picture is showing then you have a gravatar but chances are that you don't and you're just seeing a silhouette especially if this is your first wordpress blog but setting up gravatars in your site is very easy to do you sign up once upload a picture and anytime you comment on any gravatar supported blog or website your gravatar comes along for the ride so to get started head over to gravatar.com you can just go ahead and click on that gravatar link and that should take you to the gravatar homepage then to get started click on the create your gravatar button and one thing i want to point out is that you'll need to sign up for a free wordpress.com account and without getting into the weeds wordpress.com is completely separate from wordpress.org which is what your food blog will be however you'll still need a wordpress.com account in order to create your gravatar again don't worry it's free and this is the only time we'll be using wordpress.com so simply follow the steps to create your free wordpress.com account so go ahead and enter the email address you want to associate with this account and choose a username and password and then click the create your account button and in a few short moments you'll be prompted to sign into wordpress.com so go ahead and click the sign in with wordpress.com button next you'll need to confirm your email address so head over to your email and you should see an email from wordpress.com go ahead and open it and click the activate account button and in a few short seconds your email will be confirmed and you'll be taken to your wordpress.com dashboard which looks very similar to your wordpress.org dashboard but this is where we'll create our gravatar and i know that all these accounts and dashboards can be somewhat overwhelming but this is the only time we're going to be using the wordpress.com platform everything else we do in this video will be through our food blog and bluehost okay so to create your gravatar in the upper right hand side of the screen click on the little gray avatar and this will open your gravatar profile where configuring it should be somewhat straightforward so first things first go ahead and enter your first and last name here followed by what you want your gravatar's display name to be as well as a little bit about yourself then go ahead and click the save profile details button and you should get a notification letting you know that the settings have been saved and next it's time to upload your gravatar photo so click the click to change photo icon and upload the photo you want to use i'm using a simple headshot but it can basically be anything you want just try to keep it around 300 by 300 pixels in size and remember that this photo will be used next to the comments you leave online so i recommend using a somewhat professional image okay next you have the option of cropping the photo after it's been uploaded but i like it as is so click the change my photo button and your new gravatar photo is good to go and your profile has been successfully updated finally i recommend linking your new blog to your gravatar profile so under the profile links click the add icon and select add url from that pop-up menu then enter the url of your food blog followed by a brief description of your site and when entering the url of your site i recommend putting the full url and domain so i'm using the https prefix and then ben's bendsdemoblog.com and then below that a brief description you'll obviously want to put more than just my food blog here within the description box but you get the idea and then finally click the add site button and in a few seconds your site will be successfully linked to your gravatar profile then if you want to see your gravatar profile simply click on the gravatar profile link and you'll be taken to your new gravatar profile now i know it doesn't look like much but your gravatar is a great way to promote your blog and brand online when you're interacting online your gravatar will follow you and it's a great way to engage while also linking out to your new blog additionally if we head back to our wordpress.org blog remember not wordpress.com but our bluehost and wordpress.org blog and hover your mouse over users and click on profile under the about yourself section you should see your new gravatar image being used as your profile picture now if you don't see it no worries it usually takes about 24 to maybe 48 hours to show up but either way you now have a professional gravatar profile ready for the world however i do highly recommend that you update your bio here within this box and it could just be a few quick sentences highlighting who you are and what your blog is about but this bio is what's going to be used whenever you author a blog post and i'll show you what i mean in a few moments but after you have updated the bio scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the update profile button and your profile has now been updated your gravatar is ready to go and moving on to the display name alright next we're going to change how your name is displayed on your site and what i mean by this is that whenever you first installed wordpress bluehost automatically created your profile's username using the email address that you signed up with this username is also used for your display name which is the name that's shown whenever you author a blog post and using your default username as your display name isn't very professional and it kind of looks like you don't know what you're doing to your audience so let's fix that okay in order to change the display name simply hover your mouse over user on the left hand side of the screen and click on profile and this will bring you to your profile settings page where you have the ability to customize certain aspects of your profile one of them being how your name is publicly displayed and there are two things i always change first i change the nickname and then the display name so if you scroll down to the name section and on the left hand side of the screen next to where it says nickname i'm going to enter the name that i want to use for my display name and remember this is going to be used for the byline of all your blog posts so try to keep it professional and then directly below that where it says display name publicly as simply select the nickname that you just created from the drop down menu then scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click the update profile button and after a few short seconds your profile will update and your new display name will be used from here on out and then if we visit our sample post real quick you can see that the new display name gravatar image and bio will be used every time you author a blog post looks a lot more professional nice work next we're going to clean up our plugins by deleting the pre-installed plugins that we don't need and first things first let's head back to our wordpress dashboard so anytime you need to get back to your wordpress dashboard simply hover your mouse over your site title in the upper left hand side of the screen and click on dashboard alright next we want to delete some of the plugins that come pre-installed with your wordpress blog now that's not to say that the pre-installed plugins aren't useful but for the purpose of this video these plugins will just take up valuable space that could be better utilized for other aspects of your blog so on the left hand side of your screen in the dashboard hover your mouse over plugins and click on installed plugins and this will bring you to your plugin manager this is where you can add delete and deactivate plugins on your wordpress blog now like i previously mentioned wordpress starts you off with some pretty unnecessary plugins that we're not going to be using so to get rid of these plugins and free up some space the first thing you need to do is deactivate the active plugins that you want to get rid of by checking the box next to them now i should point out that depending on when you're viewing this video some of the plugins that come pre-installed may have changed meaning there may be different plugins from what you're seeing in this video so if you don't see some of these plugins that are pre-installed no worries or if you have different ones that are currently installed it's all good what really matters are the recommended plugins that we're going to install in a few moments but it's always a good idea to clean up your plugins and remove the ones that you're not going to use so for this example we're going to deactivate the all-in-one seo plugin creative mail by constant contact google analytics for wordpress by monster insights jetpack and opt-in monster then once you've selected the plugins you want to deactivate click on the bulk actions drop-down and select deactivate from that menu then press the apply button and you'll get a notification once those plugins have been successfully deactivated then to completely remove the plugins check the boxes next to the plugins that you deactivated along with the others that we're not going to use for this video we'll be getting rid of the akismet anti-spam plug-in all-in-one seo creative mail monster insights hello dolly jet pack and opt-in monster then towards the top of the screen click on the bulk options drop down menu again and select delete then click the apply button and you may get a final notice asking you if you're sure you want to delete them go ahead and click ok and our plugins will disappear one by one perfect alright next we're going to install the recommended plugins now like i said in the intro i always try to stay away from adding too many plugins to my blogs but there are a few plugins that i always recommend adding when starting a blog now if you're new to the idea of plugins wordpress plugins are bits of software that can be uploaded to your blog their purpose is to extend and expand the functionality of your wordpress site and there are literally thousands of plugins to choose from but to help you along in the process i've created a google doc that lists out and links to each plugin that's recommended for starting a wordpress blog you can also access this google doc in the show notes below the video titled recommended plugins and that way you can always come back to the video and easily access the plugins now we're only going to be adding a handful of additional plugins like i said i try to limit the number of plugins i use on my blog because the more plugins you have the more data you're using and it also opens you up to the possibility that some plugins may not play nice with one another and that could potentially break your site however the following plugins are essential to running a fast and secure blog and have been tested and all work seamlessly with one another i should also mention that all of these plugins are free and will help you become a better blogger alright so to start adding plugins go to the plugin management menu if you're not there already by clicking on plugins in the wordpress dashboard then within the plugin management page to add a new plugin we're going to want to click on the add new button at the top of the screen and this will bring you to where you can search through the available plugins now if you look towards the top of the screen you can see that you have the option of filtering your search by featured popular recommended favorites and premium if you have some extra time i recommend browsing through the different plugins to get a better idea of what's available but for this tutorial we already know the plugins that we want to install so towards the upper right hand side of the screen where it says search plugins let's type in the name of the first plugin we're going to install before you start typing make sure that keyword is selected from the drop-down this ensures that our search results are accurate so the first plugin we're going to look for is the yoast seo plugin so go ahead and type yoast in the search field there and once the search results populate it should be the very first plugin listed now as i mentioned earlier the yoast seo plugin is my number one recommended plugin when it comes to seo it's an essential component to building a strong seo foundation and will help take care of a lot of the technical aspects of seo so that you could focus on what's important your blog now one thing that i do want to point out is that i've noticed that with some blogs that i've been creating recently the yoast seo plugin comes preinstalled so if that's the case it's already installed and activated you're good to go but if it's not we'll want to install and activate it by clicking the install now button and in a few seconds once it's installed you'll be able to activate it from the same screen so go ahead and click on the activate button and then you'll be taken back to your plugin management menu where you can see that the plugin has been successfully added to your list and is activated now once the seo plugin is activated you may get a notification from yoast telling you that there are issues concerning your seo you can go ahead and ignore this for now because we'll address it when we configure the plugin a little later on in the tutorial okay nice work you added your first plugin let's add our next one so follow the same steps as before and click the add new button then this time type kirky in the search bar that's k-i-r-k-i now i know it sounds kind of funny but this is an essential plug-in for this video because it will give you the same customization options that i use in the tutorial i can't tell you how many emails i've gotten from people in the past asking me why they don't have the same customization features as i do in this tutorial well that's because they didn't install and activate this plugin so to ensure that you have all of the same customization features that are used in this video install this plugin by clicking the install now button and then go ahead and activate it by clicking the activate button and there we go all right let's add our next plugin so once again click the add new button and this time we're adding the titan anti-spam plugin so type titan in the search field and there it is and this is actually my replacement for the akismet plug-in because the akismet plug-in started charging you five dollars per month if you ran ads or promoted things on your blog however the titan anti-spam plug-in does the same thing and the free version will still protect the comments on your blog from spammers so let's go ahead and install it so click the install now button and then activate it by clicking the activate button there we go and then this particular plugin will take you to their settings page but we're not going to configure it just yet we'll do that a little later on in the tutorial so let's add our next plugin by hovering your mouse over plugins and click on add new then this time in the search bar type child theme and what we're looking for is the child theme wizard and this plugin is going to let you create a child theme if you're new to the child theme concept and you're scratching your head right now no worries i'm going to cover and explain it in greater detail a little later on but having a child theme is something i highly highly recommend so for now let's install the plugin so click the install now button and then activate it by clicking the activate button perfect and moving right along let's add our next plugin so once again click the add new button and this time in the search field type smush s-m-u-s-h and we want the smush lazy load images optimize and compress images plug-in it's a long name i know but this plug-in is going to allow you to automatically compress images on your blog this will ultimately help speed up your site and a fast blog is good for user experience and seo so let's install and activate this plugin so click the install now button and then click activate and there we go plugin has been installed all right let's move on to our next plugin which is the gdpr cookies plugin so once again click the add button at the top of the screen and this time search for cookie and the plugin is called cookie yes now if you're unfamiliar with what gdpr is it's basically a new european law stating that if you have web traffic coming to your site from the european union and you're collecting their data like their email address their ip address and so on then you need to disclose to the visitor any data collection you may be doing and i realize data collection sounds kind of scary but the majority of sites on the internet do it and if you're going to have traffic to your blog from the eu then i recommend you add this gdpr cookie compliance plugin it's free and will help your blog stay gdpr compliant so go ahead and follow the same steps to install and activate the plugin and moving right along looks good all right now we're going to be installing and activating one more plug-in however there are going to be additional plug-ins that we'll install whenever we install our theme a little later on in the video but right now we're only going to install one more plug-in so follow the steps to add a new plugin and this time search for classic widgets so this plugin enables the previous classic widget settings screen in the customization menu i know that may sound like a foreign language to you right now but we're going to cover that in a few moments in this video but due to some recent wordpress updates i've decided to install this plugin so that you can have the classic widget editing experience when making changes to your site and in my opinion the classic widget version is much better than what they have now no offense to wordpress but that's just how i feel so let's go ahead and install and activate this plugin and then one thing i will say about this plugin is that if for any reason you don't like it and you want to try the new experience you could always deactivate it and uninstall it alright so we've installed and activated the majority of the plugins that we'll be using in this video however like i previously mentioned there are a few more plugins that we're going to install whenever we install our theme but next let's configure some of these plugins so that you can get the most out of them for your blog okay the first plugin we're going to configure is the cookie yes gdpr cookie consent plugin and before we dive in a quick disclaimer i'm not a lawyer and the information provided in this video does not and is not intended to constitute legal advice instead all information content and materials available in this video and my blog are for general informational purposes only if you have any legal concerns regarding your website and compliance then i highly recommend you reach out to an attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter okay now that that's out of the way in this section of the tutorial we're going to configure the cookie yes gdpr compliance plugin so that you're notifying your visitors about your cookie policy and if we fast forward to our finished blog you can see that plugin in action so this will give your site's visitors the option to accept or change their cookie settings additionally we're also going to change the colors of the plugin so that it matches the color scheme of your website okay first things first let's access the plugins settings so back at the wordpress dashboard hover your mouse over gdpr cookie consent and click on settings and this will bring you to the settings page where you can configure the plugin now one of the reasons i really love this plugin is because it comes enabled and ready to use out of the box there's not much that we have to do in order for it to work properly however there are a few things i want to show you before you start using it first if you take a look under the general tab next to the select the type of law section you'll notice that there are three separate types of compliance options there's gdpr ccpa and ccpa and gdpr together and without getting into the weeds gdr compliance is used if some of your blog's audience is from the european union ccpa compliance is used if some of your audience will be from california and then ccpa and gdpr together is obviously for audiences that come from the european union and california bottom line if you think that you're going to have people from the eu and california visit your blog then select ccpa and gdpr next under the ccpa settings we're going to turn on the show ccpa notice this displays ccpa notice on the consent bar of your site and records prior consent from the user moving on to the customize cookie bar settings here you can edit things like the message heading the message itself the cookie bar color the text color font and so on however for this example i'm leaving everything as is next you can customize the button the user clicks on within the consent bar simply open the customized button tab and here you'll have the ability to customize the various buttons of the plugin for example you can customize the colors and styles or show it as a link or button within the consent bar and without getting into the weeds i'm not a lawyer obviously and this shouldn't be taken as legal advice but in this example whenever the user clicks on the button within the consent plugin that's going to notify me that they accept all tracking cookies being used on the site and by default the color of the accept all button is green but you can easily change it by clicking the select color button here and then you can enter the hex color code of the color if you know it or you can use the color picker to choose the new button color and that's what i'm going to do and i'm going to go with black there we go and that's going to do it for all the configuring we're going to do for these settings so once you're done making your changes click the update settings button and you should get a notification letting you know that the settings have been saved and updated then let's take a look at the plugin really quick so let's visit our site by hovering your mouse over site title in the upper left hand side of the screen and click on visit site and you can see that the cookie notice banner is displaying on your blog now we obviously have some work to do on building our blog but this gives it a much more professional look and feel and helps to ensure that you're remaining compliant with the new gdpr law okay moving on to our next plugin smush so let's head back to the wordpress dashboard by hovering your mouse over the blog's title in the upper left-hand side of the screen and clicking on dashboard and once again just a quick tip if you're having trouble finding information about a particular plugin one quick workaround is to simply go to your plugin management menu so on the left hand side of the screen if you hover your mouse over plugins and click uninstalled plugins that will take you to your plugin management page where you can typically find the settings of most of your plugins and once again we're going to be configuring the smush plugin so simply click on the settings link underneath that plugin and then the smush plugin has some automatic onboarding steps this is great because it'll let you start choosing how you want to use the plugin and then allow smush to do all of the heavy lifting so to get started click the begin setup button and the first setting is automatic compression and this is the main reason we're installing this plug-in so that whenever you upload images to your blog smush will automatically optimize and compress those images so you don't have to do it manually this ultimately speeds up your site so go ahead and make sure that the switch is turned on and click the next button next they want to know if you want to strip the image metadata and no this is not stripping the seo metadata just the image metadata so i recommend keeping this turned on and click the next button next is lazy load and this feature stops off screen images from loading until the visitor scrolls to that image and this helps with site speed as well and makes your pages load faster so again i recommend enabling lazy loading and clicking the next button and finally the plugin wants to know if they can track your usage data i'm going to keep this turned off but you can turn it on if you want and click the finish setup wizard button and we're good to go now we obviously don't have any images uploaded to our site just yet but as we start uploading images the smush plugin will automatically compress those images helping our site speed and allowing your blog's pages to load faster now you can also manually upload images through the plugin but this plugin should automatically compress images as we upload them to our media library then if we scroll down there are also some additional settings and again if you have some extra time feel free to check them out but i'm going to leave everything as is okay moving on to our next plugin so let's go back to our plugin management menu by hovering your mouse over plugins and clicking on installed plugins then the next plug-in we're going to configure is the titan anti-spam plugin so find that within the list of plugins and click on settings and this will bring you to the plugins settings page which looks a little overwhelming because there is a lot going on however we're only going to be making a few small changes also the good news is that the plug-in is already automatically blocking spam from your comments so you don't have to do anything there however there are a few small security tweaks i recommend making so go ahead and click on the tweaks tab and the first change we're making is under the base settings section so go ahead and turn the hide author login on as well as the hide errors when logging in turning these features on will help guard you from bad actors and hackers trying to access your wordpress login credentials and yes unfortunately they are out there then below that within the hide wordpress versions go ahead and turn on those three recommended features remove metadata generator remove version from script and remove version from stylesheet turning these on will make it more difficult for people to hack your blog as well then once you've made all your changes go ahead and click the save button on the upper right hand side of the screen and you should get a notification letting you know that the settings have been updated successfully okay moving on to the last plugin we're going to configure within this section of the tutorial so let's head back to our plugin management menu by hovering your mouse over plugins and clicking on installed plugins then find the yoast seo plugin and click on the settings link and this will bring you to the settings page and if this is your first time using the plugin you may see a few notifications the first asking you if you want to build your index so that yoast can process your content to help speed up your site it's not displaying for me in this example but if you see it you could skip that for now and do it after we configure the plugin there might also be a few other notifications that have to do with allowing the search engines to crawl your site but we'll take care of both of those a little later on in the video so you could skip these for now and we'll just worry about configuring the plugin so to get started click the configuration wizard link and this will bring you to the yoast seo configuration wizard where the following steps will help you configure your seo settings to match your blog's needs alright so the first step is determining which environment your blog is in reason being the plugin wants to know if your site should be indexed by the search engines and when they say environment all they want to know is whether or not your blog is live or under construction so since we're in the process of building our blog we'll select option b but if your site is already live then go ahead and select option a either way i'm going to show you how to activate it once your blog is ready to publish additionally once your blog is ready to launch we're going to come back to the yoast configuration wizard and select option a but as i said since we're in the beginning phase of building our blog we don't want it to be indexed so we'll select option b and click the next button next is site type and i'm selecting blog since this site will have blogging capabilities and let's keep going so click the next button next yoast is trying to determine whether or not you're an organization or person so if you're an organization type in the name of your organization upload your logo and add your social networks url but if you're a person aka a blogger select person and then the drop down will pull whatever you've set your display name to be so if you want to change how the search engines display your name you'll need to create a new display name within your wordpress profile however i'm going to use the display name that we created a little earlier and select it from the drop-down and then moving on so click the next button next is the search engine visibility and this is where you can configure what content types you'd like the search engines to index and unless you have specific requirements i recommend leaving this as is and click the next button next is the multiple authors section and if you're going to have multiple people writing blog posts select yes but if it's just you select no and click the next button and now we're at the title settings this is where you can change the website name that host will display to the search engines and the symbol it will use as your title separator i'm actually going to leave the default settings alone i like this site title and the separator however if you want to change it feel free to update it here but i'm also going to show you another way you can update these title settings outside of the configuration wizard either way go ahead and update them here if you'd like and click the next button next they want to know if they can track your site data to help improve the plugin by default no is selected but if you're okay with them tracking you select yes and click the next button then yoast wants to know if you'd like to subscribe to their newsletter i actually recommend signing up it's a super helpful newsletter and it keeps you up to date with everything that's going on in the world of seo they also have some upgrade options and further trainings if you're interested but we can skip this for now and click next at the bottom of the screen and congrats your yoast seo plugin has been configured and now yoast will take care of a lot of the technical aspects of seo for your blog this is going to improve your blog's overall performance in the search results and give you some peace of mind when it comes to seo alright so go ahead and click the close link button and you'll probably see a notification for a huge seo problem after you configure the yoast seo settings now don't worry about that now we're going to fix that when our blog is ready to launch i also want to point out that yoast offers some free resources to help boost your seo even more you can extend yoast with some additional plugins as well as learn seo through their yoast seo academy so if you have some extra time i highly recommend checking those out all right the next thing we're going to configure for the plugin is the search appearance of our homepage and what i mean by this is that we're going to edit how the search engines and social media channels display our blog when people either search for it online or share it on social media so on the left hand side of the screen hover your mouse over seo and click on search appearance and the first two things we can configure are the title separator and the home page and if we take a look at our blog really quick you can see what the seo title and title separator will look like on your home page and once again please ignore the fact that i'm using footage from the food blog tutorial but as you can see it's currently using the site title and then a title separator followed by the tagline best of both worlds this will also be used in the search results as well so if we head back to the yoast search appearance settings you can change what the seo title looks like on your homepage tab and the search results within the seo title section now by default yoast is using what they call variables but you can easily delete these out and simply type in what you want the title and title separator to be then below that is the meta description this is a brief description that's going to be shown in the search results that you can edit within this text box here as well and when creating your meta description try to use keywords that you're wanting to rank for and try to keep it within 155 characters all right moving on to the social settings this is where you can modify the image title and description used when someone links to your home page and shares it via social media now we're going to skip uploading the social image right now because we're going to revisit this in a few moments whenever i show you how to create your logo but you could always remove the site title variable like so and then simply type in your desired site title and tagline as well as the social description next we have the knowledge graph and schema settings and without getting into the weeds i recommend leaving this as is and then once we create our logo i'll show you how to update this image as well alright so that's the yoast seo homepage settings in a nutshell so let's go ahead and click the save change button to push these changes live and we're good to go now there is one final piece we want to address for seo before we move on and that's adding our social accounts to our profile this will help the search engine bots know what social networks your blog is associated with again this is important because when the search engines crawl your site and see that you're connected to multiple popular social networks with followings it can give you more authority and help to boost your search engine ranking so in order to let the search engines know about your social profiles you'll need to update your wordpress user profile so on the left hand side of the screen hover your mouse over users and click on profile then scroll down a bit and you'll see multiple fields where you can enter your website's url along with the links to your social profiles then once you've filled them out click the update profile button and the search engines will now know what social networks you're associated with all right moving on next it's time to install our theme in this section of the tutorial we're going to go over how to install a free wordpress theme to your blog now the right wordpress theme can go a long way in your blog success and this portion of the video will show you how to turn a boring layout into a sleek innovative and mobile responsive design then once we've installed our parent theme i'm going to show you how to create a child theme and if you're new to all this i know it may sound somewhat confusing but just know that having a parent and child theme is a necessity if you're going to have a professional wordpress blog okay so first things first let's install our free wordpress parent theme blog stream so the first thing you want to do is hover your mouse over appearance and then click on themes and this will bring you to your theme management menu this is where you can add new themes change your current theme and search for additional themes all from this menu now we're going to be adding a new theme so to get started simply click on the add new theme icon and this is going to bring us to the wordpress theme directory and basically this is where we can browse through the thousands of different themes that wordpress has to offer however we already know the theme that we're going to use so in the upper right hand side of the screen you'll see a search bar and this works the same as any search bar and is a great way to find a theme if you already know the name of it like we do so we'll just type in blog stream and that will bring up the search results as you can see our theme is right there it's the only one but before you install any theme i highly recommend that you preview the theme just so you can get a better idea of how it functions so to check out the demo simply hover your mouse over the theme and click on the preview button and that's going to bring you to the demo now keep in mind that this is just a basic demo of what the theme can do and some of its capabilities but if you look towards the upper left hand side of the screen you'll see that each theme displays their users ratings and a short description which can help in the decision making process and you can see that the theme has a five star rating and i realize there's only two ratings right now but trust me this theme is pretty amazing and then this is a super basic preview of the theme but if you want to see a more complete demo the themes developers have provided a link within the description where if you copy and paste the url you'll get to see an example of what this theme will look like once it's finished and again i love the simplicity of the blog stream theme has a minimalist design and it's also very flexible and comes with a ton of cool options which you'll see firsthand in a few moments so let's go ahead and install this theme by clicking on the install button at the top of the screen and once it's installed go ahead and click the activate button and this will officially activate the theme and make it visible on your blog then back at the theme management menu wordpress will mark the blogstream theme as active here as well okay now that the theme has been installed and activated let's check it out really quick so go ahead and click the visit site link and check that out our theme has been successfully installed i know it doesn't look like much right now but the blog stream theme is a great foundation to build a beautiful blog on and we'll definitely be doing that very soon now if you're not seeing the blog feed on your homepage and you're seeing different content than what's on my screen that means you need to make one small change to the home page settings and i don't want to get too far ahead of myself here but for this tutorial the home page of our blog is going to be our blog feed we'll then create various pages around the blog feed so if you aren't seeing your blog feed right now you'll need to make this one small change so first open your customization menu by clicking on customize at the top of the screen and this will open your customization menu this is a real-time editor for your blog and you'll definitely get very familiar with it throughout the video but really quick i want you to click on the home page settings tab then from here you'll want to set your home page to your latest posts this ensures that our blog feed will serve as the home page of our blog however if your page looks something like this which is the pre-installed content and page that came with wordpress you'll need to make this small change and depending on when you're viewing this video it may have changed but either way if you're seeing different content like this on your homepage it means that it's set to a static page instead of your latest posts so for this tutorial make sure your homepage settings are set to your latest posts this ensures that our blog feed will serve as the home page of our blog then go ahead and click the publish button to make these changes live and this will publish those changes and make them permanent on your blog there we go then let's exit the customization menu by clicking the x in the upper left hand side of the screen then there's one more thing i want to go over about this theme before we move on so let's go back to our wordpress dashboard by hovering your mouse over the site title in the upper left hand side of the screen and clicking on dashboard then if you recall there are some additional plugins that are required for this theme and after installing and activating the theme you should see a notification listing out those four plugins i highly recommend installing these plugins because they're required in order for you to have the exact same features as i do in this video plus they run in the background and you don't have to do much with them so click the begin installing plugins link within that notice and if you're not seeing it i've outlined each plugin that we use in this video within the recommended plugins doc that you could find in the show notes below this video okay so we're going to install and activate these four plugins and to make this quick simply check the box to select all the plugins at once then from the bulk actions drop down select install and then click the apply button and in a few short seconds the plugins will be installed next we need to activate them so head over to your plugin management menu by hovering your mouse over plugins and clicking on installed plugins then check the boxes next to alks extensions meta box regenerate thumbnails and wp page navi then select activate from the bulk actions drop down menu and click the apply button and once again in a few short seconds you should get a notification letting you know that the plugins have been successfully activated again these plugins run in the background and we don't mess with them too much but they are essential for this theme and video okay moving on next we need to create our blog stream child theme okay in this portion of the tutorial we're going to create a child theme this is by far one of the most important aspects of building a wordpress blog because it can save you a ton of time and headaches due to the updates that are made to the parent theme and if you're new to the concept a child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of the parent theme which is the initial theme that we just installed a few moments ago now the reason a child theme is so important is because it allows you to modify or add to the functionality of a parent theme it's hands down the best safest and easiest way to modify an existing theme because instead of modifying the parent theme files directly you can create a child theme and override them within if you don't have a child theme every change you make could potentially be lost when there's an update to the parent theme but with the child theme your changes are safe and you'll still inherit the functionality of the parent theme basically if you're going to be customizing your theme with css code and make design changes then you need to have a child theme now there are a few ways to go about creating a child theme but for this video we're going to be using our trusty plugin the child theme wizard this super light plugin makes creating a child theme super simple i'd also like to add that out of all the child theme plugins that i've used in the past this plugin is the easiest and quickest to use okay so to get started in your wordpress dashboard hover your mouse over tools and click on child theme wizard and that will bring you to the setup process which is pretty straightforward but let me walk you through it real quick first things first you'll want to make sure that you have the correct parent theme selected which should be blog stream next you'll be asked to fill out the title description and child theme url so for the title i'm just going to call this ben's child theme then for the description you're just adding a few notes about your child theme that can literally be anything you want and finally we have the child theme url and the author url i'm just going to be using the url of my blog for both of these and then we can leave everything else as is and then when you're ready to create your child theme click the create child theme button and after a few seconds your child theme will be successfully created then to check out the child theme click on this appearance themes link and that will take you to the theme management menu you can also get here by hovering your mouse over appearance and clicking on themes within your wordpress dashboard then you can see that we now have our child theme so let's go ahead and activate it by hovering your mouse over it and click the activate button and then your child theme is now active and ready to go next let's check it out real quick so go ahead and click the visit site link and your child theme should look exactly like your parent theme which it does now we obviously have a lot of work to do but the blog stream theme is a great foundation for a professional blog and the child theme will ensure that all of the css and design changes you make will be saved okay with that being said let's start building your blog okay in this section of the tutorial we're going to begin piecing together our blog and the way i'm gonna go about this is that i'm gonna start at the top and work my way down now you don't necessarily have to build your blog exactly as i do in this video and that's the great thing about wordpress and this theme you have a ton of flexibility when it comes to the design and layout of your site however i'm going to cover the most important features of this theme so that you'll have a well-rounded understanding of how to create your own unique blog also if you're seeing a primary navigation menu here no worries we're going to address that in a few minutes okay the first thing we're going to go over is how to change the site title and tagline and by default this theme uses the site title and tagline that you came up with during the bluehost sign up process however if for any reason you want to change it this is how you do that so first things first you'll want to visit your customization menu by clicking on customize at the top of the screen and once again this will bring you to your customization menu and anytime we need to make some tweaks to our theme we'll more than likely do so through this menu now the layout is really user-friendly on the left is where you have all of the customizable sections of your blog and then on the right is where you can see your changes in action it's like a live action site builder where you can see your changes happen in real time it's pretty cool finally towards the bottom of the screen you'll have the ability to toggle between the different device types that are used to view your blog this is yet another way to preview your changes to ensure that they look good across all devices okay so we want to update the site title and tagline so go ahead and open the site identity tab and then this is where you can configure the header of your blog so first things first you have the ability to add a logo this will actually replace your site title and tagline and i tested it out before i created this video and didn't really like how it displayed but that's just me if you want to try adding a logo go for it just click the select logo button and upload the image that you want to use however like i said i'm using the default settings and keeping the text of the site title and tagline and speaking of that right below the logo section you'll see the site title and tagline fields where you would simply change the text to whatever you want and as you do that your blog's header updates in real time now i'm actually going to keep my original site title and tagline so i'll change it back really quick but again this is an easy way to edit it if you need to then below that you have the option to remove the site title and tagline completely by unchecking this box but i don't want to do that so i'll leave that checked then the next thing i'm going to do is add a favicon or as wordpress calls it a site icon and if you're unfamiliar with what a favicon or site icon is a favicon is a tiny image that web browsers use to help distinguish between web pages and if we fast forward to the end of the video and take a look at the top of the screen you can see what i'm talking about these images in the tabs are favicons they're great for branding efforts and they help people navigate online additionally some browsers and mobile devices will display a larger image like the safari browser which is what you're looking at right now the site icon that we're going to create will also be used as a browser and app icon for your blog so that's why it's important to have a site icon for your branding efforts alright back to our blog before you choose your site icon image keep in mind that wordpress recommends that you use an image that's at least 512 pixels wide and tall and that's because the image will be used for your favicon and app icon and you can easily create your own site icon with canva.com this website can help you create stunning graphics with their free design software and i use them a ton you can do some high quality design work with them for free like creating your site icon and one thing to keep in mind is that when you're designing your site icon you want to make the image 512 by 512 pixels and as you can see canva allows you to quickly make custom sized images super cool then for the sake of time i'm going to speed through the design process but you'll want to make sure that your site icon correlates with your blog's brand you also don't want too much going on within it because it's pretty small and the user will need to be able to quickly understand what it is when they see it okay i think that's going to work so once you're done be sure to download the image to your computer then back at your blog to add the image that you're going to use for your site icon simply click on the select site icon button and this will bring us to our media library this is where we'll upload and store the images that we're going to use on our blog so to add the image of the site icon simply click on the select files button and this will let you search for the image on your computer then once you've found the file and uploaded it to your media library there are a few things that i always do to my images before adding them to my blog if you look on the right hand side of the screen you'll see the attachment details the first thing i recommend doing is updating the title and by default it'll show the image's file name and it's what will show up whenever someone hovers their mouse over the image as well as in the image metadata so i recommend changing it to something more user and seo friendly and i'm just going to type my site title and tagline there we go then the next thing i recommend updating is the alt text and without getting too technical the alt text is what the search engines will see whenever they can't actually see the images so you'll want to be descriptive whenever you're filling out the alt text however wordpress recommends that you leave this empty if the image is purely decorative but it's good practice and a good habit to get into for all of your images alright so once it's set go ahead and click the select button and as you can see the image i just uploaded is now being used for the favicon insight icon looks great and looks a lot more professional so go ahead and click the publish button to make these changes live there we go then if you're not seeing the updated site icon right away give it a few minutes and clear your browser's cache and history then refresh the page and it should show up okay moving on to the social icons and if we fast forward real quick you can see what these will look like the blog stream theme gives you the ability to add social follow icons within the header and direct traffic to your social media profiles this is a great way to grow your audience and it's super easy to implement so back at our customization menu you'll want to go back to the opening menu so click that arrow button then select the theme options tab then open the social links tab now a quick heads up as i was creating my social icons when i was testing this out i ran into a small bug now it's not a huge deal and it's super easy to fix and you may not even have to deal with it but basically we'll need to add the facebook icon twice and i'll show you what i mean as we're going through this but i just wanted to bring it up as we're going along again don't worry it doesn't affect the functionality of this widget okay so by default the theme will start you off with one social link and if you click that arrow you can open up the tab and begin to edit it then from here it's fairly straightforward you'll have the title field where you can add the title the icon name link and icon color if you want to change it so for this example our first social icon is going to be for facebook so in the title field i'm going to type facebook then below that is the icon name and this is how the theme will know what icon to display and again without getting into the technical weeds they use something called font awesome icons where all you'll do is type in the particular i class of the icon that you want to display which for this example will be f a dash facebook and if you're scratching your head right now no worries it's actually super simple to find the i class of the icon that you want to use simply click on the view all link and this will take you to font awesome where you can grab any icon by using their search feature so let's try facebook and you can see we have a few options then let's say you want to use this facebook square icon if you look towards the top of the icon you'll see the i class code which is f a dash facebook dash square and then all you do is highlight that snippet of code and copy it i'm going to mac so i'm pressing command c on my keyboard then back of the blog you'd paste it in the icon name field and then that's what the theme would use to display the facebook square icon however i'm keeping mine as the circle icon so i'll leave the f a facebook in place below that is the link and this is where you'd enter the full url of your facebook profile this is where your blog's visitors will go after they click on the facebook icon and best practice is to have separate social media profiles for your blog for example you don't want to link to your personal facebook profile here you'd want to create a separate facebook profile for your blog and then that's the link that you would add here all right below that is the icon color picker and i know it's set to gray but that's not the default color the theme uses you'll see what i mean in a few moments however if you want to change the color of the icon you could do so here then finally you can have the browser open a new window whenever the user clicks on the social icon and i recommend doing this because it makes for a better user experience so that your blog's visitors aren't having to click the back button to try and find their way back to your blog after they've been taken away from your site so check this box to have facebook open in a new window okay that's our first social icon and then this is the bug i ran into it doesn't display i'm not sure why but we actually have to re-add it after publishing our remaining icons at least that's what worked for me okay let's go ahead and add our next icon so click the add new social link button and this time i'm adding instagram so we'll follow the same steps to add this icon in the title field type instagram then for the icon name i'm using the fa-instagram icon again you could browse through the font awesome icons for other versions of that if you'd like then i'll add my blog's instagram profile url in the link field and then i'm leaving the icon color as is and having it open in a new window so i'll check that box there we go then for the sake of time i'm going to speed through the next two social icons but i'm going to add pinterest and youtube all right there we go and as you can see the three of our four icons are displaying in the header and footer so as i said this was a bug i ran into if you're not experiencing it that's great but i happen to come across this issue so the work around that i found is to publish these updates so click the publish button and then let's exit out of the customization menu and a quick check we'll verify that only three icons are displaying on our live site so let's head back to the customization menu by clicking customize in the top of the screen then open the theme options tab and then the social link tab and as you can see for some reason it has completely removed our facebook social link that we created and it's only showing three icons so all you have to do is re-add the facebook icon so follow the same steps as before by clicking the add new social link button and fill out the title icon name link change the color if you'd like and the open in a new window option and look at that our facebook icon is now displaying correctly then i want to change the order of the icons and this is cool all you have to do is just drag and drop those social link widgets within the customization menu and you can easily rearrange how the icons display within the header and footer then once you're satisfied with the order click the publish button again to make these changes live and then let's exit out of here and test them out real quick and they look great the social icons are displaying and they even have this cool hover effect where they change color whenever the mouse is on them that's pretty cool then when the user clicks on one of them they're taken to the social media page designated for that icon this is yet again another great tool to help you grow your social media audience and expand your blog's reach okay back at our blog one thing i want to point out before we move on are the social media menu items within the footer if you're seeing these that's because wordpress automatically created them however for this tutorial we aren't going to use these footer social menu items and we'll remove them a little later on in the video so if you're seeing these social buttons in the footer no worries we'll be fixing that in a bit another thing i want to point out about your social icons in the header is that you have the option to remove them all together if you'd like this is obviously completely optional but it's one of the flexible features of this free theme and i'll show you how to do that in the next section of the tutorial all right moving on next let's add an about me section to the sidebar of your blog in this portion of the tutorial we're going to add an about me profile to the sidebar of your blog and if we fast forward really quick you can get a better idea of what that will look like so this theme gives you the ability to add what they call a profile but it's basically an about me blurb that gives you the ability to add an image your name and a quick intro this is a great way to introduce yourself to your audience and welcome them to your blog so to add the about me profile to the sidebar we'll want to open the customization menu then click on theme options and open the header tab and before we move on i want to point out that this is where you can configure the header search and social links if you'd like i mentioned this in the last section of the tutorial as we were creating our social icons but this gives you the ability to remove or add the search function which is the magnifying glass icon as well as the social links which are the social icons that we just created you'll simply flip either one of these switches to turn these features on or off then below that is where you can create your about me profile that will display within the sidebar so first let's add an image and before you do please note that the theme recommends that the image be a minimum width of 320 pixels this will ensure that it looks proportionate within the sidebar okay so to add your image click the select image button and then we'll be uploading a new image so click the upload files tab in the upper left hand side of the screen then click the select files button and find the image that you want to use and then it may take a few seconds to load so just sit tight real quick and once you have the image don't forget about the title and alt text i know this seems tedious but it's a good habit to get into and will help with your seo all right there we go then click the select button and the image will be added to the sidebar and look at that so far so good next it's time to enter the profile name this is just your name that will appear below the image so go ahead and type what you want to display and i'm just going to type my name bin and finally is the description this is just a short intro welcoming people to your blog and giving them a quick snapshot of what it's about and there we go i love the simplicity of this and how easy it is to update not many themes have this feature plus i love the overlap design of the text and image looks pretty cool okay so let's go ahead and publish our changes so click the publish button to push these changes live and then let's exit out of here again and take a look at it on our live blog and it looks great now we'll obviously be adding more to the sidebar a little later on but this about me profile is a nice start i love it okay moving on next let's create our blogs pages categories and primary navigation menu the next thing we want to do is configure our blog by adding additional pages categories and creating a primary navigation menu and if we fast forward real quick you can see what i'm talking about having a primary menu with separate pages and categories allows you to diversify your content and it helps your visitors navigate through your blog this not only creates a better user experience but it's great for seo okay back at our blog the first thing i want to go over are the blog pages so let's head over to our wordpress dashboard by hovering your mouse over your site title in the upper left hand side of the screen and clicking on dashboard then hover your mouse over pages and click on all pages and this will bring you to your pages management menu this is where you can collectively review all the pages that are on your blog now before we do anything i want to point out that when bluehost installed wordpress it came with the following pages this isn't necessarily a bad thing but due to how we're going to build our blog we're not going to be using the blog page the create your website with blocks page or the sample page however just to simplify the process i'm going to remove all the pages except for the privacy policy page this way we could start from scratch and build it the way we want okay so once you've selected the pages you want to remove select move to trash from the bulk actions drop down and then click the apply button and this will essentially delete the pages and put them in the trash next it's time to add the pages we want to use on our blog in our primary navigation menu i should point out that a page is different from a blog post because a page is a static standalone piece of content that is separate from your blog feed and for this tutorial we're going to be adding a handful of pages that will live within our primary navigation menu starting with our about page so when it comes to adding new pages to your blog wordpress gives you a few ways to accomplish that the first way is within the pages management menu simply click on the add new button at the top of the screen and that will allow you to add a new page you can also hover your mouse over pages on the left sidebar and click on add new as well and finally at the very top toolbar you can hover your mouse over the plus new icon and click on page from the drop down menu these will all take you to your wordpress editor and will allow you to create a brand new page on your blog okay so what you're looking at right now is the visual editor and is a somewhat new wordpress editing experience this was a major change in the wordpress 5.0 update and it had a drastic effect on how you build and design your pages and blog posts and i'll go into greater detail as we start to create our pages and posts but let me give you a quick rundown of the new editor okay one of the major differences in this editor is that each section is broken down into a specific type of block there are image blocks paragraph blocks column blocks and much much more the blocks are a new experience that really give you a lot of creative control over what your blog will look like and you'll get very familiar with the blocks as we begin creating content but let me give you a quick rundown of the visual editor before we move on so by default wordpress starts you out with their full width visual layout this is new and it's meant to remove distractions but i personally like the original setting where they displayed the dashboard menu items so if you want to see what that looks like you can change the layout of your visual editor by clicking on the three dot icon in the upper right hand side of the screen and this will give you access to some more options the first thing i'm going to change is to have the top toolbar this will display some additional editing options for our blocks and will make us more efficient as we create content so go ahead and click it to turn that on now you won't see the toolbar just yet we still need to create our content but once we have our content blocks you'll see the new editing options here next i like to have the wordpress dashboard menu items display i feel that i can navigate a lot quicker through the back end of my blog when i can see them so if you uncheck the full screen mode you'll see that the wordpress menu items and toolbar reappear again this is just a personal preference but nevertheless it helps me be more efficient okay now that our visual editor settings are configured let's get familiar with the layout so you know how to get around first we have our field for our title then there's the content section directly below that and that's where you'll add your various blocks of content then towards the upper left is the content block editing toolbar then on the right you have the document and block settings and page attributes and then you'll have access to the yoast seo plugin if you've installed it as well as your publishing options all right now that you know your way around the visual editor let's create our about page and just a heads up we're not going to be adding content to the pages just yet we're simply creating them so that we can add them to our primary navigation menu then once we've created all of our pages and added them to our navigation menu we'll worry about adding content to those pages so all we're doing now is giving this page a title and since this is our about page we'll type about in the title section and once you've named the page go ahead and publish the page by clicking the publish button and don't worry about anyone seeing this page without any content on it we haven't launched our blog yet then press the publish button one more time to make the page live and there we go our page is now live next we'll just follow the exact same steps to add our contact page so just like before hover your mouse over the plus new icon at the top of the screen and click on page then let's create our contact page and i'm going to title this contact and again we'll add our contact form to this page later so let's go ahead and publish it so click the publish button twice and there we go now for this tutorial there are a couple more pages that i want to add but to save you some time i'm just going to go through adding the pages pretty quick hopefully the steps are somewhat clear by now and you can easily follow along okay so i'm going to add a resources page and this will house all of the resources that we recommend to our audience and i'll go into greater detail about what that entails a little later on in the video next i'm going to create a subscribe page this will serve as a landing page that will have an opt-in form to collect email addresses again we'll address the content of this page a little later on all right next let's create our categories now if you're new to categories a category is a group of related blog posts that are about similar subjects and when you create a blog post wordpress lets you add it to a particular category for example in this tutorial i'm going to create a category called investing then when i write a blog post about investing i'll add them to the investing category then what's even cooler is that i'm going to add the category to my primary navigation menu so that when someone clicks on investing it'll take them to a page that lists all of the blog posts that have been added to the investment category bottom line whenever you create a category it makes it easier for people to find your content this is not only a cool feature but it's a great user experience and it's good for seo your readers will appreciate the convenience of not having to search through your entire blog to find relevant posts okay so back at our blog there are actually a couple of different ways to add categories you could do so in the back end of the blog post or you can do it within the wordpress dashboard now we're going to cover both ways in this tutorial but right now i'm going to show you how to add categories in the wordpress dashboard so on the left hand side of the screen hover your mouse over posts and click on categories and this will bring you to your categories management page and you'll see that wordpress starts you off with an uncategorized category by default but you can easily create new categories here as well so since this is a personal finance blog i'm going to be creating categories that you'd usually associate with the finance industry and these are just examples so don't feel that you're confined to the categories that i make in the next few minutes when you're making your categories think about your content and your target audience your category should be like a topic bucket that can house various types of blog posts for example the first category that i'm going to create is budgeting and to create the category simply type budgeting in the name field and be sure to type this out the way you want it to look on your site then directly below that is the slug and the slug is the url friendly version of the category name and it's usually lower case and contains only letters numbers and hyphens so this slug is going to be budgeting but with a lowercase b then directly below that you'll see a drop down for the parent category and the reason for this is because categories are able to have a hierarchy and wordpress's example of this is that you may have a jazz category and under that have children categories like bebop and big band however for this tutorial we're not going to have a category hierarchy so you can go ahead and skip that as well as the description and click the add new category button and then on the right hand side of the screen you'll see that our new category budgeting has been added to our blog all right let's add our second category so this one will be cryptocurrency and then the slug is going to be cryptocurrency but with a lowercase c and again we're going to skip the parent category option and description and click the add new category button there we go the next category i'm going to create is saving tips and notice that this is two words and one thing to keep in mind is that when your categories are two words you'll need to separate them with the dash when creating the slug so our slug for this category will be all lower case letters and it will be saving dash tips this seems small but it's important okay this one's ready to go so click the add new category button perfect then for the sake of time i'm going to fast forward through me adding the rest of the categories but now that we've successfully created our categories it's time to add them to our primary navigation menu so let's visit our site really quick by hovering your mouse over the site title and clicking on visit site and if you recall we're going to be creating a primary navigation menu that contains a home menu item as well as some topics which will have a drop down menu of the categories we just created and then a few other menu items that take visitors to our resources and subscribe pages now you don't need to structure your navigation menu exactly as i do in this video but i wanted to give you an example of some different things that you could do with this menu plus having a well-structured primary nav creates a good user experience and can help boost your blog's seo i know i say that a lot but it's true okay so let's build our nav so back at the blog we'll want to access the customization menu so click on customize at the top of the screen then open the menus tab and this will bring you to your menu management settings now it looks like wordpress has automatically created a primary and secondary menu for us it also looks like the secondary menu has been set to display within the footer now don't worry if you don't have these menus we're going to be creating new ones in a moment but real quick i'm actually going to get rid of this primary navigation menu so go ahead and open the primary menu tab and then to get rid of it simply click the delete menu link and just like that it's gone now we'll worry about the secondary menu in a bit but for now let's build out our new primary navigation menu so click the create new menu button and then in the menu name field go ahead and give your menu a name i'm calling this main menu next you'll want to assign the location of the menu this is just telling wordpress where to display it so for this example the main menu will display in the header so check that box and click the next button now it's time to add our menu items and these will be what the user clicks on in order to browse our blog so click the add items button then you'll have the option to add custom links pages posts categories etc but for this menu i'm going to start out by adding some pages so make sure the pages tab is open and then select the pages that you want to display within the nav all the pages we created plus a custom link home page should be available for you to choose from and as you add them to your menu you should see them display on the left hand side of the screen as well as on your blog next i want to add the categories and these will live as sub menu items but first let's add them to the nav so that's the same steps as the pages just open the categories tab and select the categories that you want to display now i realize that the categories are all showing up as their own individual menu items as we add them and it's making our nav huge but we haven't created our topic's parent menu item that the categories will live under and let's do that right now so we'll need to create a custom link menu item so go ahead and open that tab then from here all you're going to do is enter the link text and this will be what displays on the nav so i'm naming it topics then we aren't actually linking to anything since this is just serving as our parent menu item so enter a pound sign for the url and then click the add to menu button and we have our topics menu item next i want to reorder these menu items so click the reorder link and then all you're going to do is click the arrows to tell wordpress how you want these menu items to be arranged for example i want topics to be the parent menu item for all the categories so i'll click this arrow button to move it and this is essentially changing the actual order of the menu items so the higher it goes the further left it's located within the nav then i want all of these categories to be sub menu items underneath the topic menu item so next to each category simply click the arrow pointing right and this will cause the menu links to indent but what it's really doing is creating the sub menu items that will live under the topic menu item and you can see that once we've moved all of the categories the nav is much cleaner and the topics menu item has this carrot which implies that there are additional sub menu items underneath it then i actually want to rearrange the order of the rest of these menu items so i'll do that really quick and again this menu management feature is super convenient and makes creating your primary nav a cinch all right there we go i like that okay once you're ready to make your primary nav live click the publish button and then really quick before we move on let's revisit the secondary menu that's in our footer so click the arrow button to go back and as i mentioned earlier we're not going to be using this particular secondary menu within the footer so let's go ahead and disable it so open that secondary menu tab then under the menu location section uncheck the box next to footer and this will remove the menu items from the footer again we'll revisit this in a bit but i just wanted to clean up our menus since we're here and since we made another change to the menu go ahead and click the publish button to make these changes live and then let's exit out of here really quick and check out our new primary navigation menu and it looks awesome it has this cool built-in hover effect with the sub menu items drop down i love it again your primary navigation menu is a huge part of the success of your blog believe it or not it kind of serves as a map to help your blog's visitors navigate your content and if they can easily find what they're looking for then they'll typically spend more time on your blog be more engaged and be more inclined to revisit again these are all positive metrics for seo and can improve the overall user experience as well okay moving on next let's craft your about page and start adding content to your blog so the first page we're going to configure is the about page and if we fast forward really quick you can get a better idea of what we're going to be designing so your about page is not only a great place to introduce yourself but it also serves as a way to communicate your mission and vision to your blog's readers this theme presents your content with a cool minimalist look and feel and i just love the way it looks and it's super simple to do so let's build your about page alright since we're editing our about page let's access it first so i'm just going to click about in the primary nav then to edit the page at the top of the screen click the edit page link and this will bring you to the back end of the page and give you access to the wordpress editor and you should have a pretty good understanding of where everything is so right now let's start writing so right below the title go ahead and start typing out your introduction now for this tutorial i'm just pasting some dummy text here but this is where you'll want to start writing about yourself and introducing yourself to your audience now as you start writing the new wordpress editor is automatically creating what is called a paragraph block and these are blocks of content designated for your text each block comes with editing settings in a toolbar that gives you even more editing options within the block then you can change the alignment add bold font italicize it create hyperlinks and much much more and we'll cover some of the other editing options a little later on in the tutorial but the new blocks feature is a powerful editing tool that you can use as you create content next i want to add a heading and this will be a different sized and formatted font that stands apart from the rest of the text having different headings within your content is good for seo content structure and readability headings help people skim through your content and quickly find what they want as well so to achieve this we'll need to add a heading block after the paragraph block and to add a completely new block simply press enter on your keyboard like you would if you're using a word doc or writing an email and this will give you space to add a new block then you can click either one of these plus icons and that will bring up the block menu this is where the building blocks of your content is housed and is what you'll use to add the various blocks to your blog's posts and pages by default it will display six blocks within the menu but you can always search for specific blocks by using the search bar or by clicking on the browse all button and as you can see you have a wealth of resources when it comes to the different types of blocks you could use to create content now when you have some extra time i recommend browsing and exploring the different types of blocks but for this particular part of the video we're going to be adding a new heading so find the heading block and click on it and we now have a heading block then to add your heading simply start typing so this heading is going to be about the mission of the blog so i'll title this my mission our first heading looks great again you can see that each block has its own toolbar for editing features and feel free to play around and see what works best for you however i recommend that all headings use the h2 heading size this is a best practice for seo okay next i'm going to add some more text so again i'm just pasting some dummy text below our heading but this is where you would start writing again next i'm going to add an image so follow the same steps to add a new block by clicking the plus icon then this time let's use the search feature in the block menu and search for image and there it is then this gives you a few different ways to add an image one of them being to upload an image from your computer and that's what i'm going to do so go ahead and click the upload button and then find the image you want to use and after a few moments it'll be added to the content now depending on how it looks you may want to adjust the size if that's the case you can easily change the image dimensions by moving either one of these blue dots or you can use the block settings on the right hand side of your screen either one of these will allow you to customize the image dimensions within the editor then if you look below the image you have the ability to add a caption now i'm not going to do that for this example but you can add a caption here if you'd like all right i'm going to add some more text below this image but let me show you another way to add a block so if you click on the three dot icon within the toolbar this will give you some additional options one of them being adding a block before or after a particular block and to determine where you're adding the block it'll use the location of your cursor so our cursor is currently on the image block and if we click the three dot icon and then select insert after from the drop down menu that will give us the ability to add a new block after the image block now i realize that you could have easily clicked enter on your keyboard to create the space for the new block but this feature comes in handy if you want to place a new block above or below content all right let's keep going let's add another heading so i'm going to use the plus icon to add a new block and then find the heading block and this section of the page is going to tell people how to use the blog so i'll title it how to use this blog and again these headings are just examples you don't need to use the same ones that i'm using in this video feel free to get creative and use what best fits you and your blog and i'm going to add some more text there we go then the final piece of content i'm going to add is another image so i'll follow the same steps to add a new block by clicking the plus icon and then find the image block then i'm uploading an image of my signature this isn't required but i thought it was a cool touch that added some personality to the page and then let me find the image really quick on my computer and then give it a few seconds to load and that looks cool alright next let's add our featured image and if you're new to the concept a featured image can be described as the image that's visually representing your blog post or page on social media it's also the image that's above the content on our page and is used in the blog feed if it's attached to a blog post now i used canva.com to create my featured image for this blog i was able to easily size and design professionally looking images that allowed me to keep a consistent look and feel across the entire blog and one question i get quite a bit is what size of image should i use for my featured images all that can vary from theme to theme and it also depends on what social channels you're sharing your blog post or blog page with but the featured image size that i used in this video was 940 by 529 pixels either way you'll always want to add a featured image to all of your blog posts and pages and the way you'll do that is on the right hand side of the screen make sure you have the page settings selected and open the featured image tab then click the set featured image button and we're uploading a new image so click the upload files link and then the select files button and find the image you want to use and then give it a few seconds to load into the media library and then don't forget about the title and alt text again i know it seems tedious but it's important all right there we go then click the set featured image button and our featured image has been successfully added to our page then we have a few more things to configure within this page but let's take a look at it really quick so anytime you create content in wordpress you have the option of previewing your changes before you publish them this is a really helpful feature that can help determine how things look before you put it online for the masses to see plus sometimes what you create within the wordpress editor doesn't always translate exactly how you made it to the front end of your blog so that's why it's always a good idea to preview your changes before publishing them and to do that simply click the preview button in the upper right hand side of the screen and then you'll have some options as to how you'd like to preview the page we're going to select desktop and then click the preview in new tab link and this will open a separate browser tab with the preview environment where we can see what things will look like on a desktop before we make them live and look at that our about page is using the two-column layout we have our beautiful featured image followed by our written content with headings and images and we even have the signature there at the bottom looks great okay so i'm really happy with how that turned out so let's go back to the editor and the last thing that we want to configure are the yoast seo settings for the page and you have a few ways to go about that you can click the yoast icon in the upper right hand side of the screen or if you scroll down to the bottom of the editor you'll see the yoast settings if you've installed and activated the yoast seo plugin both will help you optimize your pages and posts for the search engines so the yoast seo plugin is a powerful tool and should be used every time you create a page or post on your blog if you look towards the top of the plugin you'll see some of the features available like general seo settings readability analysis as well as the schema and social settings now i'm going to show you the seo best practices that you should do for your pages and posts but if you'd like a deep dive into the plug-in and learn every feature that's offered then i highly recommend you check out my free yoast seo tutorial on the blog whip in youtube channel however for the sake of time we're just going to cover the most important things that you should do when using this plugin to boost your blog's seo so the first thing you could do is set your focus keyword or key phrase and this is where you could tell yoast the keyword or key phrase that you're trying to rank for then the plugin analyzes the content to determine whether or not you're using the focus keyword in a way that benefits your seo plus after adding the keyword you'll be given an seo grade that helps you optimize your content for the search engines below that is the google snippet editor this is where you can configure how the search engines see your google snippet and the cool thing about this is that yoast gives you a mobile and desktop preview of what that snippet will look like as you edit it you can toggle between the two previews here but this is super helpful as you're optimizing your snippet for the search engines then below the preview is where you can edit the snippet and first is the seo title and by default yo starts you off with what's called snippet variables of the title of the page dash separator followed by the site title and you can easily add or remove the variables or you can remove them completely and just type out your seo title and remember this is only changing how your title looks in the search engines not the actual title of your page on your blog another thing i want to point out is the green line below this title field and as you begin typing it'll turn orange and the goal is to make this line green because this feature helps you stay within the character limit set forth by google and other search engines and lets you know when you should stop adding content to the snippet by turning green next is the slug and the slug is your permalink so whatever comes after the dot com of your page will show up here below that is the meta description which is the preview text that people see when they search for your blog post or page within a search engine and to configure it within the meta description box simply start typing a preview of your post and you'll want to be sure to use keywords and make it enticing to help improve your click-through rate and once again you're probably noticing the orange line that's moving below your text as you type this is the same feature as the seo title field and it helps you stay within the character limits set forth by google and other search engines and lets you know when you should stop adding content to the snippet by turning green and there we go then below that we have the seo analysis and once you've entered your focus keyphrase the seo analysis checks the presence of your focus key phrase throughout the content of the page and the plugin will then reward you with a colored bullet based off of its findings and tell you what is good and what needs to be worked on now yo states that whenever you follow the instructions and craft your pages and posts so that they get green bullets they have a better chance of ranking high in the search results however you don't need a green bullet every time so don't stress too much if it's not green you can also review your seo analysis on the right hand side of the editor as well this is just another way to help you stay on top of your seo then below the seo analysis you can add a related key phrase set the cornerstone content and advanced settings but we're not going to worry about that in this tutorial next if we scroll up and click on the readability tab this will show you the readability analysis and this uses an algorithm to determine how readable your post is yoast has carefully crafted this algorithm to make it as accurate as possible without being too strict it features several checks that will give you advice as you write your post in other words by following this advice you can make your text easier to read and understand which is good for the overall user experience and seo now you'll probably notice that yoast gives you a score of your readability and seo analysis resulting in a colored smiley face red is bad green is good however should all bullets be green yoast says no not every bullet has to be green what you should aim for though is a green happy bullet overall having an orange bullet here and there for the checks is okay your article will still be able to rank even if it doesn't pass all of the tests this is merely an indication not a necessity finally there are the schema and social settings but again we're not going to worry about those for this tutorial if you want to learn more about them definitely check out the in-depth yoast seo tutorial on the blog within youtube channel okay the last thing i want to show you before we publish this page are the layout settings and if you look towards the very bottom of the page you'll see that you have the ability to reconfigure the entire layout of the page i can't begin to tell you how convenient this is there are premium themes out there that don't offer this kind of functionality so the fact that you can do this so easily with the free theme is really cool alright so the way this works is that you can change the layout of the page by selecting one of the layout icons here you're basically able to choose whether or not to have a sidebar which would give you a full width layout or you can move the sidebar from side to side now if you just want to use the default layout which is the two column layout with the sidebar on the right hand side of the screen don't do anything and that's what we're going to do for this page but again this feature is super convenient and we'll definitely be using it later on in the video okay our about page is ready to go so once you've added your content and designed the page you've set the featured image you've updated the seo settings and you've previewed the page it's time to publish your changes so go ahead and click the update button in the upper right hand side of the screen and then let's view the page and check that out we have an amazing about page again i really love the simplicity of this theme and how the developers have designed the layout everything is presented in an even and professional looking manner and it's just a great overall design i'm really happy with it all right nice work one page down moving on next let's add a contact form to our contact page in this portion of the tutorial we're going to add a contact form to your blog giving your audience a way to get in touch with you and if we fast forward real quick and visit the contact page you'll get a better idea of what we're going to be making and as you can see we're going to use the two column layout for the page but we'll be embedding a contact form within the content of the page having a contact form is a great way to keep a line of communication open between you and your audience and it's also a great way to build your email list so to add a contact form let's go back to our wordpress dashboard and like i said we're going to be using the wp forms lite plugin and this plugin came pre-installed when we initially set up our blog but if you don't have the wpforms plugin installed and activated be sure to do that before this part of the video okay so the first thing we need to do is configure the plugin so that it's gdpr compliant and we'll only have to do this once but after we make this quick change all of the forms that we create with the wp forms plugin will be gdpr compliant so within your wordpress dashboard on the left hand side of the screen hover your mouse over wp forms and click on settings and this will bring you to the general settings page of the plugin this is where you can change things like the license key the captcha integrations and much much more i should also point out that we'll be using the free version of this plugin but i have a full length tutorial on how to upgrade and use the pro version of the plugin if you're interested i'll put a link to that video in the show notes but you can also find it on the blog within youtube channel as well okay like i said what we're concerned with right now are the gdpr enhancements so under the gdpr section all you're going to do is check that box next to gdpr enhancements and this will enable the gdpr features for all of our forms moving forward now if you know that your audience isn't going to be coming from the european union then you don't need to worry about this however i am so i'm checking that box and clicking the save settings button to save our changes okay now that our changes have been successfully saved it's time to create our contact form so on the left hand side of the screen in your wordpress dashboard hover your mouse over wp forms and click on add new and this will bring you to the various form templates that you can use to build your form and these pre-made templates can speed up the creation process and help you quickly get your forms up and running wp forms has also added a quick search feature that allows you to browse their templates to find one that best suits your needs and the free version of the plugin comes with some great templates to get you started but if you decide to upgrade to the pro version you'll get access to some of the more intricate and specialized web forms however for this tutorial we're using the free version of the plugin and this contact form will be using the gdpr contact form template and if you hover your mouse over that template section you have the ability to view a demo of that form before you start using it this is a new feature that allows you to get a better idea of what the form will look like before you spend time building it and adding it to your blog it's pretty cool and this looks great so back at the plugin go ahead and click the use template button and that will take you to the form builder so this is the form builder and if you look towards the upper left hand side of the screen you can see that wp forms has done a good job of breaking the form creation process down into four sections first there are fields this is where you set up the various fields you want to display within your form next are the settings this is where you configure things like your thank you message and notifications then we have marketing this is where you'll connect your email marketing service to the form if needed and then payments this is where you can set up a payment processor and collect payments from your forms okay so let's create our form so the first thing we want to focus on are the fields of our form and this is where you'll edit and configure the fields of the form that you're building starting at the top we have the standard fields that comes with the free version these are your typical form fields you see like name email phone number etc then below that are the fancy fields and payment fields and these are only available with the pro version of the plugin and are some of your more intricate form fields however for this tutorial the standard fields will do everything we need them to do and more next on the right hand side of the screen is the form preview and builder and this is where you can see what your form fields will look like as well as build it this is also where you can drag and drop the fields and edit them as you create your forms and i'll show you how that's done right now so within the form builder you'll notice that each form field is like a block of content you can tell as i hover my mouse over each field you can also drag and drop the form fields within the form builder giving you even more control and flexibility over how your forms are displayed that's a pretty cool feature for a free plugin okay so for this example we're creating a contact form that's gdpr compliant and this form template is pretty much ready to go out of the box however there are a few small changes i want to make to the form so the first thing i want to change are the name fields now i don't particularly need the user's last name for this contact form so to edit the fields simply click on the field you want to edit and this will open the field options where you'll have the ability to configure some of the settings of the field as you can see for the name field you have the ability to change the label format add a description change whether or not it's a required field and even add some advanced options or conditions to the field and you can play around and experiment with all these settings but right now i just want to remove the last name field i don't necessarily need it for this form and i've found that fewer fields the user has to fill out leads to higher conversions so keep that in mind whenever you're building your forms okay so under the format section click on that drop down menu and select simple and the form will update and only require one name instead of the first and last next and this is a personal preference but i want to change the actual length of the name and email fields you can see in the form preview that they currently don't span across the length of the entire form so i want them to be flush with the comment box again this is a personal preference but it's also good to know how to change the length of your form fields so you can achieve this change under the advanced options tab then under the field size select large and you'll see the name fields span across the entire form then i'm going to do that for the email field as well so click on the email field in the preview to bring up the field options and then follow the exact same steps open the advanced options tab and change the field size to large perfect and i'll do the same thing for the comment box as well really quick and there we go now i realize that my form fields are longer than my comment box however you'll notice that once we publish this to our blog the form fields and comment box will be aligned and will look a lot cleaner on the front end of your blog okay next it's time to configure the form settings so go ahead and click on the settings tab on the left hand side of the screen and then from here you have the ability to configure the general notification and confirmation settings all other settings are only available in the pro version but these three things still give us a lot of control over our form so the first tab are the general settings which we're at right now and this is where you can change things like the form name the description the form css the submit button text as well as some additional spam and privacy settings however for this video i'm leaving the general settings as is so let's move on to the notifications so go ahead and click the notifications tab and then this gives you the ability to send out an email every time a user fills out and submits the form for example we're building a contact form that will live on a wordpress blog then when someone fills out the contact form this notification feature sends me an email letting me know that someone has filled out the form this is important if you're trying to drum up business or have people inquiring about coaching sessions or product info or they want to partner with you whatever it is you'll want to know when people fill out the form so that you can quickly reply to them and the notification settings lets you do just that by automatically sending you an email and notifying you that someone filled out the form so to keep it simple i'm actually leaving the default notification settings on and as is however you can configure settings like the send to and from email addresses and by default they're set to send a notification to your wordpress admin email but if you want to change that email just remove the admin email smart tag and replace it with your desired email address and a quick tip if you're going to add more than one email make sure you place a comma in between each email then you can also edit things like the email subject line the from name email message etc like i said for the sake of time i'm leaving the default notification settings as is but feel free to test them out to see what works best for you okay moving on to the confirmation so go ahead and click that confirmation tab and this is where you can customize what the user sees after they submit the form here you can easily adjust the confirmation settings to display a success message or take them to another page on your site or redirect them completely to a different domain simply select the confirmation type you want to use from this drop down however for this contact form we're going to use the default confirmation success message so leave the confirmation type as message then below that is a text box where you can edit the actual message the user will see after they submit the form and i'm leaving the default message as is but you can get creative here and have some fun with different messages if you'd like finally is the option to automatically scroll to the confirmation message i recommend keeping this checked just for a good user experience and that's pretty much going to do it for this form now we're not going to worry about the marketing or payment tabs because this is a contact form however whenever we create our opt-in form a little later on the video i'll introduce you to the marketing tab but for now we have everything in place so go ahead and click the save button in the upper right hand side of the screen after the form is saved it's time to embed the form on your site so go ahead and click the embed button and you'll be presented with a few more options on how to achieve this now to be honest they're all super easy and convenient but i'm going to use the short code option so click the use a short code link and then you'll be presented with the code go ahead and copy it by clicking that copy icon towards the right of the code there we go then let's add this to our blog so we'll exit the plugin by clicking the x in the upper right hand side of the screen and then we're going to be embedding this form on the contact page so you'll want to head over to your pages menu by hovering your mouse over pages and clicking on all pages then find the contact page and click the edit link then to add the form we're going to use a shortcode block so place your cursor where it says type or to choose a block and then you should see that plus icon show up go ahead and click on that to add a new block and then search for short code and there it is then all you're going to do is paste the short code from wp forms within the block like so now i know it might not look like much right now but it will trust me okay now i probably should have added some text before i added the form so let me add some dummy text really quick and this could be a few quick sentences explaining your contact policy your office hours etc then check this out you can actually move entire blocks by clicking this arrow in the toolbar now i want to move the text above the form so i'll click that up arrow and boom the text has been moved how cool is that okay next let's add our featured image so be sure you have the page settings selected and then click the set featured image button and i'm uploading an image that i created using canva.com so click the upload files link and then the select files button and you'll see that the image is using the same design as my about me featured image this will help the design of my blog's brand remain consistent across the entire site and then don't forget about the alt text and title then click the set featured image button and we're good to go there then let's preview our changes really quick so click the preview button in the upper right hand side of the screen and open in a new tab and look at that we have our featured image followed by some intro text and then our beautiful and functional contact form that not only looks professional but will help you collect and capitalize on leads as well as open up a line of communication between you and your audience all right back at the editor don't forget to configure your yoast seo settings i'm skipping past this for the sake of time but you'll at least want to make sure that your title and meta description is optimized for the search engines and another quick thing i'm going to show you are the permalink settings within the editor if you open this permalink tab within the page settings you have the ability to edit the slug if you need to we currently have it set to use the page or post title but this is a quick way to manually edit the permalink of a specific page or post if you need to just wanted to show you that real quick okay this page is ready to go so click the update button to push these changes live and then let's view the page and no surprises here everything looks great so let's actually test this form out and make sure that the lead flow is behaving correctly so i'm going to fill this form out really quick and i highly recommend that you test all of your forms after you create them to make sure the funnel is set up and working properly okay so i've filled out all the required fields and clicked the submit button and success again if you recall we have a confirmation message that will pop up once the user submits their info then let me show you the notification email that you'll receive again we set the notification email to go to my wordpress admin email address and when i check my email you could see that the notification contains all of the info from the form that was filled out this is great because you can reply to this notification and due to how we set up our notifications in wp forms the reply will go directly to the email address that was submitted through the form this is also great because it gives you a way to strike when the iron is hot and capitalize on potential leads and business inquiries since this is what's typically coming through a contact form and one thing to note is that you may need to whitelist these email addresses so check your spam to see if the notifications are going there and then whitelist them so that they'll hit your inbox going forward all right moving on next let's set up your email marketing funnel and create an opt-in form so that you could start growing your email list now it's time to build your following and grow your email list with email marketing and the way we'll accomplish this is by adding and configuring an email opt-in form on your blog and if you're new to the concept here are the basics we'll create an opt-in form using wp forms we'll then connect it to an email marketing platform called constant contact we'll then add that opt-in form to various locations on your blog and then once your blog's visitors fill out that opt-in form their information will be stored in constant contact and you'll be able to begin your email marketing relationship with them via professional email marketing software but the first thing you need to do is sign up with an email marketing company and as i previously mentioned for this tutorial we'll be using constant contact and i've been a customer of constant contact for quite a while now and i absolutely love their platform and their free integration with wp forms that's one of the main reasons why i use them and why i recommend them now before we jump in you may be asking yourself why do i need email marketing software why can't i just use my normal email provider like gmail well email marketing software like constant contact allows you to do so many more things while also staying compliant with the canned spam act as you can see with constant contact versus gmail you have so many more features with constant contact that will allow you to efficiently collect grow and market to your audience because that's what this is all about the goal here is to grow your email list so that you can expand your blog's reach and have a larger audience to monetize they always say the money is in the list and constant contact gives you everything you need to effectively grow your email list plus constant contact is offering a 60-day free trial with no credit card required and if you use my affiliate link within the important link stock in the show notes you can test drive their email marketing platform for two whole months to see if it's a good fit for you and your audience just enter your email address here at the landing page and you'll gain access to the free trial and you can begin to grow your email list with constant contact and again i highly recommend them and encourage you to take advantage of their 60-day free trial if after the 60 days you find that you want to keep using them then you can easily get started for only 20 dollars per month they do offer an email plus package which is what i'll be using in this tutorial and that's 45 dollars per month but if you're just starting out the basic email package can help you grow your email list and get started with email marketing so with that being said let's build our opt-in form and set up our email marketing funnel so that we could start building and growing your email list okay so i'm going to log into my account really quick and i should point out that i'm using a test account so some of the features may look a little different than yours depending on when you're viewing this video however the steps to create your form and connect it to your blog will be the exact same now for the sake of time i'm not going to do a deep dive into setting up your constant contact account but once you sign up for the free trial plan and you verify your email address you'll need to create your first email list and welcome email and i'll show you how to do that right now so the first thing we want to do is create our email list this is essentially where we will store all of the emails that are submitted through our opt-in form so to create your list click on the contacts tab and the primary nav and then we're creating a brand new list so click the create list button then for this example this list is going to be attached to an opt-in form that will live in the sidebar so i'm going to title this list finance blog sidebar and click the save button and we have our first list next it's time to create our opt-in form that will connect to this list so let's head back to our blog and as i previously mentioned we're going to be using the wpforms plugin to create our opt-in form that we will then embed within our sidebar and then that will be connected to the list that we just created in constant contact i know it may sound confusing if you're brand new to all this but once we get going it'll become much easier to understand once you see the process and how everything is connected all right so to create our opt-in form we'll need to access the wp forms plug-in so let's head back to our wordpress dashboard by hovering your mouse over your site title and clicking on dashboard and then we're adding a new form so on the left hand side of the screen hover your mouse over wp forms and click on add new and this process is going to be somewhat similar to how we created our contact form but there are a few additional steps that we'll need to take in order to connect it to constant contact so first i'm going to name this form and this is just so that i can keep track of it in the back end of wordpress so i'm going to call this finance blog sidebar then you have multiple ways to create the opt-in form and i recommend testing different templates to see what works best for you but for this example we're going to be using the opt-in form template it's pretty straightforward so go ahead and click the use template button then once again i'm going to be changing the first and last name field to just one name so click on that field to open up the field settings and from the format drop select simple and as you can see this makes the first and last name fields just one field then open the advanced tab and change the field size to large and remember this makes our form fields full width it just looks a lot better in my opinion there we go then i'm going to change the field size of the email field as well so click on that field and then open the advanced tab and select large for the field size there we go next i know that i'm going to have visitors from the eu so i'll need to add the gdpr compliance checkbox to this form so open the add fields tab and then under the standard fields simply drag and drop the gdpr agreement field where you want it located within your form and i recommend placing it right above the submit button there we go how cool is that and we now have our sidebar opt-in form okay for the sake of time i'm leaving all of the default settings as is but feel free to configure them to your liking if you need to next it's time to connect the form to our constant contact list but before we move on be sure to save your form wp forms requires you to save it before moving on to the marketing tab so go ahead and click the save button in the upper right hand side of the screen and now it's time to connect this form to our list that we just created in constant contact this way anytime someone fills out this opt-in form their information will be sent to and stored within the finance blog sidebar list that we created in constant contact so to start the connection we'll need to open the marketing tab on the left hand side of the screen and this is where you'll connect your email marketing service provider to your form and wp forms has made this process really straightforward which is super convenient and it saves you a ton of time trust me all right so all you're going to do is select your email marketing service provider from the list of options on the left hand side of the screen and the great thing about constant contact is that wp forms allows you to connect to them using the free version of the plugin pretty cool so go ahead and click the constant contact button to select your marketing integration next it's time to connect the plugin to our constant contact account so click the add new connection button and then you'll be asked to name the connection this is just how you'll distinguish between each connection within wp forms so i'm going to keep the naming consistent and call this finance blog sidebar then click ok next it's time to make the connection so click where it says click here to register with constant contact and then a pop-up should appear where you'll be asked to log in to your constant contact account so go ahead and enter your constant contact login credentials and click the login button then after logging in you'll be asked whether or not you want to allow access to wp forms and we do so go ahead and click the allow button then after a few seconds you'll be given your constant contact authorization code so go ahead and copy this code i'm on a mac so i'm highlighting it and clicking command c on my keyboard then back at wp forms simply paste that authorization code in the first field then below that in the second field you'll be asked to give the constant contact account a nickname and i'm going to name this finance blog then click the connect button next you'll want to configure the connection by first selecting the account and list you want to connect the form to so i'm using the finance blog constant contact account and connecting this form to the finance blog sidebar list and all you'll do is open up the drop down menu and select the list that you want to connect to perfect next are the list fields and this is telling wp forms what information to send to constant contact first is the email so next to where it says email click that drop down menu and select email next is the full name so click that drop-down and select name full and there we go our opt-in form has been created and connected to our constant contact list and account so let's save our form really quick so click the save button and since this form will live in our sidebar we're going to use a widget so we won't be embedding this form so go ahead and exit out of the plugin next it's time to add this new opt-in form to the sidebar so let's visit our site so hover your mouse over your site title and click visit site in the upper left hand side of the screen and then open your customization menu then click on the widgets tab and you'll more than likely have some pre-loaded widgets here you can see that each widget in the customization menu is translated to a different feature within the sidebar now we're going to be configuring the sidebar a little later on in the video so i'm going to leave these three widgets alone for now and just add our opt-in form so go ahead and click the add a widget button and this will bring up a list of the available widgets then scroll down to the bottom of the list and find the wp forms widget there it is then you'll have the option to give your form a title this will display above the form and can serve as a way to entice people to subscribe so i'm going to title this never miss a drop and then in a few seconds we should see our updated title in the sidebar there it is looks great then select your form from the drop down and we want the finance blog sidebar form and then once the widget goes to work give it a few seconds to load and then let's scroll down a bit so we can see it and check that out the widget is working in our opt-in form that we created in wp forms is displaying beautifully within our sidebar so let's go ahead and publish these changes and make this form live and then let's exit out of here and test it out real quick now i know i say this a lot but i just love the simplicity of this theme plus the free wpforms plugin allows us to create this professional looking opt-in form and easily add it to the sidebar if this is your first time doing something like this i just want you to know that it isn't typically this easy there's usually a lot of technical roadblocks and hoops to jump through in order to make a form look this nice and properly connect to an email marketing service provider and speaking of that let's test out our new form and make sure that the funnel is set up correctly so i'm going to fill this out really quick and then let's submit it and we got our confirmation message nice then if we head over to constant contact and refresh our sidebar list success our form submission has been captured and we are growing our email list with constant contact perfect so our email marketing funnel works the next step in this process is to create an automated welcome email that will be triggered every time someone signs up through this opt-in form and joins this list now i'm not going to cover that in this video because it takes about 30 minutes to set up however i highly recommend that you check out my constant contact tutorial there i'll show you how to set up and create your welcome email for this list this is super important because it will ensure that you're setting up and meeting the expectations of your audience plus having a welcome email is just a professional best practice and it's super easy to do with constant contact so after we're done building this blog be sure to check out my constant contact tutorial on the blog within youtube channel so that you can ensure that your funnel is set up correctly i'll put a link to that video within the important links doc that you can access in the show notes below this youtube video okay next i want to quickly show you how to create a landing page so in this portion of the tutorial i'm going to show you how to build a landing page and if we fast forward really quick you can see what that will look like so the purpose of any landing page is to capture your visitor's email address and in order to do that you'll need some sort of lead magnet and opt-in form now for the sake of time i'm not going to walk you through the entire process of creating a lead magnet but for this video our lead magnet will be the opportunity to subscribe to our newsletter however i've found that if you offer your audience something like a free ebook or a free video training they'll be more inclined to subscribe either way having a landing page in opt-in form is the first step in that process and for this example we're going to have a subscribe page that will house our opt-in form that we just created and i realize that this is our sidebar form but i don't want to waste your time and walk you through the entire process of creating a new form and new email list so we'll be using the sidebar form and list for our subscribe landing page just keep that in mind as we're building this landing page out okay back at our blog let's head over to the page that we're editing so click subscribe in the nav then click edit page at the top of the screen within the toolbar to get to the wordpress editor then we're going to do something a little different with this form instead of using code we're going to use the wp forms block but first let's add some text and this could be marketing copy telling people what they'll get whenever they sign up or enticing them to sign up for the list introducing your free offer etc next let's add our form so follow the steps to add a new block by clicking the plus icon and then search for wp forms there it is then all you're going to do is select the form that you want to appear from the drop down and again i'm reusing our finance blog sidebar form for this example and look at that i love it i will never get over how easy it is to embed these forms with this plugin it really is super simple okay we have our form next let's be sure to add our featured image so open the page settings and click the set featured image button then follow the steps to upload the image you want to use and then click the select files button and find the image and it may take a few seconds to load there we go then don't forget about the title and alt text so let's fill out those two fields really quick and then click the set featured image button and boom featured image is set looks great okay let's go ahead and preview our work before we publish this so click the preview button in the upper right hand side of the screen and preview in new tab and so far looks pretty good our form is displaying correctly but one thing i want to point out do you notice that we have two forms on one page that's kind of a no-no and can cause some confusion for your blog's visitors especially if these forms are connected to two separate lists so one way to fix this is to change the page layout to full width and let me show you how easy this is to do so back at the editor if you recall we have the ability to configure the page layout just scroll to the bottom of the editor and select that icon that looks like a gray square this will remove the sidebar and make the page a full width layout no coding no worries super simple i love this theme alright then don't forget to update your yoast seo settings i am skipping that for now but you'll just want to get in the habit of updating this every time you create a page or post okay let's publish these changes so click the update button in the upper right hand side of the screen and then let's visit our site and check it out and look at that it's now using the full width layout removing the sidebar and distractions allowing the visitor to be more inclined to fill out the form and convert this is a nice looking landing page now remember we already tested this form whenever we added it to the sidebar but if you're using a new form and list for this landing page you'll want to be sure and test the functionality of the form to ensure that it's behaving correctly and that your leads are making it to your constant contact list okay moving on next it's time to publish your very first blog post alright now it's time to start adding actual blog post content this is the exciting part this is when you become an actual blogger all of your hard work up to this point was for this moment and the blog stream theme gives you the ability to present your content in a modern and minimalist design if we fast forward really quick you could see that we're going to create a blog post that uses various types of media within the post the new wordpress editor makes it super simple to add gifs instagram posts images and youtube videos which all have a positive impact on user engagement and the time people spend on your blog so with that being said let's get to it and start creating blog content so before we dive in the first thing i want to do is get rid of the sample hello world blog post i should mention that this is a published post so unless you want the search engines to index this post and have people visit it we'll need to get rid of it so let's trash it okay so first go ahead and head over to your wordpress dashboard and then access your post menu by hovering your mouse over posts and clicking on all posts and this will take you to the post management section of your blog this is where all of your published and unpublished posts will live then to remove the sample hello world post simply hover your mouse over the post title and click on the red trash link and this will unpublish the post and move it into the trash all right now it's time to create our new blog post so you have a couple of ways to create your post you can either click the add new button within the post management menu or hover your mouse over posts and click on add new on the left hand side of the screen you can also hover your mouse over the plus new icon at the top of the screen and select post from the drop down it's really whatever you're most comfortable with but any of those options will allow you to create a new post and access the wordpress editor okay so you're probably noticing that the blog post editor looks like the blog page editor well that's because they're the exact same but a quick refresher never hurts so let's go over it real quick so we have our title section where the title or headline of the blog post will live then below that is where you'll add your various blocks of content then we have some additional document and block settings as well as your editing toolbar followed by the yoast seo plugin if you've installed it and finally the publish and preview buttons okay now that you are refreshed and know your way around the editor let's create your first blog post so the first thing we want to do is give our blog post a title so where it says add title type in the desired title of your blog post and remember your title is going to be your blog post's headline and crafting an attention grabbing headline can be challenging at times but try to keep it under 70 characters and always implement keywords within each title also your title should tell the reader what they're going to get from reading the post and how to posts are great examples of this because they have straightforward titles telling the audience exactly what they'll get from this headline okay next it's time to start adding our content and for this example i'm going to start with a quick intro so again i'm just using dummy text here but this would be where you'd introduce the concept of your post or maybe have a quick story to draw the reader in either way it's a best practice to have some sort of intro before you dive into the rest of the content of the post also if you recall the new wordpress editor gives you blocks of content to work with whenever you're creating content and each block will have its own block settings where you can configure and edit them giving you complete control over what each block can do this is just one of the many reasons why i love and recommend wordpress okay let's keep adding to this post so next i'm going to add a section that will include a gif and these are fun and unique ways to diversify your content and it's super easy to do so the first thing i want to do is add a heading and remember headings are a great way to break up your content and allow your audience to easily skim and consume your blog post plus it's good for seo because the search engine bots will use the headings to understand what the post is about when they're crawling your site so it's always a good idea to use headings when creating blog content so to add a heading follow the steps to add a new block by clicking the plus icon and then find the heading block and this section is going to be about debt management so i'll title it don't take on more debt then i'll add some text and now it's time to add our gif now if you're unfamiliar with what a gif is it stands for graphics interchange format and it's basically a short animated loop gifs are a fun way to diversify your content and add some life to a blog post nowadays you can find literally thousands of funny gifs to add to your blog popular site for gifts is giphy.com and i'll put a link to that in the show notes but this site is my go to when i want to find a gif and then once you find your gif go ahead and click on it and then you'll want to grab the link so click the share icon and then click the copy gift link there we go it's copied then back at the editor to add the gif we're going to use the image block so follow the same steps to insert a block after the paragraph block and click the plus icon and then find the image block then within the image block click the insert from url button and then within that field paste the link that we just copied from giphy.com and then click that arrow button to the right to apply it and boom we have our gif and it's not centered so if you want it to be aligned in the center of the page within the toolbar at the top of the screen in the upper left hand side of the screen click on the change alignment icon and select align center from the drop down there we go looks more aligned and much better then if you want to resize the gif for any reason simply drag and drop either one of those dots or change the image dimensions within the block settings both of these features will allow you to change the size of the gif you also have the option of adding a caption below the gif if you'd like just type it out here and the space provided okay how easy was that again gifs are fun and unique ways to not only diversify your content but they can help with user engagement and time on the post it's good stuff okay so i'm going to add some more text below the gif just to even out the layout and then let's add our next section so this time we'll be embedding an instagram post first things first follow the steps to add a new heading block so click the plus icon and then find the heading block and this section is going to be about budgeting so i'll title it create a budget and then i'll add some text below that then like i said this section is going to display and embed an instagram post this is a great tactic to not only diversify your content but to drive traffic to your social media accounts so the first thing you want to do is go to the instagram page that has the post you want to use and for this example i'm going to use the yahoo finance instagram but you'll more than likely be using one of your instagram posts then once you find the post you want to embed click on it and that will open up the post then click those three dot icons and this will bring up some sharing options for the post and we're going to be embedding the code so click the embed option then you have the option to include the caption of the post but i'm going to remove it so i'll uncheck the include caption box and then click the copy embed code button and this will obviously copy the embed code that we're going to use on our blog post next go back to the post and add the custom html block so click the plus icon and find the custom html block then simply place your cursor in that block and paste the embed code that we just copied there we go now i know it looks kind of crazy right now but we'll preview it here in a second and you can see what the finished product will look like okay i'm going to add some more text below the instagram post to even things out a bit and then let's add our next section so this time we're going to embed a youtube video so once again follow the same steps to add a new block by clicking the plus icon and find the heading block and this one will be about paying your bills on time and let's add some text and now it's time to embed the youtube video so you have a few ways to go about this but the most efficient and effective way i've discovered is to use a free tool called embed responsively this ensures that your post is responsive across multiple devices and it just looks better in my opinion which is always good for user experience okay so first things first let's grab the youtube video that we're going to embed so head over to youtube and find a video you want to use then click the share icon and then copy the youtube link by clicking the copy button there we go then head over to embed responsively.com i'll put a link to this free site in the important link doc in the show notes but this free tool will allow us to easily create responsive embed code that will make our youtube video look picture perfect on our blog regardless of the device that's being used to view it and all you're going to do is make sure that you have youtube selected and then within the youtube page url field paste that link that we just copied from youtube and click the embed button then the tool goes to work and will spit out the embed code that you're going to copy and paste within the custom html block so go ahead and highlight that code and i'm on a mac so i'm pressing command c on my keyboard to copy it then back at the wordpress editor since we're embedding html we'll need to add another custom html block so follow the steps to add a new block by clicking the plus icon and then find the custom html block there we go then simply paste the embed code within the block and voila again i know it doesn't look like much but we'll preview it here in a second and make sure the code is behaving correctly okay i'm going to add some more text below the video to even this section out and then that's going to do it for the content of this post next let's add the featured image so make sure you have the post settings open and under the featured image tab click the set featured image button and we're going to upload a new image so click the upload files link and then the select files button and find the image you want to use and then for the sake of time i'm going to skip adding the title and alt text but be sure to add those before setting your featured image then click the set featured image button and looks great next let's configure our yoast seo settings and you'll notice that these are the exact same steps as when we updated our page seo settings the logic behind everything we did with the about page is the same as your post seo settings here but it never hurts to review so the first thing i recommend doing is entering your focus keyword or key phrase this is where you could tell yoast what you're trying to rank for and then once you do that the plugin analyzes the content to determine whether or not you're using the focus keyword in a way that benefits your seo plus after adding the keyword you'll be given an seo grade that helps you optimize your content for the search engines now you obviously want to aim for the green smiley face however i'm using dummy text in this post so i'm sure my seo score isn't going to be great but moving on to the search engine snippet now i'm leaving the seo title and slug as is but you can edit it here if you'd like however i will update the meta description so within the meta description box simply start typing a preview of your post and again you'll want to be sure to use keywords and make it enticing to help improve your click-through rate and you're noticing again that the orange line moving below your text as you type this is the same feature as the seo title field and it helps you stay within the character limits set forth by google and other search engines and lets you know when you should stop adding content to the snippet by turning green then for the sake of time i'm going to leave the remaining settings as is and i'm not going to worry about the readability due to the fact that i'm using dummy text but again you'll want to try and aim for green ratings whenever you create your content all right our post is really coming together but the next thing we want to configure are the categories and a quick refresher a category is a group of related blog posts that are about similar subjects whenever you create a category it makes it easier for people to find your content so to assign this blog post to a category open the categories tab on the right hand side of the screen then you'll have access to all the categories that we created earlier in the video and then select the category that you want this post to be associated with and that's all you're going to do the category has been set super simple then below that are tags they're a bit similar to categories but there isn't a hierarchy and they can't be used within a menu structure but they're good for grouping content and helping your visitors find specific types of content plus if you have the tag feature enabled in the sidebar you may want to use this however i'm skipping it for now okay so let's preview our post really quick so click the preview button and then open in a new tab and so far so good we have our two column layout with the featured image some nice headings with our embedded media our gif turned out nicely and the embedded instagram post looks great got our youtube video there followed by those social icons and our author bio looks great however one thing i noticed was that the spacing between the embedded youtube video and the text is very thin this is due to how the theme is processing the code and the padding now it may not seem like a big deal but it doesn't look great in my opinion so let's fix that okay so let's head back to the wordpress editor and you may be thinking the padding between my embedded youtube video and text looks good here within the editor why is it super thin on the front end of the post whenever i preview it well that's why it's always a good idea to preview your work before publishing sometimes what the content looks like in the editor doesn't always translate perfectly to the front end of the blog so always preview your work before publishing then a quick work around for this issue is to just add a spacer block and adjust the pixels of space between the video and text so this time follow the steps to insert a new block before the text by placing your cursor within the paragraph block and then click on the three dot icon to open the more options and select insert before this will give you the ability to add a new block in that location then click the plus icon and search for the spacer block there it is then for this example i'm adjusting the padding to 20 pixels so you can either use the dots or change the pixels in the spacer settings on the right hand side of the screen like so and i know it looks kind of odd right now in the block format but let's preview it really quick and check it out so click the preview button and then preview a new tab and if we scroll down to the youtube video look at that our spacer block has added 20 pixels of space and the padding between the video and text looks much better also i want to point out that each post comes with these four social sharing icons at the end of the content there's also the date published with the hyperlink category and our fancy little author byline and bio looks great all right this post is ready to go so let's head back to the wordpress editor and publish it so go ahead and click the publish button in the upper right hand side of the screen then before we push this live i want to show you something really quick if you open the publish immediately tab this opens a calendar widget that allows you to set the specific time and date that you'd like to publish the post this can come in handy if you need to schedule a post for a specific seasonal campaign or if you're creating multiple posts in one sitting and you don't want to publish them all at once however for this tutorial we're going to publish it right now so click the publish button again and then you'll get a notification that the post is live and you also have the ability to view the page or copy the link so go ahead and click the view post link to check it out and i'm biased but looks amazing we have a media rich blog post that uses headings well-spaced content blocks and various types of media throughout the post again you don't have to add these different types of media to each of your blog posts but it's always a good idea to include some sort of media to help break up the text and tell your story okay now that you've published your first blog post there are a few things i want to show you that can help clean up your blog feed so if we revisit the home page where our blog feed lives you'll see that the default setting of the theme is to display the entire post this means that every time you publish a post it will display all of the content in the feed this can make for a messy user experience and it isn't a best practice to have your blog feed look like this so let's clean it up okay the first thing i want to do is give our blog a new heading this is a cool little feature that the theme offers and it's a way to add a little flair and personality to your blog feed so go ahead and open the customization menu then click on the theme options tab and open up the blog tab then from here you have a lot of control over how your blog feed is presented for example you can add a blog heading and subheading that displays above your feed so in the heading and subheading fields simply type out what you want it to say this can really be anything but you can make it fun and unique to help keep the reader engaged and mine will say the drop what's new and it's not displaying because we have to enable this feature but we'll do that before we publish our changes next let's clean up our feed and change the logic so that it shows sample excerpts instead of the entire post this is a best practice and it just looks better so under the enable excerpt section flip that switch on and that will show an excerpt instead of the full blog post then right below that you can edit the number of words used in the excerpt if you like this gives you even more control over what your feed looks like and i know i say this a lot but this is a great feature for a free theme all right then you do have some additional features to enable like front page widgets and some other things but for this tutorial we're only going to enable the heading and excerpts however if you have some extra time feel free to play around with these other options to see if there's anything that you like okay so the last thing we need to do is enable the blog heading so back at the top there simply flip that blog heading switch on and check that out our heading and subheading are displaying above the blog feed pretty cool okay so that's going to do it for the feed so let's go ahead and publish our changes to make them live and then let's exit out of here really quick and check it out and that looks much better in my opinion having those little sample excerpts of each post is not only a blogging best practice but it entices the reader to click through and engage with the content as you can see the theme has this nice continue reading link that when clicked will take the reader to the full post again you don't have to build your blog posts and feed exactly like i do in this video but from my experience these types of things have proven to be very successful when starting any type of blog now another thing i want to show you if we head back to the home page you probably recall that we structured our primary navigation menu to display our categories and since we added this post to the budgeting category which is also displayed at the bottom of the post it will automatically be added to the category feed so now anytime you create a post and add it to the budgeting category it will be placed in this feed and it's yet another way to organize your content and make it easier for the reader to find what they want again these are all great metrics to help improve the user experience and overall seo okay so instead of making you watch me create multiple posts and publish them to the blog let's fast forward so you can get a look at what your blog feed will look like once you start creating and publishing content and as you can see our feed has filled out and is displaying some beautiful previews of each post now one thing i want to point out is that you have the ability to change how many posts show up in your feed for example i think i have around seven displaying right now but you can shorten that list and configure how many posts show up within your feed if you'd like so if that's something you want to do let me show you how that's done really quick so we'll want to head back to our wordpress dashboard so hover your mouse over the site title and click on dashboard then hover your mouse over settings and click on reading then from here simply switch out the number 10 with whatever amount you want and be sure to match the numbers within the blog pages and syndication feeds so that you have a consistent feel throughout your blog and i'm gonna go with five then click the save changes button to save these settings and then let's visit our site real quick and if we scroll through the blog feed you'll notice that the amount of posts displaying has been reduced to five and we even get this cool pagination feature where the remaining posts are put on a new page this is yet another cool way to clean up your content and create a better user experience for your blog's visitors all right moving on next let's configure the sidebar and add some new widgets to it all right now it's time to build our sidebar and your blog sidebar is a great place to advertise and grow your email list because it's a global element meaning that it stays the same on every page in post that has a sidebar and if we fast forward really quick you can see that each page has a two-column layout that can easily be customized to your liking on the left side is where we add the content and then the right side is our sidebar this is where we can add various widgets links images and even earn money with affiliate campaigns and adsense ads keep in mind that the content on each page will be different but the sidebar remains the same throughout the blog now by default wordpress starts your sidebar off with some pretty basic widgets these aren't bad and you may want to keep some of them for your blog but for this video we're going to be reconfiguring the sidebar quite a bit so to get started open your customization menu and then open the widgets tab then from here you'll see that each block represents a widget in the sidebar again these aren't necessarily bad but i want to use more engaging widgets to help spread our blogs reach and promote content so let's clean this up a bit by first removing the widget we aren't going to use and to do that simply open the widget and click the red remove link and then you'll see one by one the widgets disappear from the sidebar and i'm removing the first three widgets and leaving our opt-in form next it's time to add new widgets so click the add a widget button and then find the alks tabs widget it's spelled alx tabs widget and this will give you the ability to list posts comments and tags in a cool and unique way and then if we scroll down a bit you can get a better idea of what that will look like and as you can see the alks tab widget lists out our published content and organizes it into four sections there's recent posts most popular recent comments and tags and they also use these cool icons to distinguish what is what and when the user clicks on one of the icons it takes them to that particular section of content again this is a super cool feature for a free theme okay so configuring each section is pretty straightforward just go down the widget settings on the left hand side of the screen one by one and they're sectioned off and titled first being the recent posts now you're probably noticing that the items to show are set to 5 but it's showing 10 i think that's a bug because it resets after we publish our changes either way this is where you can add a title enable or disable this tab you can show or hide the thumbnail set the number of posts to display and even set the category if you only want a specific category to show up here alright moving on to the most popular tab again these settings are pretty much the same as the recent posts tab however you can set the time frame of the posts with the most comments from all time this year month week or past 24 hours and speaking of comments below that you can configure how the recent comments and tags are displayed you can even disable some of the tabs if you know that you aren't going to have a lot of comments or use tags simply uncheck these boxes and only the recent and popular icons will display you can even remove the most popular section so that only the recent posts displays it's really what you want to make of it however for this example i'm going to have all four sections display so i'll enable them before we move on okay finally towards the bottom of the widget you have some more editing features where you can configure the tab order and info again this is just another way to diversify the content and change things up if you want next let's add another widget so i'm going to close this up really quick and then click the add widget button and this time we're adding the aux post widget this will give us the ability to display additional featured posts in a different format within the sidebar and as you can see this widget shows your posts in a larger format giving you yet another way to share your content and drive traffic to specific posts now by default the widget is displaying four of our most recent posts but you can easily configure that here within the widget settings so for this example i'm going to give this section a title and call it featured post then i'm only going to have it display one post at a time so i'll change the items to show from four to one and then i'm leaving the other settings alone but feel free to configure them as you see fit okay and that's going to do it for our sidebar widgets then if you want to reorder them you can simply drag and drop the blocks within the widget menu on the left-hand side of the screen and you can change how they're displayed in real time that's pretty convenient and yet another reason why i love wordpress alright our sidebar is set so let's publish our changes and make this live then if we exit out of the customization menu you'll see that our tabs widget is now displaying only five posts instead of every single post that we published looks a lot better we also have our featured post widget along with our opt-in form beautiful again your sidebar is a great piece of digital real estate that can be used for multiple reasons you can drive traffic you can grow an email list you can even monetize your blog with ads in the sidebar now speaking of monetization we're not going to be monetizing the sidebar in this video but what i'm going to show you a little later on in the tutorial can be used to monetize the sidebar just wanted to give you a heads up and we'll definitely get into that in a few moments either way the sidebar of this theme is a great way to enhance your blog alright moving on next let's build your footer all right so now it's time to customize the footer and this theme gives you a few options when it comes to how you want the content to be displayed along your footer let's fast forward real quick and take a look at the finished product and as you can see we're going to design the footer so that it displays its own menu we'll also clean up the copyright text and add a revenue stream with this affiliate marketing banner ad this footer can really do a lot so let's get back to our blog and build out our footer menu okay so to get started we'll want to access the customization menu then open the menus tab and let's scroll down so that we can see our changes as we work okay now you might be familiar with this because it's exactly how we built our primary nav earlier in the video the steps are going to be the exact same but instead of deleting the secondary menu we'll just add to it and then configure it so that it displays in the footer so go ahead and open the secondary menu tab then if you recall we initially disabled the menu from displaying in the footer however the default menu items are still intact so for the sake of simplicity i'm going to remove all of these menu items and start from scratch so to remove them it's the same as the widgets just open them up and click the remove link and i'll do that for each one perfect we now have a blank canvas for our new menu so for this menu we're actually going to be piecing it together throughout the remainder of the video and that's because we haven't created all the pages that are going to live in the footer but what we can do now is add the contact resources and subscribe pages so just like our primary nav to add new menu items click the add items button then as i just mentioned we're adding three pages for now so under the pages section i'm going to select contact resources and subscribe there we go then to display them within the footer we'll want to set the menu location to footer so check the box next to footer within the menu location section and this will tell wordpress to display our secondary menu in the footer and there it is looks great now as i said earlier we're going to add a few other pages to this menu a privacy policy page and an affiliate disclaimer but we still need to create those pages so let's go ahead and publish what we have now to make this menu live so click the publish button next i want to clean up the copyright text and by default the theme displays some copyright text along with the slogan powered by wordpress theme by aux now this isn't a huge deal but i want to remove the slogan and just have the copyright text so to achieve that we'll need to go back a slide in the customization menu so click that arrow and then click that arrow one more time and open the theme options tab and then the footer tab then from here all we're worried about right now are the copyright and slogan so you do have the ability to replace the footer copyright text here if you'd like i'm leaving it as is but you can edit it here if you want to then below that to remove the slogan simply flip the footer credit switch off and then you'll see that the powered by wordpress theme by aux text will disappear again this isn't a huge deal but i think it looks a lot cleaner like this okay let's go ahead and publish these changes and then let's exit out of the customization menu really quick and check it out and as we scroll down our blog is really starting to come together looks great so far and our footer menu items and copyright text look and behave as expected nice work next let's create our privacy policy page and add it to this footer menu so creating and setting your privacy policy page is an aspect of a blog that can sometimes get overlooked but due to the always changing privacy and data landscape it's extremely important that you have a privacy policy page on your blog regardless of what country your traffic is coming from and i want to clarify that the following information should not be perceived as legal advice i'm not a lawyer and by no means should this tutorial be used as any type of legal consultation i recommend that you reach out to a legal professional if you have any questions or concerns when it comes to how to move forward with your blog's privacy policy page so with that being said the new wordpress update makes it super simple to get started with your privacy policy page all websites on the internet should have a privacy policy page because it protects your business from legal issues and also helps build customer trust so let's create a privacy policy page go ahead and head over to your wordpress dashboard and then we'll need to access our pages menu by hovering your mouse over pages and clicking on all pages then you'll notice that wordpress has automatically created a privacy policy page for you and it isn't published yet but if you click the edit link you'll be taken to the wordpress editor where you can edit the content of the privacy policy page and speaking of the content your blog's privacy policy page needs to be edited to match your blog's specific requirements this is where it can get tricky however there are some resources for you when it comes to creating your privacy policy page first you can use a service like termsfeed.com this is what i used for blog within.com and they can help you create trusted legal agreements in a matter of a few minutes now there is a cost associated with this but i personally think the investment is worth it if you have the budget for it because this can help you stay compliant and give you peace of mind about the protection the policies can offer next you have the option of using the wordpress policy guide which i'll show you in a few minutes but they've outlined some recommendations for your privacy policy based off of the software and plugins that you have installed on your blog then finally i recommend reaching out to a legal professional this will probably be the most expensive but this option will definitely give you peace of mind that you're legally protected when it comes to things like this okay after you've created your privacy policy page don't forget about the yoast seo settings and the featured image i'm skipping those for the sake of time but you'll want to do that before you publish the page and speaking of that let me publish this page really quick so i'm going to click the publish button and then click it one more time okay after you've published your privacy policy page you'll need to set it in wordpress and to do that hover your mouse over settings and click on privacy and this will bring you to your privacy settings where you'll set your privacy policy page now as i previously mentioned wordpress provides a policy guide that you can review and use as a guide when you're creating your privacy policy just toggle between the settings and policy guide here to take advantage of that guide this is a great resource but it's still your responsibility to create a comprehensive privacy policy page so that's why i recommend using either terms feed or talking to an attorney before you put this page on your blog okay so once you have your privacy policy page you'll want to set it in wordpress and all this is doing is that it's signaling to wordpress the search engines and the rest of the internet that this particular page will be used as your privacy policy page so to set your privacy policy page select the page you want to use from that drop down and click the use this page button this makes it official and will be the first line of defense and the ongoing and ever-changing terrain of the privacy laws online now the final step in this process is that you should have it somewhere on your blog now you'll get a notification reminding you to update your menus but i want to use the customization menu to update it and add this page to our footer menu so let's visit our site really quick and then open the customization menu and then let me scroll down to our footer really quick so that we could see what we're working on okay and then open the menus tab and then the secondary menu tab to access the footer menu then we're adding a new item so click the add item button and under the pages section find the privacy policy page and select it there we go then if you want to reorder the menu items it's just like the sidebar you can drag and drop the menu items in any order you'd like and i like that order looks good then let's publish our changes and make this menu live and then let's exit out of the customization menu and move on to our next step alright moving on next i want to show you some cool tips on how to customize your blog and really make it unique okay one of the many reasons why i chose the free blog stream theme for this tutorial was because of how easy the developers made it to customize the theme and with a few clicks of the mouse you can change the entire look and feel of this blog allowing you to create a personal brand that can help you stand out from the crowd so here are some quick customization tips that you can implement on your blog if you'd like to okay so let's visit our customization menu so click customize at the top of the screen and from here the first tip i'm going to show you is how to configure the overall styling of your theme so go ahead and open the theme options tab and then the styling tab and this is where you can edit things like the font the site width content width primary color and logo height however in order for any of these things to work you need to first make sure that you have the dynamic style switch turned on this gives you the ability to configure the styling okay so the only thing i'm going to change right now is the primary color however i encourage you to experiment with the other stylings to see if there's anything that you like alright so the primary color is basically the main color that's used throughout your blog and if you click on the color picker you can change that color and see what areas of your site will be affected and as you can see as you select different colors from that color picker tool it changes the color throughout your blog this gives you some flexibility as to how your blog is displayed it's pretty cool all right but for this example i'm going to keep the default color so you can always click the default button to get back to the original blue color if you'd like next let's change some more colors so head back a few slides on the customization menu by clicking that arrow a couple of times and click it one more time then this time open the colors tab and this will give you the ability to change the header font color as well as the background color and the steps are the exact same as when we change the primary color just open the color picker tool and select the color you want to use it's pretty straightforward and can give you some freedom on how the header text is styled and then the same goes for the background just use that color picker tool i don't know if that's the technical term but that's what i'm calling it and select the color that you want to use this one's a little more dramatic since it's changing the entire background all right and speaking of background if you don't like the color option you can always use a background image so let's head back a slide within the customization menu by clicking that arrow again and then open the background image tab then all we're doing is uploading an image so click the select image button and upload the image that you want to use i recommend using a larger image since it will need to stretch the length of the screen and i think mine was around 2000 by 1300 pixels and there we go then after you upload the image you have some options as to how it's displayed i recommend playing around with these features to see what works best for you and then i like the preset option fill screen so if you click that drop down and select fill screen this locks the image in place and stretches it the full width of the screen giving it a much cleaner and nicer look in my opinion all right then the final thing i want to show you is how to add a header image this is my work around for adding a logo so let's head back a screen by clicking the arrow then open the header image tab and one thing to keep in mind is that the theme recommends using an image that is 1120 by 300 pixels and i was able to create this custom dimension image in canva.com so i recommend you do the same if you want your header to fit properly and then just follow the steps to upload the new image and then we'll skip the cropping and check that out now the theme calls this a header image but i like using it as a logo instead it feels like it's more prominent and you can even randomize the header images giving you more flexibility of the design of your blog super cool then after you make all of your design configurations and edits don't forget to publish your changes by clicking the publish button so i hope those tips were helpful but feel free to experiment with these customization features and get your creative juices flowing alright moving on next let's implement your first revenue stream so that you could start earning money with your blog so i'm not going to lie this is my favorite part mainly because monetizing a blog changed my life and the lives of my family and in this portion of the tutorial i'm going to introduce to you how i earn revenue with my blogs and if we fast forward really quick you can see what we're going to be making what you're looking at is affiliate marketing this is one of the most profitable marketing strategies and this themes footer offers some premier advertising space within your blog this is a great way to earn passive income and like i said affiliate marketing changed my life and allowed me to earn anywhere from five thousand to ten thousand dollars per month of passive income now as i mentioned i'm going to be showing you how to implement affiliate marketing campaigns and anytime you have affiliate offers on your blog you need to disclose to your audience that they're clicking on an affiliate link so in addition to your affiliate offer within your footer i'm going to show you how to add an affiliate disclosure as well this will not only protect you legally but it allows you to be transparent with your audience which is always a good thing this ultimately leads to more conversions because you're building trust with your audience by being honest now before we get started i want to give you a quick rundown of how affiliate marketing works at its core affiliate marketing is a monetization strategy that lets you market other companies products for a cut of the profits there are a lot of ways to get started but let me show you a quick way to start earning money with your blog through affiliate marketing first you sign up for a reputable affiliate program of a company and as a personal finance blogger you'll want to make sure that you join affiliate programs of companies that make products that align with your audience's interests you then promote those affiliate offers on your blog through display advertising affiliate links email campaigns etc then when someone clicks your affiliate link and makes a purchase you get paid it's that simple plus if you set your blog up like i show you in this video you can implement multiple affiliate campaigns and increase your potential to earn more revenue with your blog like i said affiliate marketing is a very lucrative strategy when it's done right and the blogging industry offers some of the most reliable and high converting affiliate programs around now before we dive in i want to mention that i also offer a premium online course called the affiliate blogger academy it includes 20 plus step-by-step video tutorials that show you the strategy and blueprint that i use to earn six figures in a year with affiliate marketing so if you're interested in learning more about it click the link in the show notes below titled affiliate blogger academy okay with that being said let me show you how to get started with affiliate marketing and how to implement your first revenue stream on your blog so the first step in the process is you have to officially partner with the company before you can start promoting their products on your blog and the way to do that is you apply to a particular company's affiliate program now one of the best ways to find multiple affiliate programs to partner with is by joining an affiliate network and if you're new to affiliate networks they're basically a hub for companies to promote their affiliate programs think of it like joining a club once you're in you have access to all these different companies affiliate programs plus instead of going to the company directly you can access all the information about their affiliate program within the affiliate network let me walk you through an example really quick so we're currently at the cj affiliate network and this is one of the most popular affiliate networks around they have a great reputation for creating successful affiliates and then to get started you can sign up directly from cj affiliate dot com and one thing i want to clarify is that when you sign up you're signing up as a publisher and think of being a publisher as partnering with brands and publishing content that is promoting that brand's products then you'll go through the application process which is free by the way but after filling everything out you'll have access to literally thousands of companies or advertisers as they're referred to within cj affiliate that you can then partner with and promote their products for a cut of the profits now one thing i want to point out before we get started is that the reason i waited until the end of the video to go over affiliate marketing is because when you're applying to these affiliate programs and asking to partner with their company they'll want to see your blog to make sure your content is aligned with their brand and that you'll be a good face so to speak of their brand so that's why i wanted to wait until you had a solid foundation in place before you apply to these affiliate programs all right so let me show you how to apply to an affiliate program within cj affiliate i'm also going to show you how to add this revenue stream to your blog okay so after you've joined the cj affiliate network you'll have access to all of the companies within it which they refer to as advertisers and this is where you can begin your search for affiliate programs to partner with so you can easily filter and browse these companies affiliate programs a few ways for this example since we're creating a personal finance blog i want to search for companies within the finance industry so one quick way to filter through all these companies and find the ones that are associated with finance is to filter by category so click the category tab and then we want financial services so check that box and then click the search button and this will list all of the companies within the financial services niche that are part of the cj affiliate network this is essentially the list of companies that have affiliate programs available for you to apply to and join now one quick trick i like to do is to sort this list by network earnings this will list the highest earning affiliate programs first and will give me a good idea of what affiliate programs are generating revenue for their affiliates and as you can see cj affiliate has a networks earnings meter that reads zero to five as well as some other stats that can help you determine whether or not the affiliate program would be a good fit for you and your audience but this is just the first step we can go even further and dig deeper into the affiliate program by clicking on the company's profile like experian and then this will bring up an even more detailed company profile where you can gather more information to see if this would be a good company to partner with now as i previously mentioned in my premium online course the affiliate blogger academy i go into much greater detail about these profiles what everything means and how to get approved and negotiate higher payouts but this is a great starting point that can give you some insight on whether or not you'd be a good fit for this brand's affiliate program okay so once you've done your research and you're ready to apply simply click the apply to program button and you'll go through their application process now this could vary depending on the company you apply to partner with some have automatic approvals and some will review your application and blog before approving you however most companies will manually review your application before approving you to join their affiliate program so just be ready for that then after you've been approved you'll have access to the company's affiliate resources like their links and banners and if you click the get links icon you'll see everything that they have to offer and what you're looking at right now are all of the links and banners that experian provides their affiliates to use and their promotions so essentially you can use these ads and links on your blog and if someone clicks the ad or link and makes a purchase you get a cut of the profits which can range from six dollars to thirty dollars per order and that can add up pretty quick whenever you start generating traffic okay let me show you another quick example of an affiliate network called impact.com this is another great affiliate network that i'm a part of and has helped me generate thousands of dollars per month through affiliate marketing and if you're interested under four publishers in the primary nav simply click affiliates and then you can apply to join the impact.com affiliate network now i'm not trying to toot my own horn and i hate boasting but i want to show you some proof that this actually works so here is a quick snapshot of my affiliate dashboard and my affiliate earnings from just one of the products that i'm affiliate for within impact.com again this is just for one product and it generates around a thousand dollars or more per month of passive income all i do is just create content around this product and put affiliate links and banners on my blog and then i drive traffic to this offer and then speaking of that let me show you how to embed an affiliate banner ad within the footer of our blog so one thing i want to point out before we do this is that you're probably noticing that each affiliate network is pretty different in how they structure their affiliate dashboards but i can assure you that once you get familiar with where things are and how to navigate the site it'll become second nature to you and you'll be able to quickly create affiliate campaigns through various affiliate networks plus regardless of the affiliate network or company you're partnered with we're going to be embedding html in order for this banner ad to display so the steps to get the code may vary but the steps to implement it will be the same okay so let me show you what i mean so for impact.com if you want to access your affiliate resources you're going to click on content in the primary nav and select ads and links then from here you can access all the banners links gifs etc that the company's affiliate program provides their affiliates and since our footer is somewhat wide i want to use a banner ad so i'll find the one i want to use and then click the get code button and then you'll get a little preview of the ad as well as some details and the landing page that it's driving traffic to then like i said we're going to be embedding the html for this to work on our blog so towards the bottom of the screen click the html tab and then this will spit out the code then click the copy code button and we'll then paste this code within our footer so let's head back to the blog and once again open the customization menu and then let's scroll down really quick so we can see our work in action okay then open the themes options tab and then the footer tab then in order for this to work we'll need to turn on the footer ads so flip that switch on and then click the publish button and then exit out of the customization menu then we have to go back into the customization menu i know i know why did we just leave then well when i was testing this out earlier the footer ads wouldn't work for me unless i published and re-entered the menu so this was the workaround that i found hopefully it works for you too but if not feel free to reach out in the comments and i'd be happy to take a closer look okay next you'll want to open the widgets tab then you should see the footer ads tab so go ahead and open it then click the add a widget button and find the custom html widget since we're pasting some code then simply place your cursor in the content box and paste the code that you copied from the affiliate partner and then in a few seconds boom you now have a professional looking ad and revenue stream on your blog so let's go ahead and publish our changes so click the publish button and then exit out of the customization menu really quick and our blog is really coming together i know i sound like a broken record but i think i'm falling in love with this theme so much so that i've honestly been considering using it for a personal blog project i just love it and check that out we now have a functioning revenue stream on our blog the footer ad space allows you to add custom html banner ads that can drive traffic to your affiliate offers now this doesn't have to stop at the footer you can add custom html widgets to the sidebar and add affiliate offers there you can also use the custom html blocks within the wordpress editor whenever you're creating blog posts and you can add affiliate offers that way as well as long as it's html you can pretty much embed it anywhere on your blog either way this is a great strategy to increase your conversions and ultimately earn more revenue with your blog now one thing that we need to do and this is very important when promoting affiliate offers on your blog is we need to add an affiliate disclaimer now i should start by saying that i'm not a lawyer and nothing in this tutorial should be considered legal advice so with that being said simply put your affiliate disclaimer is a statement on your blog or website that informs users that you're compensated by companies for promoting reviewing or recommending their products or services it's essentially legal copy to ensure that you're following ftc guidelines which protects you legally as an affiliate and the way that we're going to accomplish this is with an affiliate disclaimer page so let's create the new page by hovering your mouse over the plus new icon and clicking on page then this will be a simple page with just a title and some text so first things first let's add our title and i recommend calling this affiliate disclaimer then below that is where you'd add your actual disclaimer now i'm simply copying and pasting this from blogwithbin.com and if you need help creating your disclaimer feel free to use this one but again this shouldn't be considered legal advice or even something that will protect you legally i recommend visiting the link in the important links doc titled ftc affiliate disclosure there you'll find some guidelines on what you should include in your affiliate disclosure okay and i'm going to make some quick edits to this text there we go then just for fun i'm going to add my signature below the text and this is going to be an image so i'll add a new image block so i'll click the plus icon and then find the image block and then follow the steps to add the image there we go then don't forget about the featured image and seo settings again i'm skipping them for now for the sake of time but be sure to do that before publishing your page and then finally i'm going to make this page full width so scroll down to the bottom of the editor and within the page layout section select the full width icon and that will remove the sidebar and make this page full width and then let's preview our changes really quick and the page looks good however i want to remove this italicized bold font within the text your affiliate disclaimer should really be free of any type of stylized fonts or colors so let me fix that really quick all right there we go then let's preview this again and perfect we now have a professional affiliate disclaimer that will help to ensure that we're staying compliant with the ftc guidelines for affiliate marketing okay let's publish this page so back at the editor click the publish button and click it again and it's live next we need to add this to our footer menu so let's visit our site and then open the customization menu then let me scroll down really quick and then open the menus tab then the secondary menu tab and from here we're going to add the new affiliate disclaimer page that we just created so click the add items button and find the affiliate disclaimer page and click it to add the new item to the menu then i actually want to move this to the front of the line so i'll drag it like so there we go then let's publish this and make our changes live and then i'll exit out of here to check it out and then let's scroll down a bit and look at that our footer menu is complete and you now have an affiliate disclaimer that is protecting you legally okay the next thing i want to show you in regards to monetizing your blog is how to create a resources page and if we head over to blogwithbin.com you can get an idea of what that is so a resources page is essentially a page that has resources that you recommend to your audience the key here is to ensure that the resources are actually things that are aligned with your niche and that will help your audience achieve a goal or improve something within their lives or businesses now the most important thing about this page is that the resources should also be affiliate offers so you'll want to make sure that you are recommending products that will help your audience but also be products that you're an affiliate for this is a win-win and my resources page has been one of the most successful pages on my blog when it comes to generating traffic to my affiliate offers so with that being said let's create your resources page on your blog alright so if you recall earlier in the video we already created our resources page and added it to our menu all we need to do now is add content to it so let's visit the page and then access the wordpress editor by clicking edit page at the top of the screen then the format of this page is really up to you but i like to have headings with some content some images some calls to action commonly referred to as ctas throughout the page now for this example i'm going to only add a couple of resources but you'll want to maximize your efforts here and add as many as you can without being overbearing just do whatever feels right to you and your audience okay so first thing you'll need to do is add an affiliate disclaimer yes i know we added one within our footer but if you have affiliate offers and links on a blog post or page you need to disclose that to your audience before they even see the offer so i highly recommend adding your affiliate disclaimer at the top of each page and blog post that you have affiliate links in so i'm just pasting dummy text for now but again this is where you would paste your affiliate disclaimer okay next it's time to add our resources again these will be resources that will help your audience but will also be products and services that you're an affiliate for so first i'm gonna add a heading so follow the steps to add a new block go ahead and click the plus icon and then find the heading block then this resource will be experian credit monitoring and then you'll want to add a brief description of the resource pointing out why you recommend it and how it will benefit your audience next it's time to add the cta which stands for call to action this is essentially something that encourages the reader to do something like click a link or button so for our resources page the cta will be a button thankfully the wordpress editor has a nice button block that we can add under each section of content so let's add a button block go ahead and follow the steps to do that by clicking the plus icon and then search for button there it is then you'll want to add some text to the button enticing the reader to click it and i'm putting learn more but you'll want to test different versions to see what works best for you next you'll want to add the affiliate link to this button so highlight the text within the button and then click the link icon in the toolbar and this will give you the ability to add a link to the button and again we're adding affiliate links to these ctas so you'll want to be sure and grab the affiliate links not the html but just the links to the affiliate products and i should also point out that i'm not an affiliate for experience so i can't access their actual affiliate links however once you're approved to join their affiliate program through cj affiliate you'll have access to the affiliate links here within the affiliate resources then once you've copied the experian affiliate link from cj affiliate paste that link within the button block and then i recommend having it open in a new tab since it's taking people away from your blog so flip that switch and then click the arrow icon to submit the link and add it to the cta button perfect now that's all i'm going to do at the moment but you have the option to really make the ctas your own and match your brand here with the block settings you can change the border settings the color width style and font of the button so feel free to really make it your own and get creative with your ctas if you'd like okay now i also recommend adding some banner ads or maybe some images to each resource section this is yet another way to drive traffic to your offers and increase conversions however for the sake of time i'm not going to add any images or banners and we're going to move on to adding the next resources but again get creative with this page okay so let's add our next resource but before we do one thing i found when creating this page was that the padding between the buttons and the headings wasn't that great so you'll need to add a spacer block to make it look evenly spaced throughout the page so follow the steps to add a new block go ahead and click the plus icon and then find the spacer block then i found that 25 pixels of space look the best and there we go then let's add our next heading block so again click the plus icon and find the heading block then this section is going to be credit cards and then add your text and then the cta so let's add the button block so again click the plus icon and then find the button block there we go then these steps are the exact same steps as before you'll want to add your cta text and i'm keeping things consistent and having this one say learn more and then add the link to the button by highlighting the text and then clicking the link icon in the toolbar and for this example we're using the american express credit cards and yes it looks like these links are for the canadian region but it works for this example so once you have the affiliate link add it to the button block and remember have it open in a new tab and then submit it perfect and as i said earlier in the video you'll obviously want to add more resources but we're only going to add two for now and hopefully you get the idea okay so next thing we want to do is add our featured image and i realize i keep skipping this part for the sake of time but a good refresher never hurts so make sure you have the page settings open and under the featured image tab click the set featured image button then follow the steps to upload the image you want to use and then once you set the featured image there it is looks great then don't forget about your yoast seo settings i'm going to skip these for now but remember you always want to configure those settings when creating content and finally if you want to change the page layout settings you could do so here at the bottom of the editor then i'm not going to preview this i'm just going to publish it but again i recommend always previewing your work before publishing just fyi and then let's view our page and it looks great then if you click on the cta it's going to take us to the desired landing page of the affiliate offer again i know it sounds simple but that's because it is however i don't want you to get the impression that success is going to happen overnight it took me well over a year before i earned my first dollar with affiliate marketing and even then it took probably another year before it was a consistent flow of steady passive income so as long as you have this foundation set that's the first step in earning money with your blog and affiliate marketing also we only added two resources to this page and they only contain some text and a few ctas i highly recommend you get creative with your resources page and add images banners hyperlinks videos etc these will add more pathways to your affiliate offers and can increase your click-through rate which ultimately increases your profits okay moving on we have a few seo house cleaning tips to take care of and then we can launch your blog all right we're almost there your blog is a few minutes away from launching but before we finish up there are a few tips that i want to share with you the first has to do with seo by default wordpress hides your blog from the search engines and that's because your blog isn't optimized for the search engines when you're just starting to build it however now that you have a search engine friendly blog that is structured correctly and has content you're ready for the search engine bots to crawl your site so one way to let the search engines know that your blog is ready can be configured in your wordpress dashboard so let's head to our dashboard really quick and then on the left hand side of the screen hover your mouse over settings and click on reading then towards the very bottom of the reading settings you'll see an option for search engine visibility and like i said by default wordpress discourages search engines from indexing your blog so to encourage them to crawl and index your site simply uncheck that box and click the save changes button next we need to update our yoast seo configuration wizard so that the plugin tells the search engines that we're ready to be indexed so let's head over to yoast general settings then click on the reopen configuration wizard link and within the first step environment select option a to let the search engines know that you're ready to be indexed this basically means your blog will be viewable in the search results and then click the close the wizard button now i should mention that this doesn't necessarily guarantee that our blog will be indexed by the search engines in order to be 100 sure your site will be indexed you'll want to submit a site map to all major search engines in order for your blog to be properly indexed luckily the yoast seo plugin takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting and automatically creates an xml sitemap for your site and if you're unfamiliar with what a sitemap is it's basically an easy way for you to inform search engines about pages on your site that are available for crawling a site map is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell google and other search engines about the organization of your site's content search engine web crawlers like google bot read this file to crawl your blog so you can view your site map by going to the features section of the yoast seo plugin then just make sure that the sitemap lever is switched to on and it is another useful tip is to check and make sure the sitemap is configured correctly and you can do that by viewing the sitemap url and then copying it and pasting it on xmlsitemaps.com so to access the sitemap url click on the little question mark icon there then click on the see the xml sitemap link and this will take you to your sitemap and i know it doesn't look like much but trust me this is very important to your blog so we want to check the validity of the sitemap and to do that you'll want to copy the sitemap url in the browser so highlight it and copy it and then head over to xml-sitemaps.com and i'll put a link to this tool in the important links doc within the show notes and then once you're at the site click on the seo tool menu item and then click the validate xml sitemap link then simply paste the sitemap url in the field provided click the validate sitemap button and the tool will check if your sitemap is formatted correctly and it is no issues detected perfect now remember what i was saying this doesn't automatically guarantee that your blog will be on the search engine results you still have to submit the sitemap to the search engines and this process will vary depending on which search engine you're submitting this to but the most common search engine is by far google and the way to notify google is through the google search console which is what you're looking at right now and i'm not going to walk you through the entire process in this video but all you need to do is sign up for a free google search console account verify your site and submit your sitemap it's a fairly straightforward process and i actually have a video that walks you through that process that you can access in the show notes titled verify your site with search console and you can also find the tutorial on my youtube channel as well so what you're looking right now is the dashboard of google search console and depending on when you're viewing this video some things may have changed but after you've signed up for google search console and you have verified your site with google this is how you would submit your sitemap so within the google search console dashboard you click on the sitemaps tab on the left hand side of the screen then where it says add a new sitemap simply paste the url that we copied from yoast a few moments ago and click the submit button and this will ping google and let their search engine bots know that your site is ready to be crawled and i'll put a link in the important link doc within the show notes that will take you to the google search console sign up portal so that whenever you're ready to launch you can get that process started all right moving on to the last step it's time to launch your wordpress blog and here we are it's finally time to launch your blog this is it the moment you've been waiting for it's time to show the world what you've been working on and it's time for you to shine so if you remember bluehost displays a coming soon page in place of your blog but now that you're ready to launch it's time to lift the curtain remove the coming soon page and showcase your hard work so to officially launch click the coming soon active button at the top of your screen in the toolbar and this should bring you to your bluehost dashboard then from here you'll want to open the settings and then under the site control section turn the coming soon page off and that's it congratulations your blog is now live and just for good measure when we visit our site you can see that the coming soon active notification is no longer showing and now when people visit your blog's domain they will see this beautiful work of digital art that you have put your heart and soul into and again i can't thank you enough for allowing me to be a part of this journey but it's only just the beginning now it's time for you to create blog content and implement the lessons that you've learned in this video to begin to grow your brand your audience and revenue and i wish you the best of luck with your new blog and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need some additional assistance with your blog i'm always happy to help so that's going to do it for this video if you found it helpful i'd greatly appreciate it if you would like share and subscribe to the blog with ben youtube channel as always your support means a great deal to me and my family and for that i thank you so with that being said i'll see in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Blog With Ben

Views: 24,240

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Id: ZKZDlVAk8Yk

Length: 257min 38sec (15458 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021