Now, it’s time to start adding some content to your blog! Before we get straight into writing blog posts, there are some important pages we need to add to your blog.
In this lesson, we’ll add some categories to your blog based on what you want to write about, and then we’ll add a few pages like your about me, terms and conditions, and privacy policy.
Adding categories
Categories are basically the high level topics you plan to write about on your blog. WordPress is so flexible, you can always add and change these later. It’s helpful to add a few to get started for the sake of customizing your menu and telling your readers a little about what your site will be about.
My suggestion would be to think of 3-5 categories you know you want to write about and adding those. For example, for a general lifestyle blog, you might do “Beauty”, “Fashion”, “Home Decor”, and “Relationships” or something.
These are some examples of categories I use on my blog. Once you have your list, open up your WordPress dashboard.
Follow these steps to add your categories:
Click on Posts -> Categories in the left panel of your WordPress dashboard
Under “Add new category” enter a name for your category and a slug (this is what the URL will be, for example myblogname.com/fashion) I typically skip the description.
Repeat for 3-5 categories you want to write about.
Now we are done adding categories! You can always come back here to add more or edit in the future.
For each post you write, you’ll select a category it goes in.
We’ll come back to these in a bit.
About your about me page
It’s a good idea to have an “about me” page on your blog so that your readers can get to know a little about you and your blog.
However, I tend to disagree with a lot of blogging experts advice to spend a ton of time crafting a perfect about me page. There are certain instances where it is helpful, but in the beginning, chances are no one is going to visit this page.
I have a blog that gets over 150,000 views per month and guess how many people every visit my about me page? Like 10-15 per month.
So my suggestion would be to start small here! Your about me page becomes a lot more important in the following scenarios:
- you sell a product or service (People want to know who they are buying from!)
- you write extremely personal content (In this case, you definitely want to share a little bit more about who you are any why people should care)
- you are framing yourself as an “expert” in a certain topic (People will want to know who is behind the content they are reading)
In any case, you’ll want to share the following on your about me page:
- 👋 Greeting: welcome your readers to your site
- 👩🏻💻 Introduce yourself: what is your name and what do you do?
- 📖 Tell your story: why did you start your blog?
- 💕 Turn the tables to your audience: tell them why they’ll ❤️ your blog and what they’ll get out of it.
- 🎉 Fun stuff: including some fun facts on your about me page can just help humanize the person on the other side of the screen. Plus, it’s fun to add and gives your readers small things to relate to!
- ✅ Call to action: At the end of your about me page, tell the reader what you want them to do next. Read your content? Subscribe to your email list? Give them a way to stay engaged.
Honestly, the most important thing is to just be yourself! People who relate to you will find you. I would also recommend adding some images throughout and keeping things as brief as possible. Use short sentences and paragraphs to keep people engaged.
These are just basic blog content best practices, and they will help people stay engaged!
Adding your About Me page in WordPress
To add your about me page in WordPress click on “Pages” in the left hand sidebar
Depending on the theme you used, it may already come with an about me page for you to customize. If you see a page called “About me” on this list, hover over it and click “Edit”.
Otherwise, click “Add New Page to start from scratch.
Now, you are in the Block editor. This is where you can add the about me page you’ve written. You can also add images and other formatting.
On the right hand side, make sure the “permalink” just says “about-me” or something else super simple.
When you’re ready, you can publish and view the about me page you just created.
Adding your “Contact us” page
A contact page is important to have in case any readers or even brands want to reach out to you about your content.
You’d be surprised, even small blogs can get reached out to by brands if they have quality content! This page should be super simple and you don’t need to spend a ton of time on it.
Again, your theme may come with this.
Navigate back to Pages and click “Add New Page” again.
Then, title your page “Contact us”.
Here we will need to add a form. I am going to use WPforms, which Bluehost preinstalls on your site. You can find WPForms by clicking the blue plus button and searching, or using the shortcut “/” to search and add blocks.
Follow the steps WPforms provides to add a contact form.
I’m going to select “Simple Contact Form”
If everything looks good, I’ll click save and then click out of this.
Now my contact form will show up like this.
Once that’s added, you can preview & publish your post just like we did the last one.
Your contact form should send submissions to the email you set up your WordPress account with. However, it’s a good idea to do a test run and submit something yourself, to make sure it’s working correctly!
Creating your privacy policy and terms and conditions
Now, we have a couple more pages to add right now.
Creating your privacy policy and terms and conditions on your blog is super boring but necessary.
Luckily, there are plenty of free templates for these online which is what I did when setting up my blog. Just go to:
And follow the steps on the website.
However just know that this is NOT a substitute for hiring a lawyer, which you may want to do if you outgrow these templates.
Once you have filled in the information in a google doc, we can add pages in WordPress just like we have done the others.
- Click on “Pages” left sidebar
- Click on “Add New”
- Paste your content into the page
- Add a title (”Terms and Conditions” or “Privacy Policy”)
- Select “Publish”
Do this for both your terms & conditions and privacy policy.
Now, your blog has some pages filled out! When you go to “pages” in the left hand sidebar you’ll see everything you just created.
Adding your new pages to your site menus
Next, we need to revisit some theme customization from yesterday to add the categories and pages you just created to your sites menus.
TBH menus in WordPress are one of the more confusing aspects, but don’t worry, once you get the hang of it it will be easy.
We need to give readers a way to navigate to all these new pages and categories you just created.
Click on the Appearance —> customize in the left hand panel
Then click “Menus”
You will see that you don’t have any unless you added some yesterday, so click “Create new menu”
Your theme will come with a few different places you can put menus on your site. Typically, there will be one that’s called something like “Main navigation” and then some others.
We will first create a menu for our “Main Menu”
Call it something like “main categories” and make sure “Main Menu” is selected. Then click “Next”
On the panel that appears, click “categories”. You should see the categories you created earlier show up here. Add all your main categories to this menu by clicking the plus buttons.
Now you will see where this new menu will show up on your site. For example:
I would recommend putting your blog categories you just created in the “Main navigation” so people can browse around easily. Then, create another menu for the “Secondary menu” with your privacy policy, terms , and about me page so people can find them if they are looking.
Here, you’ll see I’ve followed the same process to add the other pages to a secondary menu:
This is just an example and your theme may vary on what these are called. You’ll always want to test what your menus look like after you create them by visiting your site.
And Viola! Now, your blog has some structure to it. You have done everything you need to start publishing content (so exciting!)
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how to write a good blog post and start creating your first one!