How To Start A Blog In 2024: Step-By-Step Tutorial

If you're looking to start a blog but find some tools too daunting or too limited and not ready to scale with your business, HubSpot's totally got you covered. Let me show you how to create a blog right inside of HubSpot. If you already have a blog set up, don't worry. I'll show you how easy it is to import it right into HubSpot. To get started, select Content and Blog. From here you'll go ahead and click the Settings button and it will go ahead and bring you to your blog settings. Here you can get started by importing a blog all of your own. To get started, simply click the name of the blog and click Import Blog. Go ahead and hit Start New Import and you'll want to import the blog posts. You can import knowledge based articles or other website content. We're going to go ahead and click Import Blog Posts. Here you've got some main options. You can use a Smart Copy feature, which is an easy way to import blog posts into HubSpot. Or you can select WordPress, a CSV file or an XML file. We'll go ahead and do the Smart Copy and click Next to get started with the import. Go ahead and import the blog homepage URL. Next you'll need a URL of your most recent blog post. Let us know which blog platform this is already on and we'll go ahead and click Copy blog posts and HubSpot is now importing your blog content right inside of HubSpot. It's also super easy to connect an outside domain right inside of HubSpot. To connect your domain, click your name in the upper right hand corner and click Profile and Preferences. Then scroll down to Content and domains and URLs. Here you can go ahead and select Connect a Domain. Make sure that it's your primary domain. Go ahead and enter the domain Next, select what you'll be using your domain for, then tell us where you want to host your content and select Next. Go ahead and review your primary URL and your redirects and click Next. Next, it'll walk you through how to set up your DNS records and and all of the backend information so that your domain is connected to your HubSpot website pages. And don't worry about security. With HubSpot's premium hosting, you get a fully managed and optimized infrastructure that scales with your business, including a standard SSL certificate, a content delivery network, web application firewall, and 24. 7 Secure Monitoring and Threat detection to keep your website and user data Safe. Let me show you how easy it is to extend the look and functionality of your website and blog to using some of HubSpot's themes on our free marketplace. To get started from any page on your CRM, scroll up top and select the Template Marketplace. Here you can see thousands of different themes and templates to help customize the way your website content looks. You can simply type in the search bar anything special you're looking for, like blog. Then you can search the results and even filter them by different types of templates which plans they're compatible with the the price rating support that's provided, provider that created them, or any sorts of different tags that might give you content you're looking for. To explore themes a little bit more, simply select Preview. Here you can get an active preview of what this actually looks like. You can even scroll to see what it will look like on a tablet or on a mobile device. Once you're ready to make a decision, you can simply click Install and it will install this theme right inside your HubSpot CMS and you'll be ready to use it in moments. HubSpot makes it easy to customize the way that your blog and all your website content looks like with our simple drag and drop editor. Let me show you how it works. To get started, scroll over to Content and I'll select Blog. Here I'll go ahead and click one of my blog posts and click Edit. To get started customizing your blog with our drag and drop editor, simply click the plus button on the left hand side. From here you can simply scroll to look for different modules that will enhance your content and your users experience. Drop it where you want it on your webpage and there it is. You can then select Edit and edit all the URLs to make sure that this will point to the correct place. If you're looking for free images for your blog, use Chat Spot. It uses AI to generate images for you. To get started with Chat Spot, scroll up top, click your portal and scroll on down to chatspot AI. From here, scroll up top to Templates and down to Images. Here you can choose which type of image style you're looking for. So I'm asking Chat Spot AI to generate an image of a team of professionals brainstorming in a photographic style. I'll go ahead and click Send Chat and let Chat Spot AI do the work for me. Now this looks like a great image for my blog. I'm going to go ahead and double click on it and click Download. It will immediately download to My Downloads folder. Now I can go back to my blog, click Edit Settings Featured Image and go ahead and upload my feature image. And there it is. A completely AI generated image that aligns directly with my blog post, ready to be featured on my blog for my visitors. Creating a blog that looks great on a mobile device is essential to your blog success. Let me show you how we make it easy for you to optimize for mobile. Simply take a look at any one of your blog posts. Go ahead and click Preview. Select Mobile from the top right hand menu and you can scroll through and see what your blog post will look like on mobile, on a tablet, or or even on desktop. Search engine web crawlers determine the structure of your site so they can crawl it more intelligently, therefore giving you better search engine results. Let me show you how HubSpot takes care of this for you right out of the box. To take a look at your sitemap, simply scroll on down to the left and click Contents. And here you can see your sitemap is all determined for you with all of the content. It's going to be important to identify SEO issues across all of your content, web pages, blog posts, and landing pages. But HubSpot's got you totally covered with every SEO recommendations built in. To get started, simply click to the left and click Optimize. Here you can see that we've already scanned your page to give you some easy information as well as options to help optimize your blog post for search engines. Now, since you're creating blog posts as a way to educate your prospects and figure out if they're a good fit for your business, a great way to capture their email is using HubSpot's forms tools. If you want to embed a form on any one of your blog posts, simply go ahead and hit the plus button, type in form and go ahead and drag and drop where you'd like that form form to appear. From. Here you can select from one of your forms that you've already created, or you can create a new form. We'll click Create New form and we will title it the name of the blog post so we remember which form it is. Click Create. Now we can see that we've got the form right here. Now we can go ahead and actually edit this as needed to make sure that it has all the content that we want. Select Form Content. We can see we're capturing their email, but we can add another form field such as their last name and their first name. We can even change the order here and we can go ahead and make sure that it looks the way we want it to look and even make sure that it's a required field and change the styles. Now that form looks good to me. Now anytime somebody reads my blog, if they find it interesting and want to know more, they can simply input their email, their first name and last name, and they will automatically be added to our CRM. Plus, after a prospect fills out your form, we can automate what happens next. Maybe you want to send them a welcome email or put them into one of your sales sequences to to make sure we're providing valuable educational content to them so when they're ready to convert to a customer, we've already got them in our CRM. HubSpot makes it easy to create and manage cookie banners so you can manage the consent from your website visitors. Let me show you how it works. To get started making cookie banners for all of your website pages, simply scroll up top to the Settings banner on the left hand, scroll down to Privacy and Consent, and then click Cookies. Here you'll have a few options to create different cookie banners. You can to see how these banners show up on your website and what type of information they'll collect. To get started, click Manage Banners and Create Consent Banner. Here we'll give it an internal name. We can even select which country we want this optimized for, and next we can determine which type of cookie banners we want. First type is a notification banner. This type just alerts visitors that you are tracking all of their cookies and just alerts them to that fact. Next is the Opt in banner. This allows visitors to opt in to cookie tracking. Last is Opt Out. This informs visitors that we are automatically tracking all their cookies, but gives them the option to opt out. When you're ready, select which one you want, select which language you'd like to optimize for, and click Publish. Now we can see the banner has been created. I can go ahead select the dropdown menu and click View on Site to take a look at what this cookie banner will look like when visitors Visit my blog. HubSpot's got tons of other tools to help you create, manage and optimize your blog post. For example, our AI Blog Post Generator creates blog posts optimized for web for you with a few clicks of a button. To get started, simply scroll up top, click Generate Blog Post. Then you're just going to answer the prompts from the AI Blog Post Generator and it will create a blog post that is optimized for mobile for you. Here you can see We've got blog post titles that are optimized for search. We can see the monthly search volume, the difficulty to rank, and the keyword intents. We'll go ahead and select this one and click Next. Next it will create a search engine optimized blog post outline for our blog post. Any of these paragraph headers can be edited, they can be regenerated, or we can get rid of them if we want. I'll go ahead and click Create blog post. And now HubSpot's AI blog post generator is creating a search engine optimized blog post. For me, this is a great starting point for many marketing teams because from here you can put your personal brand, your insights and all of your intelligence into the blog post based on the structure that the AI Blog Post generator has created for you. Look at that. A completely AI generated blog post that can serve as a starting ground for you and your team. You can see we've got an AI generated image. Our headlines, even all of our sections are all ready for us to go. Now, as usual, I can go ahead and select any of this text, click the HubSpot AI icon and have it rewrite it, expand it, shorten it, or even change the tone to match my brand. I'll go ahead and click Insert. And now we've got our updated text right there. As your company grows, HubSpot's tools are made to grow with you. For example, as you look to expand into new regions in different languages, you can scroll up top and click File Multi Language and and create a multi language variant of this blog post with a few clicks of a button. I'll go ahead and click AI Translate and click Create and let the AI do the work for me. And there it is. Now we've got a Spanish blog post. And as always with AI, you'll want to go back and check the verbiage and make sure that everything is perfect for you and your customers at any time. If I want to scroll between Spanish, French or English, I can simply select it and I'm back into the language which I need to edit. As prospects visit your blog, it's nice to engage with them in a few different ways. As an example, you can create conversational chatbots right on your blog. The best part of all of these blog tools is that they're centered around our free CRM. All of your customer data in one simple, easy to use place. So if you're ready to get started using HubSpot's blog tools, simply click the link below to get started for free. Today. And don't worry, our software is made to scale with you as your business grows. I'm Mark from HubSpot. Thanks for watching.