Creating an HTML Blog Post

Hi, SEers! Mae here today with a topic I hope will be beneficial to a number of readers. Many of you may already know this trick, but I hope you’ll indulge me for those who don’t.

Recently, I did a cover reveal, single day blitz of my upcoming release, Cusp of Night. I had sixteen blog stops in a single day. When the book releases, I’ll prepare individual posts for the wonderful bloggers gracious enough host me, but in this case, I was splashing the same content everywhere.

To make it easier on my hosts—and okay, me too—I sent everyone a pre-formatted HTML post. All sixteen blogs were sharing the same content, so I was able to create a template that everyone received. Basically, “look at my sparkly new cover!” Afterward, several bloggers emailed me to inquire how I had created the post.

It’s amazingly easy. Although the steps below are for WordPress users, Blogger may have something similar if you poke around.

Steps to creating an HTML blog post:

Open the VISUAL editor of your WordPress blog and format the post exactly as you want it to appear. This includes spacing, inserting book covers, photos, graphics, links, etc. When including links, remember to set them to open in a new window.

Switch to the TEXT editor of your blog and copy your entire document. This will retrieve all the HTML code.

Paste the document into MS Word (or your word processor) and SAVE.

It’s that simple.

When you send the post to your blog hosts, instruct them to paste  it into their TEXT editor.  Presto—they have a pre-formatted post without having to do any layout work, insert photos, links, etc.  This makes things easy-peasy for your hosts. And who doesn’t like easy-peasy?

Even when I do this, I still make it a practice to send everything separately (post, photos and graphics, links). Some hosts prefer formatting their own posts to maintain continuity with their blog. For those who want a quick hosting solution this saves a lot of time. I now do this for every blog post I submit to another blogger.

So let’s chat….were you already aware of this trick?  Have you used it before? If not, do you see yourself giving it a try in the future? Do you have any special tricks you employ to save yourself and/your blog hosts time? Time is the enemy of all writers. What steps do you take to circumvent it?