Your Blog Posts interface allows you to create new blog posts or manage existing posts that may be interesting to homebuyers, sellers, investors and other agents. Writing a blog can help generate traffic for your site, convince visitors that you are the REALTOR® they want to work with, and even help to generate leads when visitors leave a comment.


To access your Blog Posts interface, log into your iHOUSEweb admin menu, click Blog, then click Posts.


From the main posts screen, you can do the following:

  • Create a new post.
  • Search through your current posts using filters. Filters can also be used to find your drafts.
  • View, publish/unpublish and edit posts.



Creating and Editing Posts

When you Create a New Post or Edit an existing post you will see the following fields to edit.


Page Title

The title text at the top of a Blog Post. If a featured image is set it will overlay on top of the banner.


Author

This will choose the Default Author from Settings unless you override it. The Default Author name can be made into a link from the settings page.


Main Content Area

See Using The Content Editor for more help.


Tags

These are used to sort your content similar to a Category in the archive. Tags also provide a small search engine benefit as a keyword describing your content.


Featured Image

Displayed as a banner at the top of your blog post. It is also used as a preview or thumbnail image when your posts are featured via a widget on your homepage.


Here is an example of the same blog post with and without a featured image. 

(Without has the image as part of the main content area)


Allow Comments

Unchecking this will prevent visitors from commenting on this post. There is also a general setting on the Settings tab that will allow or disallow comments on all posts. Changing the setting in an individual post will override the general settings for that post. If you have comments but want to lock a post from further discussion you can also turn off allow comments. This will keep the old comments but not allow any further commenting.


Published

Checking this will add the post to your website. If left unchecked, the post will get saved as a “Draft”. If you publish a post with a timestamp in the future it will be added to your website at the time indicated in the timestamp. If this is difficult for you, there is a calendar button provided that pulls up an intuitive way of choosing the timestamp.This is a great way to preload content.


Publish Date and Time

Since your posts are ordered by most recent first, this determines the order of your blog posts. When you create a post, these values are automatically set to today’s date and time. However, you can manually change the values if desired. If you change the timestamp to a date and time in the future the post will not show up until then. You will also need to publish the post.

The format for time stamps is: mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm AM/PM (Eg: “02/03/2011 02:34 PM”)



When you're done, click Save this post.